Should There Be Limits on Persuasive Technologies?

You could deploy the same argument in favor of allowing any kind of fraudulent product or service; the full libertarian "caveat emptor" approach. However, not only is this unpopular, prohibiting fraud doesn't in and of itself result in fraudsters taking over the market.

The boundary between overly enthusiastic promises and actual fraud is one that's in different places for different jurisdictions and is constantly at the forefront of litigation as people invent new fraud schemes.

> "People don't act randomly. They have reasons for what they are doing. I think their reasons are bad".

Sometimes the reasons are bad in very objective ways.

A goes down to the market to buy a kilogram of apples. A vendor B advertises 1kg apples for a pound. He weighs them out on his scales. A hands over his pound. When he gets home he finds he has 800g of apples. Was A's reason for purchasing the apples from B good or bad?

(laws against short measure have been a thing since at least Roman times; I believe they also had a few product quality laws, although the canonical example there is always German beer law from 1516)

I said it before I will say it again:

The new thing, and the key point here is scale.

You can discuss persuasion or cognitive bias away until everyone gets an aneurysm, sure. Some example: You can't not communicate. So even not persuading is persuading. What if the presidential candidate would just not give a scheduled speech? How do you communicate information objectively? Casual language creates bias, so does scientific language, simple language, passive language, active language. "Cognitive Bias" might as well be called "Cognition", since it is just how the brain works. You have to think "tree" immediately when you see one, even before you validated that all leaves are real and that the whole thing is not a projection on an transparent screen. Otherwise you can't function.

But: Big tech throws us in a situation where a small group of people influences our perception on a massive scale. Facebook changes a sentence on their homepage and a billion people read it. Youtube raises some parameter (yeah I know that's not how AI works) by 0.01 and the political opinion about the Grenfell tower disaster changes ever so slightly - for 30 million people. Google's filter has a tiny hole and some troll broadcasts wrong medical information about gout to 200k people.

Every time one of these things happen, the world shakes. Dozens die or survive. Demonstrations form and elections swing. Opportunities are wasted and ideas surface.

I am not arrogant to actually propose an easy solution to this, and I don't think there is one. Just be aware that "I can always go and stab someone" is not a good argument when you are discussing a fully automated drone swarm with kill authority.

It's an interesting discussion.

Of course I don't think blandifying ads is the way to go. Making ads attractive is a cultural phenomenon.

An implicit suggestion of fame, class, social status is fine. It's part of the game. It's an implicit suggestion in the end.

But everything has a limit. What might be acceptable in an adult ad might not be so acceptable for a teenager or a kids ad.

More worrying is propaganda, which is misleading/false in non-obvious ways and not explicitly an ad.

With the raygun there's a clear cause and effect. You can fairly easily prove that what changes beliefs is the raygun. You can't do that with ads and fake news articles.

The other point is that with ads and articles you have to engage with them yourself. Something can grab your attention, but you can decide to ignore it anyway.

The wider culture is supposed to counterbalance for this.

Taking things to the extreme: maybe people are by default violent and will kill a few people in their lifetime to get their way. But the culture counterbalances this.

Likewise everyone old enough to have a sex drive has seen enough publicity with barely-clad attractive women to know the ruse. Of course, people are still vulnerable to these things (cf. onlyfans, etc.) but at some point you have to establish that the rules are clear and if people still want to indulge the fantasy of a beautiful woman by buying a car, well, whatever.

Sure, we still put backstops to this with drugs, gambling. But the use of sex as a tool for attention grabbing is way too wide a net to cast.