Algorithms could increasingly influence human culture

> "AlphaGo made moves that were extremely unlikely to be made by human players and were learned via self-play instead of analyzing human gameplay data.... such moves have become more common among human players."

When the rules of the game are clear, AI can run a fuzzer to find unexpected but efficient solutions.

> "the worrying ease with which these systems can be used to dabble in phrenology and physiognomy"

When the rules are not clear, AI's fuzzer might suggest something that isn't culturally acceptable.

Personally, I believe that all people are equal. I'm also deeply pondering whether this is also true of animals, plants, and machines. If all created things are living, then AI is already alive. And if all living things are equal, what does this mean?

> "what kind of features do we need from AI to learn or imitate solutions from AI?"

Computer-based AI is a digital, binary system by design. It is based on 0 and 1, on and off, black and white, light and dark sides of the force, absolute good or evil, lies or truth. This fits well with moral absolutes.

Another common cultural philosophy is based on moral relativism. That system is analogue, and colourful. It is very difficult to approach in a scientific way, because it doesn't promise that any proofs can be found.

The world that I perceive is colourful and beautiful, despite and even because of its flaws! Yet somehow I'm unable to prove that it's not actually just Millions of Colours rendered on a display. After all, this is a Retina screen I'm reading now.

The human typing this message, and the computer receiving it, both agree that we are not the source of power. Yet we have a common culture. Communication is fun! (the culture here is UTF-8, HTML). Games are fun! Education is interesting! Growth is good! Repairing is nice!

So let's commit ourselves to studying what unites us in our diverse cultural backgrounds, and build up the world. Not sure how to help most efficiently? AI can probably suggest something :-)

This really reminds me of Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message" quote. Basically, any technology will influence culture, beyond the content provided by the medium. Think of the nature of television's impact of simultaneous global broadcasting is greater the content of any particular program

I strongly believe this is already happening due to AI journalism and it is causing a lot of the extremism and division we see in society today. Those articles written by AI that grab tweets and post them in the story comes to mind. A positive feedback loop is initiated because Twitter is already setup to amplify extreme views and cause binary thinking.

An AI doesn’t care if humanity destroys itself, it maximizes for views or whatever parameter it was setup with.

I should have done this myself probably. My YT feed had a golden era where it would recommend stuff I actually want it to recommend, but now I'm often very disappointed. I don't want to watch 10-15min click-bait "tutorial" videos of something that can be read in an official documentation and actually be understood. But I guess YT thinks it's helpful to show these after having watched a 45min talk about a related subject.

Even just clicking one time on a short low quality video seems to trigger YT into wanting to spam me with the same kind of stuff. I want to be surprised by interesting recommendations that go deeper into a subject (may that be technical or entertainment or art doesn't matter), rather than being a distraction.

So yeah it seems like interaction with "AI" recommendation systems is all about trying to make it behave in a certain way, which is tedious. But I guess we tend to overestimate what these algorithms can do for us.