I remember reading an article (somewhere) years ago that criticized Silicon Valley for spending so much money to hire bright people to design a better way to click on ads. I thought that was a real dystopian future.
Now Facebook is finally dying... I haven't been on it in ~6 months. People are paying for more and more subscriptions. Nextcloud is becoming a better and better replacement for Gapps. DuckDuckGo is good enough I can 'google' for 95% of my stuff on it. Firefox is now competitive with Chrome. I think we are better off now then we were a few years ago.
Perhaps you are remembering the famous quote from Jeffrey Hammerbacher[1] who left Facebook to found Cloudera[2]: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" (at a Business Week interview in 2011 [3]).
The quote is a parody on another famous quote from the opening lines of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl":
> I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
> dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
> Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
Doubtful. Facebook is not just facebook.com, it's the whole package of FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. People may uninstall the mobile app and limit their Facebook access to their laptops or desktop computers (that's a popular response among my colleagues), but I don't even know anyone who has actually deleted their account — aside from the folk who never had one, like me.
I also get the impression that usage of Facebook and related services differs greatly from country to country, and from demographic to demographic. This article¹ from 2014 on WhatsApp usage isn't joking; In countries like mine (the Netherlands) not using Facebook-owned WhatsApp (like me) is rather exceptional. If I had kids they would miss out on basically everything (playdates, birthday parties, changes in schedule for sports/scouts/etc.; not to mention becoming social recluses because all their peers (or their parents when they are younger) are on Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp) if I kept refusing to use Facebook's offerings.
Facebook is not going anywhere soon (although I wish it was).
Facebook is also Oculus, React, Onavo, Facebook Live and their video platform is trying to compete with Youtube, and they have bought and consumed lots of technology, developers and data from companies that do analytics, deep learning, tracking, location, development tools (even some good ones they EOL'd like Parse) and more.
If the Facebook site/app goes the way of AOL/MySpace, which it won't for a long time, they have already prepared for that.
It would be enough for me if it declined into the confused and nonelastic state Microsoft was in around the times of Vista. That was enough for Android to appear and take over, forcing a paradigm shift.
Temporary monopolies can be sometimes good like AT&T building telco/software with Bell Labs and C++ etc, Microsoft with the desktop and getting people online, early ISPs to get broadband started, but they usually end up abusing that position eventually.
Some companies get greedy when they get the market leader monopoly power and it can lead to less innovation if they focus on limiting competition rather than beating the open market.
Microsoft started to abuse their position eventhough they had won. Then Microsoft got slowed down both from the anti-trust/monopoly DOJ/EU strainer and the subsequent miss of iPhone/Android mobile market.
Microsoft got humbled and returned to innovation and is a better company for it today, but has lost power they once held. That speedbump allowed Google (Android/Cloud/Search), Apple (iOS), Amazon (Cloud), and more to rise. Ultimately slowing down Microsoft even a bit re-opened innovation and bettered everyone's quality of life when they had started stiff-arming and blocking competition rather than innovating.
There is a lesson to companies that get the market monopoly or top positioning, stay competitive and don't slow down innovation by attacking others, continue to research and develop and innovate. Resorting to limiting others to get ahead in competition makes the companies forget why they are the market leader, win in the open market and innovate to stay the leader.
Companies on monopoly/market leader watch: Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and others in tech. Some that have already gone beyond acceptable limitations of stifling innovation include Comcast, Verizon and AT&T and are in need of breaking up again as they turned to favored markets rather than neutral. These companies are not winning with better products but winning with bribes, lobbying and limiting innovation only.
As long as companies stay focused on innovations and winning in the fair competitive market, not with limiting others beyond open fair market competition, they will stay ahead and not forget why they are the leader. Market leaders should innovate instead of being the bully.
> It would be enough for me if it declined into the confused and nonelastic state Microsoft was in around the times of Vista. That was enough for Android to appear and take over, forcing a paradigm shift.
What? Android and Vista are on two different spaces. You are comparing mobileOS to a desktop OS?
Android didn't compete with microsoft. It competed with apple.
Android might have been trying to compete with Apple, but for a decade before the iPhone, Windows CE was the de-facto choice on mobile devices where you actually wanted to accomplish something. I'd be more tempted to say that _both_ of them were trying to compete with Microsoft in the mobile space.
Yes, there was Palm and PSION before that, both of which I used heavily, but Windows CE had a massive marketplace for applications and seemed to coincide with WiFi and the web really taking off. This feels very odd to say, but mobile Internet Explorer was impressive - and even supported flash!
