Scapegoating the Algorithm

Scapegoating the Algorithm
asteriskmag.com

But the real issues are not the ones to which he points. Our problem is that as a society we have no real values. Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences. Politicians will engage in arguably corrupt behavior as long as benefits outweigh costs.

Google, by pioneering an internet based on advertising, shifted the allocation of the collective Internet-capital toward producing content that is engaging. You tell me if engagement correlates with truthfulness or long term utility (it doesn't). Google -- though yes initially useful and even utility-generating -- would ultimately extract all the useful latent value (including any surplus it had added) from the internet. We are left with a very high entropy internet, where you are far more likely to find factually incorrect or simply worthless content (noise) than useful content (signal). (Though, yes, bastions of order do still exist, like wikipedia.)

Social media (facebook) simply did the same but instead of the broad internet, focused on extraction of value from interpersonal relationships. The result there, too, has not been good.

So is the internet / social media different? Yes and no. The degree of concentration of power, potential for manipulation, and general capacity to shape the world is much greater in these companies. Whatever trends existed previously have been substantially accelerated. These companies have means to influence nearly every aspect of life. That is not something that magazines, radio, nor (untargeted) television could accomplish.

Moreover, given their substantial power, companies like Goog and FB are more capable of altering the fabric of values that might otherwise have resisted change; i.e., they have accelerated the decline of institutions that would have otherwise favored truth, community, etc.

America's "large scale epistemic challenges" are exactly that: our society and institutions are increasingly devoid of concern for what truth is. There aren't "right" answers to every problem, but to have a debate, there has to be some set of values against which to measure consequences, and good faith commitment to a framework to measure. That's a notion of "truth", and we have mostly lost that.

Social media makes zero epistemic commitments, except whether a marginal dollar is earned. Though it is not the only problem, if your society were overrun by drug dealers turning people into mindless zombies, you might realize that it's hard to fix anything until you expel the drug dealers.

This author -- at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence -- likely wants to use algorithms for democracy; i.e., his group has the new miracle pill to fix your ill.

Maybe if there was a social safety net, people would feel more comfortable choosing options that pay less. My soul has a pretty low price since I value security over abstract morality.