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It's not about technology. It's about power, capital, and society.
We already know that Facebook/Instagram can manipulate your real-world emotions and thoughts by what it chooses to show you.
We also know that susceptibility to ads for different products varies depending on emotional state and context (pre 'surveillance capitalism' it was well known that you could get much bettter responses to aspirational products as the weekend approached, and to products like make-up on Sunday evenings as the work-dread sets in).
The question is, if you have a load of high-value inventory to shift, but your audience isn't susceptible to it, why not treat this as an optimization problem and make them?
It's the right thing to do for your shareholders, completely legal, and near undetectable.
The question is, if you have a load of high-value inventory to shift, but your audience isn't susceptible to it, why not treat this as an optimization problem and make them?
Susceptibility to action is binary. If the audience isn't susceptible then they won't ever convert, or take action.
I'll never buy a Yoni Egg [1], and no amount of targeting or putting advertisements in front of me will cause me to make a purchase of one.
However there might be a world in which I would buy a box of feminine products, even though I am a man. For example if my daughter is sick or incapable of getting them for herself. In which case, a social or other network knowing that
1. I have a daughter
2. That she is sick
3. What her time based need of these products is
4. That there is a preference for a certain product in this category
5. I can get the product cheaply or easily
Makes my life easier, by saying: "Hey [user] we see that you may be in a scenario that this particular product/service would be helpful right now"
Even though at that point I might not even know that I need to help get that when I go to the store because of social anxiety or embarrassment preventing from asking.
So yes, I believe in an all seeing all knowing AI god that will guide and optimize our behaviors. That is not a sarcastic comment.
Your example is laughably contrived, unrealistic, and so full of plot holes that my fingers would tire from typing all my thoughts out. By contrast, the very real privacy invasion damage that invariably occurs in the kind of world that you're advocating for is well documented, and dystopian in the extreme. The never forgetting Internet, the different insurance rates, the illegal files on every citizen etc. I want no part of such a world.
And it is a world where non participation might equate to a negative profile, so the bay we can do is understand the enemy and curate perfection, while engaging in a real way only when anonymous (so far as that can even be achieved).
It can be regulated against, more transparency can be enforced. Despite the enormous lobbying from Facebook and Google in the EU, I could imagine it happening there within five or ten years for example.
There's a real tendency on HN to get all Ayn Rand and forget we live in a society. In relative terms, this is a very new business model. Companies will push for more power, and they get it unless people push back. As people close to the problem, we need to see ourselves as responsible for influencing the discussion about type of society we end up with.
> So yes, I believe in an all seeing all knowing AI god that will guide and optimize our behaviors. That is not a sarcastic comment.
We already use much less powerful things, words and images, mostly to manipulate. Plenty don't hesitate to trying to make people feel bad or unpopular for not having a product they don't actually need, and your susceptibility doesn't matter, that they also don't blink doing it to a mentally handicapped or psychologically unstable person is. But sure, just give marketing more power and at some point it will wrap around to being all nice and fluffy... I'm also not being sarcastic when I say you can live in that world over my dead body. It's not enough for you to want it, you need to want it more than I don't want it, and I doubt anxiety or fear of embarrassment is going to be enough motivation, not by orders of magnitude.
>The cynical dystopian insinuation around technology, on a technology site no less, is getting old.
A technology site is exactly the place for cynicism about technology. The idea of seeing an ad for a suicide hotilne on a social media site is even more distopian than the op's crack about mandatory happiness.
A technology site is exactly the place for cynicism about technology.
I disagree, because I think we need to be the idealists and drivers instead of those pushing back, but I also don't think yours is necessarily an unreasonable position to have.
The idea of seeing an ad for a suicide hotilne on a social media site is even more distopian than the op's crack about mandatory happiness
I'm not sure I follow why. Ideally an offline social network (like your friends and family) would correctly infer your mental state from interactions and be able to intervene appropriately. A digital social network, where your friends and family, as well as the digital homunculus are all observing your activity should be able to infer your mental state as well, if not better than the offline system and intervene where necessary as well.
The universe of human endeavor is not a line between backwardness and progress. Social medial platforms could evolve into more robust means of communication, tools of brutal oppression, advertising-saturated hellscapes, monuments to human vanity, or slightly more advanced contacts lists. They already are most of these things and more. What direction or combination of directions this technology takes will be determined by 'idealists' and 'drivers'. These will not be the people sitting on the sidelines and cheering, but rather the cynical, dissatisfied, and imaginative people who have the capacity and desire to envision a tech landscape dramatically different than the one we currently occupy.
Except the network can't compare with non-members, so it can't even assess whether it itself is part of the problem, and whether the social network committing suicide would be the best intervention of all. That's just unthinkable. It's like trying to make a TV show that makes people happy, instead of encouraging them to turn off their TV which is likely to have drastically better results. You can write a script about turning off the TV, you can have a show about people who hate their TV and are heroes, but you cannot not make an episode, the network has no slot for that.
When I see Zuckerberg's fake, forced smile, I see a person trapped under there somewhere crying for help. I don't even mean this in a snarky way, I don't hate the guy, and I'm interested in the "Bill Gates transformation of being less insecure". But still, anyone near that and oblivious to it should read and listen when it comes to mental health, not talk and certainly not write algorithms that "intervene". If FB was able to want to help with it on any meaningful level, it would either disband or change drastically, and not have "be middleman for everything" as goal number one like so many do.
> idealists and drivers instead of those pushing back
You say this like there is a train, and it either moves or doesn't. Instead it's a multi-dimensional space with a million things that can all change position and shape and color. Technology isn't the question, but who is using it, why and for what.
There are plenty of profitable industries built on the backs of people's mental unrest that has nothing to do with making them well.
Why do you think this technology would be deployed only aligned with the best interests of the users?
My guess is that it would optimize for the most proftiable behavior for the owner of the capital.
A free or cheap solution would not have the ROI a palliative / ongoing treatment would.
Why do you think depressed people are almost never given the option of writing gratitude letters, or are given drugs shown to increase the symptoms they proport to treat in the long term?
Agreed. The path of least resistance for capitalism is to manufacture needs in its consumers, then fill them at a profit. People pay for what they have been manipulated to want, not what improves their lives. In Korean the saying for this is "to give a disease and offer the cure" (병주고 약주다).
It is when the mods wake up, just trying to help you guys out. I've seen things moderated for less, they don't want clever quips they don't want reddit