They cater to the same need, which is computing. I once heard that majority of this planet only browses Internet using a smartphone - if that's the case, Microsoft lost.
You're probably right, though I'm sad about that. For a lot of people FB use seems almost like cigarettes. I mean, not that order of magnitude, but same idea. Doesn't really matter what bad news comes out because it's so habit forming.
The bad news has to be truly existential to make a real difference.
It doesn't seem understood here that for many Facebook is for events, sharing some life updates with friends and family, and messenger, not compulsively scrolling your newsfeed to find articles about Trump's plan or something
The scary part about Facebook dying - and they will at some time - if not now, then later - is who acquires them. Where will all that very personal data about everyone find a new home?
With retargeting being rampant, so much talent locked in adtech industry that's still growing strong and keeps innovating new ways to hurt other people, I'm not sure we're better off.
Directly, by wasting people's time and trying to manipulate them into buying a good or service they don't need. Quite often, those goods or services are subpar and a bad fit for the buyer (but a better sale for the seller). For each one of us who knows how to run an ad blocker, there's someone else who will get convinced by the ads and will sign up to a bad deal, possibly leading to a scam or a payday loan.
Indirectly, through erosion of privacy and pretty much constructing a global high-tech surveillance apparatus, ready to be taken over by any evil government in the future. Basically, what this talk was about.
Indirectly, through criminals who exploit marketers' data, as it inevitably leaks in data breaches.
Indirectly, through enabling even more waste of precious resources in a stupid zero-sum game of customer acquisition.
Indirectly, because ad networks are one of the most powerful malware distribution vectors. (Instead of hacking a website and putting your malware there, you can hack an ad network and put your malware on thousands of websites. Also, I'd expect most ad networks to have only very small budgets for infosec, or none at all.)
Facebook is most certainly not dying. This is a short term blip that it will almost certainly recover from. Even if it ends up being more closely regulated (which I'd support) it could still be a very successful business.
AOL and MySpace are still around. One possibility is that Facebook could experience a similar asymptotically slow death, gradually losing more DAUs than they gain, but never quite dying.
When you say you remember AOL, do you mean that it exists or that you remember using it?
If the latter, where can we send condolence cards or what is your favorite charity? (I have friends my age that used it, but I think most of us will be dead in 50 years. We could live longer if we took better care of ourselves, but not much)
> Nextcloud is becoming a better and better replacement for Gapps.
What ? I just installed Nextcloud to check if that statement is valid and I don't see any slides/excel replacement installed by default or in the store.
The interface is a huge improvements over the owncloud one from a thousand years ago though.
edit: Ah ! It's the collabora add-on. Description wasn't clear enough. Well, it's crashing at the moment, will try get it fixed.
edit2: Ah ! https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/ The add-on connects to an instance of collabora. No way to download it, no way to get a pricing. I suppose nextcloud doesn't have google docs/slides/sheets capabilities then.
I think that in aggregate we are not, considering the rapid rate of growth of Facebook in the developing world, where for many low income people, Facebook and FB messenger ARE THE INTERNET. Walled garden achieved. Example:
If Facebook does fail and fold, I will be looking toward these communities with great anticipation of what fills the void. Human ingenuity will prevail, and these communities will communicate just as well. My hope is for small tech communities to be inspired for smaller scale, more community friendly technology specific to their problems.
At least that's an optimistic view. Of course some other evil corp could fill the gap. Who knows.
Late to the party as usual, I think this speech underestimates the will of companies to do what’s described. Most cynical actions are powered by money and harm anonymized/faceless groups that “hey, they were suicidal anyway”. The simple fact is: you cannot dislike, remove or train networks to get what you want – you eat what is served instead, liked or disliked. Your opinion is not an argument of targeting function, only attention is. My youtube feed was full of crap until I removed all suggestions. (Did you know you have to remove it 3-5 times for it to not show up again?) And still, it presents that toxic whatnext thing, which my inner self often treats no less than disgusting. I CANNOT find the content I really like with all the searches and smart ordering. I only get it from random articles by pure chance.
The only way to take control of it is to make modern tech available to wide public as in next-next-done, not as a github-link. The internet and all its power is still here for us from the start, but heck most turn into companyname zombies because everyone already is and that’s the easiest way to communicate. Instead of spending time on ultra-asynchronous scalable tech, could we stop and think of small businesses and just people who want to publish and exchange content in their small volumes?
