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'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

theguardian.com

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Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#121

Post by prostoalex »

burnte wrote: post #114
chubot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another part to the analogy: we've all woken up to the fact that corporations re-engineered the food supply after World War II. They were hacking the human body. I think I didn't get this say in the year 2000, but I really get it now. Think about what your grandparents ate vs. what your parents ate (assuming you grew up in the U.S. and are in the 20's-30's age range. Anecdotally the effect seems to have been…

Could you expand on what you feel the goal of their hacking was/is?

Competitive pressure. Gary Taubes in his books "The Case Against Sugar" and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" mentioned the competition between Kellogg's, Post and other cereal brands.

While it's hard to believe today, Kellogg's was founded by a health nut who was eager on bringing healthy grains to Americans. Once his descendants took over, they noticed how enriching their product with sugar increased sales. Kids specifically don't have necessary mental controls to recognize addictive behavior (which is why we have restrictions on sales of cigarettes and alcohol).

So bit by bit American breakfast table and grocery store cereal isle turned into varieties of concentrated sugar instead of the muesli, oats, granola and nuts mixes it was way back in the days.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#122

Post by barrkel »

burnte wrote: post #114
chubot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another part to the analogy: we've all woken up to the fact that corporations re-engineered the food supply after World War II. They were hacking the human body. I think I didn't get this say in the year 2000, but I really get it now. Think about what your grandparents ate vs. what your parents ate (assuming you grew up in the U.S. and are in the 20's-30's age range. Anecdotally the effect seems to have been…

Could you expand on what you feel the goal of their hacking was/is?

Increase demand for their products.

Overweight people eat more. Creating obese people needn't have been a corporate goal; a blind optimization process could have produced the same outcome. Just tweak the product until it sells more.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#123

Post by prostoalex »

rubinelli wrote: post #73

Can we hijack this loop to create or reinforce good habits instead of selling ad space? Can we use the skinner box to dole out intangible rewards for activities with real, long-term benefits like exercising and eating better? This looks like an obvious opportunity to me, so what work is being done in this area?

A bunch of companies are using this primarily for learning via spaced repetition. I use Memrise and Drops for foreign languages.

The problem is training your brain to capture and monopolize that brief moment of boredom and inactivity.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#124

Post by prostoalex »

40acres wrote: post #22

It seems like the root cause of all this is advertising. Social media companies need attention grabbing features to draw eyes on ads, makes you wonder if we'd still be facing this dilemma of social media was sites were a paid service.

But people justify paid services by the amount of attention they dedicate to it. If you barely read the magazine, you'll likely not renew the subscription.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#126

Post by jdietrich »

prostoalex wrote: post #121
burnte wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on what you feel the goal of their hacking was/is?

Competitive pressure. Gary Taubes in his books "The Case Against Sugar" and "Good Calories, Bad Calories" mentioned the competition between Kellogg's, Post and other cereal brands. While it's hard to believe today, Kellogg's was founded by a health nut who was eager on bringing healthy grains to Americans. Once his descendants took over, they noticed how enriching their product with sugar increased sales. Kids specif…

>While it's hard to believe today, Kellogg's was founded by a health nut who was eager on bringing healthy grains to Americans.

Strictly speaking he was trying to prevent masturbation, but I see your point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harvey_Kellogg#Masturbati...

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#128

Post by awongh »

barrkel wrote: post #122
burnte wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on what you feel the goal of their hacking was/is?

Increase demand for their products. Overweight people eat more. Creating obese people needn't have been a corporate goal; a blind optimization process could have produced the same outcome. Just tweak the product until it sells more.

this is exactly what's happening with digital media. Optimize for human attention. Direct real time feedback on how people react to your media. Tweak for more attention. Repeat. No intentional malice needed.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#129

Post by bmurphy1976 »

I recently installed Android Oreo on my 6P sans browser. No Google search app, no browser, no Facebook, no Twitter. I still have Slack, email, calendar and SMS for work, maps, Lyft, spothero, Spotify, and podcasts for travel. So far the phone is working great, only had to install aosp browser component to keep apps like Gmail functional.

Elevator rides are very different. I'm curious to see how this will work out in the long run. I figure if it's worth opening up a browser, it's also worth opening up laptop.

Re: 'Our minds can be hijacked': tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

#130

Post by toomuchtodo »

fortani wrote: post #109
nether wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not too long ago, we had this story, "Social Media is the New Smoking" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14851057 . The mathematician Ted Kaczynski said decades ago, "humans with technology is like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine."

Interesting, while I have known about it, I haven't really read Ted Kaczynski (aka Unabomber) essay "Industrial Society and Its Future" [1] (aka The Unabomber Manifesto) before until your comment. I absolutely abhor his actions and what he had done, but the essay is a brilliant read. Especially interesting is paragraph 171, as it pertains to the recent concerns about AI and our increasing technological dependence. No…

> As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

"The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story (12,300 words) by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928. After being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965, it was included that same year in the populist anthology Modern Short Stories.[1] In 1973 it was also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two.

"The story, set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide their needs, predicted technologies such as instant messaging and the Internet."

I won't spoil the ending, but you can guess how it plays out.

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