The Web Suite consists of a simple but overcomplicated browser app, instead of a full platform to create, publish and manage the content with few design hints to not turn it into myspace. Until that changes, we all, no matter #deleted or not, will swim in crap that is pushed by so-called media giants (media jerks in my view). Removing yourself from everywhere doesn’t help, as it doesn’t help to be healthy in mental asylum.
The moment when I dropped facebook, was the time they start manipulating my timeline. One day I realized that they don't show me things in their posting order, but they were moving them around. I remember using a bookmark ending with .com/?sk=h_chr to beat them, but I gave up when I realized that this is cat and mouse game, and they will continue these shady practices.
Start with your attention. The impact will be even bigger than your vote. Avoid services altogether that abuse you, even if there’s some benefit you gain out of it.
Yea, I have been using an exercise of periodically deactivating my account for most of the last year. I just reactivate now when there is some major event that I want to discuss with mostly my friends from college.
In the past year that has been:
1. Hopping on for Thanksgiving week/weekend to have fun trashing talking in college football rivalry week. Briefly stayed active through the end of the playoffs since Clemson was involved and MOST chatter was sports and families getting together for the holidays.
Got back off as soon as that was over and it devolved back to politics.
2. Stayed off until Clemson made the NCAA tournament and now that we're out and it's back to politics...I'm off again.
In the next year I imagine I'll probably sign on specifically for Clemson games when I'm trying to meetup with people at different tailgates or on road trips like Texas A&M.
That is pretty much the entire value proposition for me at this point...because as much as I'd like to just keep up with family and friends, Facebook force feeds me so much junk that is almost entirely aimed at "Show this very dumb, rant thing to try to get me to argue and engage".
Because already popular posts tend to get more popular and that encourages more engagement, and for the advertisers engagement (likes/comments) are far more important than accuracy or completeness.
I actually like having an algorithm curate my timeline. Not everyone I follow is as equally important to me, and some posts are more important than others.
This was a great speech she wasn’t trying to say all algorithms are evil or that machine learning is evil, but despite it having good consequences it can just as easily bring about a great evil. Not only do we have to be aware of hidden biases in machine learning that could be doing unethical things, but we need to be aware of the great power and effects these algorithms have on those they are being used on and how they can be used to manipulate.
Near the end she states, “Many of these ad finance platforms [e.g. Facebook, Google] boast that they are free. That means that we are the product that’s being sold. We need a digital economy where our data and our attention is not for sale to the highest bidding authoritian or demagogue.”
Shame that CS people seem among the least interested in ethics, as it's just such a bummer when you have to consider anything else but technical solutions. It's why the field really needs the humanities.
I'm doing my Masters right now and taking a look at the job market / discussions about it. I'm stunned to see people talk about Palantir etc. as if it's just a thing you need to do to get enough money to live comfortably and not the enabling force that is bringing about next-gen warfare with more capacity to kill than all previous technology combined. People go into "defense" because planes flying themselves is cool but that's where their consideration ends. I really wish more people thought about what their efforts enable, directly or otherwise. Like it or not, we are all connected, and there are causal relations between your actions and the harm (or benefit) of others every day. Try to minimize that harm.
I have a good friend who just finished his Master's in CS and considered taking an internship at Palantir. I was very apalled at first how he could even consider to work for a company that are obviously the 'bad guys'.
He comes from one of those countries your president considers a sh*thole and scoring that internship polishes his CV enough so that he can get a stable and high paying job which will allow him to stay and not have to go back there.
Can't really bame him....
You know, I'm inclined to agree with your sentiment. I just think it might be more nuanced. At least to me my friend's suffering is more immediate. Whatever work he would have done there is multiple layers removed from me. I'm not saying that this is ok, but I feel it's just human.
Luckily the story ends with him getting a nice internship at another company that's less problematic.
Well, yes, rationalizing individual behaviour that in aggregate leads to authoritarianism, totalitarianism, genocide, war, ... is "just human". Just as building power structures that add sufficient indirection that allows individuals to use those rationalizations is "just human". And tribalism ... yes, definitely "just human".
But is any of that really a justification for anything? Yes, things are more nuanced, some things are worse than others, sure, but that doesn't really make "but he is my tribe, and he benefited from it" a good justification, does it?
I have to agree again. What you point out is correct and I hope to be able to act accordingly.
My personal take-away is still that these kinds of ethical ponderings are a bit like 'first-world problems'. I have the luxury that I can accept or deny any job based on my personal moral values. If the alternative was to have to go to some place where my life is significantly worse, I'd probably think twice too.
Well, yes, it is understandable what motivates the individual, and depending on what exactly you are weighing against what, it might even be justifiable--but then, the reason why some (actual) shithole countries are shithole countries is essentially this sort of attitude, as that is essentially the rationalization for corruption. I guess the point is that evil institutions do not usually come about due to evil people, and when they do, they are not sustained merely by evil people, so, if we don't want to have them, concentrating on evil people won't do shit, we have to concentrate on the actual cause, and the actual cause are those perfectly understandable, human decisions.
Yes, I did. That's when he explained his situation to me. I mean I was aware of his background, but up to that point I didn't really grasp how strongly that influenced his decision making. In the end I didn't really agree with his POV but I surely did understand and appreciate why he was thinking the way he did.
Unfortunately what makes many people very good at CS often makes them very good at rationalizing. People who spend their time wrapped up in clean, logical paradigms have a hard time recognizing that even for themselves, those logical paradigms float on a chaotic sea of human instinct, emotion, and self-serving biases.
Plenty of us are interested in ethics - and actively practicing them - hence an unparalleled sharing of knowledge and tools ranging from linux, gcc through to github. We're also quite happy consumers of the humanities in our spare time.
Which need to put their own house very much in order... looking at you in particular Economics.
If anyone wonders how we got to this point, I think that is understandable. Here are a few thoughts:
It’s easy to overlook how much advertising works. We each have a limited supply of bandwidth for perceiving the world we live in. The result is a high demand for undermining that perception and using it to manipulative ends.
Authoritarian dystopias from books and films usually illustrate force because force is more immediately graphic. It also reflects the dismal state of a dystopian existence. Manipulation would look a lot different. Fear of manipulation is a fear of knowing someone else is trying to manipulate you.
We don’t regularly notice evidence of brands and companies trying to manipulate us, but most of us understand they are incentivized to.
I have worked in advertising for almost a decade and the truth is much worse. Although individuals who work at companies may be on your side, they get paid to spend their days doin what the company tells them to. Even managers and CEOS may be great people but when they go work, they are an employee. They have a duty to the company. And, the more efficient and skilled we get at manipulating members of society into behaviors which direct money our way, the employees will remain working for the company.
Are the employees immoral? Not from the perspective of the family they support. And whose opinion is more important? The family’s. It’s pretty simple that we cannot expect individual decisions to compete with those of the profit-motivated companies they work for.
> Are the employees immoral? Not from the perspective of the family they support. And whose opinion is more important? The family’s. It’s pretty simple that we cannot expect individual decisions to compete with those of the profit-motivated companies they work for.
We could expect more on a social level, though.
I still don't fully understand how did we get to the point when marketing became a respectable occupation. Something young people dream about being part of, when they learn to be a graphic designer, or a programmer, or a media person. I guess it's the consequence of how much money the industry makes.
But looking at it from the top, we're literally celebrating the profession that's meant to exploit and hurt other people. If I came to you, as a friend, and did to you what half of the adtech companies do to people at large, I'd get - rightfully - punched in the face. And yet we tolerate that happening at scale.
What fascinates me is how marketing/media people seem to be detached from general public as they were living in some parallel universe. You would think nobody would like that their wife, daughter, ageing father would be tracked all over the internet, algorithms be used on them to target stuff to them and etc. However when adtech company proposes yet another tracking/targeting big data cross-device etc. algorithm it is always met up with standing ovation by marketing people. I guess as long as it makes advertiser/employer happy it is all OK.
In my experience it is much the same as why people in the US intelligence community are perfectly happy with all of the data-gathering revelations in the Snowden files. In short, if you've already gone through the full process to get a Secret or TS clearance (filling out an SF-86 and going through the full-scope background investigation via US OPM) and work somewhere like the NSA, NRO, DTIC, etc, you've given up so much privacy that it has become effectively meaningless to you.
I am not sure we can trust ourselves to maintain a rational comprehension of what’s going on around us. We have little reason to believe humans have ever done this for very long.
For all it’s follies, religion is evidence-based as an evolved meta-structure which motivates moral commitments to one’s community. We have taken such a superficial approach to religion that it’s worth has eluded us and we are paying the price.
Rest assured, I am not arguing for religion. But I will argue we cannot rinse ourselves of it in such a frivolous manner. Of course, advertising applies all the perceptual tools of the Roman-Catholic empire to unending profit and shameless hedonism.
> If I came to you, as a friend, and did to you what half of the adtech companies do to people at large, I'd get - rightfully - punched in the face. And yet we tolerate that happening at scale.
What, specifically, are you talking about? "Hey, have you heard about x, it seems like your kind of thing" from friends is entirely welcome.
Me: Hey, have you heard about X? X is super awesome! It's the leading $FOO on the market [[in fact, I'm lying here, but you'd have to compare X to alternatives to discover that]]!.
Me: Oh, have you heard about X? Really, X.
[[We sit in front of TV to watch a game.]]
Me: Oh, before we watch, you have to listen to this. X. X is the thing. It's super awesome...
[[Halfway through the game.]]
Me: Let's take a break now, and talk about why you really should look into X right now!
[[Some time later]]
You: By the way, why do you think I need this X thing?
Me: Oh, it's simple. I've been peeking through your windows for the past few days, and I see that both you and your wife regularly look for A, B and C, which are related to $FOO. Also, I've seen your recent purchase receipts in your thrash can, and it again confirms you're on the market for a $FOO. And X is the leading $FOO on the market!...
Ok, so let's break that down and tease apart the bits that are ok and the bits that are not ok.
> Me: Oh, before we watch, you have to listen to this. X. X is the thing. It's super awesome...
> Me: Let's take a break now, and talk about why you really should look into X right now!
Having you to do something for them sometimes, while they do something for you sometimes: normal part of friendship.
> Me: Oh, it's simple. I've been peeking through your windows for the past few days, and I see that both you and your wife regularly look for A, B and C, which are related to $FOO. Also, I've seen your recent purchase receipts in your thrash can, and it again confirms you're on the market for a $FOO.
Looking in people's windows and at people's rubbish: creepy. Remembering what people told you in conversation: entirely normal, even positive. Remembering what other people told you about a mutual friend: also positive. Advertisers aren't looking in people's windows or going through their rubbish.
It is a question of degree, as with everything else. Does the massive machine need to sell more totally useless shit for people to be happy and healthy? Or are the things it sells contributing more to the dereliction of today than whatever "social good" the marketers try to impose on the job that necessarily ignores consent and exploits animalian impulses to achieve its goals?
> It’s easy to overlook how much advertising works.
It works at a deeper level than you appear to describe. Agricultural society is a machine for converting increasing proportions of the Earth's biomass into larger numbers of biological humans. Culture is a set of practises for creating persons from that raw human material. Marketing is a means for business to capture culture for the purpose of creating persons with values overwhelmingly tilted towards goods-acquisition. The consequent positive feedback loop makes a marketing-driven culture incompatible with the continued existence of a healthy living planet. Marketing's victory over a sustainable culture was well-entrenched before the internet, which is essentially a (powerful) accelerant. We will slide faster into self-destruction with the internet than otherwise, but it's the same destination.
A population of self-abnegating saints may have saved us from this, but beyond such fantasies, concentrating on the 'morality' of individuals in advertising is a misdirection. Once the machine was set in motion, the dismal result was probably inevitable.
The average American has maybe 3-4 hours of discretionary time per day. They choose to spend an hour of it on Facebook. The newsfeed algorithm could be optimized to do anything -- Facebook's own experiments show that they can make people happy or sad. They choose to maximize their own revenue. There is immense potential to improve the lives of their users, and they choose to sell an unimaginable amount of human potential for what amounts to 30 cents per hour.
Just imagine one day, some algorithms completely take control of/help us decide what we eat, who we date, where to travel, who we talk to or make friends with, what job offer to take, what subjects to study in school, what startup ideas to invent.
Then imagine that 100 year later, the original developers of these intricate algorithms retired, passed away, complex system got maintained by automated tools and programs, and the outcome of these algorithms become more and more obscure.
Eventually, the complex machines and A.I. algorithms will be looked as mysteries to our grand grand grand children and they will study them as we're studying nature today..
To the nontechnical we’ve already built god. A fav anecdote of mine is somebody once asked their Lyft driver how their day is going. And the driver replies: I have been blessed by the algorithm. It brings me much rides.
If you have no mental models of how these things work, they may well be gods and the people who make them may well be high priests performing mysterious incantantions to bend the gods to their will.
Brought into a modern era where , in a world with $50 Android phones and cheap/free Facebook "free basics" walled garden internet, people who are only one generation removed from subsistence farming lifestyles are suddenly encountering meme warfare and predictive algorithms.
Part of Google Cloud Job Discovery is letting seekers find jobs ... the other is getting the "jobs in front of the right candidates." Does this sound familiar? It seems like another opportunity for an individual seeker to be put in an algorithmic jail, with opaqueness and little recourse we usually expect from Google.
I thought that had to be a joke, but it's not. It even "...improve[s] job site engagement and candidate conversion," so it's fully adtech buzzword compliant.
Literal algorithmic jail is coming, too, as in: prison sentences handed out with humans completely out of the loop. This will so obviously and inevitably happen it doesn’t even seem worth typing.
yeah, evolution deals with "dna-jail" by mutating to a certain degree. and we already see that in the recommended clips algorithm by YT. we are occasionally offered stuff from outside your bubble.
Wait till we get fully AI controlled offensive and defensive weapons and nobody can turn them off because then the enemy would win and we live in this state of permanent AI killer robot vs. AI killer robot warfare.
>Just imagine one day, some algorithms completely take control of/help us decide what we eat, who we date, where to travel, who we talk to or make friends with, what job offer to take, what subjects to study in school, what startup ideas to invent.
Yes, I want this in my smartphone. It's like a life coach. I don't like to make decisions or plans. Should be outsourced to an algorithm. I need to google for this.
A friend of mine had this idea that there's a path towards Facebook's AI learning to actually kill people. If they take a certain approach to machine learning (which they may or may not), the following could happen:
A machine learning algorithm might notice that when someone commits suicide, there is an uptick in activity on Facebook that follows the event. It may determine, then, that a "suicide" event is "good".
If they try to use feeds to drive more long-term site activity, the algorithm could learn a correlation between certain types of feed posts and suicide. In other words, if a user's feed starts to look a certain way, they will be more likely to commit suicide. The algorithm could then see this as "good" because it is also related to the spike in overall activity, and promote these kinds of feeds.
It then becomes a feedback loop where the algorithm is triggering people to commit suicide.
Yeah. It's even simpler than that. I saw a similar post on HN a few months ago theorizing that Facebook's machine learning algorithms could very plausibly pick up that controversy generates activity, and promote controversial topics more and more to the point of optimizing for divisiveness and extremism.
And most people here are slowly realizing that it's not just a theory... it's likely already happening. We're on the early years of acknowledging that it's happening. 5-10 years from now, some article will come out about how Facebook has been manipulating our world view for decades and people will link back to these posts and say "Duh, we've known about this for ages".
Hey, to the people who work at Facebook, Twitter, Google et al, it's your responsibility to make sure this stuff isn't happening. The company you work for has no path to fix these problems on its own, this stuff needs human supervision and intervention, and hyperawareness of what kind of damage is caused by manipulating people en masse.
This is already documented to be the case with YouTube, where the recommendations serve as a radicalization engine. For example, watching videos on vegetarianism will cause YouTube to push you to be vegan. Article (by the same author) here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...
If YouTube hadn't gone on a fairly extensive program of manually culling Arabic language Islamic state related videos, watching videos on secular Sunni hanafi and hanbali ideology would pretty quickly lead you to hardcore wahabbist Sharia law indoctrination.
My father's the same. He'll walk along through town minding his own business, and then see someone he thinks is a Muslim. That's when the shouting begins.
I feel sorry for you. In my experience, there is little you can do to change the mind of such a person, and yet living with them can be constant embarrassment.
I can just as easily find news articles about thousands of white women who are killed by their WASP husbands in the USA, but those are, from the xenophobe perspective, a relatively mundane occurrence.
If Facebook’s AI knows that you hate nothing more than anti-vaxxers, it could choose to show you seemingly-randomly that your great aunt has liked an anti-vax page.
I’m not sure if that would ultimately help drive engagement but I’m sure it’s something they’ve studied.
Which is ultimately the goal of the folks in charge. The 1% win when they can get 49.5% to think the other 49.5% are ruining everything, and vice versa.
As a whole USA violent crime rates have been declining steadily in almost every category since the mid 1970s, but increased sensationalism in television news and "if it bleeds, it leads" would have the average person thinking the USA is a much more dangerous place.
These biases seem unnecessary to me but some controversial topics are important. HN hosts a lot of controversial conversation. It’s the conspiracy stuff and inherent bias that advertising has toward complacency that seems disturbing.
It's funny to see businesses who use a lot of PR for diversity of appearance create software which goal is to stiff diversity of thought.
People scoffed at China trying to control internet in the early 2000. Now that they're proof it is possible, everyone with an idea for a better future will try to emulate them.
At around x-mass / new year, Facebook flashed a message on my wall which said "in 2017, you received 0 birthday wishes". (Screenshot reported by others https://goo.gl/images/YWfsqb).
I thought it was amusing since it sounded like a bug, it looked like the engineer forgot to account for the special case where wishes == 0. However, putting your comment into perspective, I now think it was most likely a well-calculated tactic, perhaps generated by an AI as you suggested and I guess it wouldn't be shown unless it was A/B tested.
Interestingly, the message was shown around xmass / new year, where people tend to be more vulnerable to suicide / self harm.
One popular scenario imagines a corporation designing the first artificial super-intelligence, and giving it an innocent test such as calculating pi.
Before anyone realises what is happening, the AI takes over the planet, eliminates the human race, launches a conquest campaign to the end of the galaxy, and transforms the entire known universe into a giant super-computer that for billions upon billions of years calculates pi ever more accurately.
After all, this is the divine mission its creator gave it.
Eh. We've got a close enough approximation. Sci-fi-esque example below.
The more things humans collected, the safer their genes were, and the higher the dopamine hit. Many humans took this to the logical end, collecting things at the expense of all else, including the safety of other humans. This led to severe poverty of all humans not wired to collect more things, which decreased their reproductive fitness.
Over time, the human race in aggregate continued to become more effective at collecting things, until they had wiped out all other life and all viable material was turned to drugs. The end.
And there wouldn't even be a way to prove it was happening. Given the opacity of deep learning models, it's possible that no one, not even the people at Facebook who developed the algorithm, would realize that it had trained itself to induce suicides.
Thinking about it, this actually reminds me of an eerily similar anecdote from a completely different context. Researchers tried to use an evolutionary algorithm to evolve a robot that could walk (in a computer physics simulation). Since none of the initial randomly generated robots could make consistent forward progress, they started out by optimizing for maximum distance traveled before coming to a complete stop. As the evolution proceeded, the robots kept making it farther and farther, until they seemed to hit a limit. When the researches looked at what the robots had evolved into, they realized that the robots had evolved to simply fall forward and roll or slide as far as possible. The limit they hit was the farthest a robot within the designated size constraints could possibly fall. This was obviously an evolutionary dead end from the perspective of evolving a walking robot.
Achieved a local optimum, not global optimum. One technique to avoid getting stuck in such local optimums is to have some children which have extreme mutations.
You're making it sound like a simple parameter optimization issue, but it's hard to imagine a mutation that breaks out of the "fall forward as far as possible" paradigm without discarding the parent phenotype entirely, which would defeat the purpose of using an evolutionary algorithm in the first place.
Anyway, the point was that a complex optimization problem resulted in an unexpected "suicidal" phenotype, i.e. falling over instead of walking.
Facebook literally did this study. Not, as an AI thing, as in Data Scientists actually did a study on the rates of depression when you changed people's news feed to show primarily positive and negative news. And then Facebook used that data to tune how negative they could make the feed and still drive engagement.
One of the signals they were getting from that study was suicide rate. I'm not certain how it was measured; I don't care. I saw that it was measured and decided that it was not a place I could stand to work.
Their standard operation is to preform studies that wouldn't even be laughed out of an ethical review committee. They don't blink an eye. They just don't begin to view their users as humans.
Facebook are war criminals. There's nothing more to it.
I dislike this kind of inaccurate rhetoric. I suppose one could make some claim that someone is at war with someone and Facebook exacerbated it, but the more strained your argument is the more easily people can dismiss you.
Facebook is psychologically manipulative. Facebook uses human attention for profit. Facebook moderates our connections with other people for its own gains. All these are accurate indictments of facebooks behavior. But if you call then war criminals and don’t articulate what war you’re talking about, it just sounds inflammatory.
> One of the signals they were getting from that study was suicide rate. I'm not certain how it was measured; I don't care. I saw that it was measured and decided that it was not a place I could stand to work.
Where did you see that suicide rate was measured? Did you work at Facebook?
More realistically, if you're a person with DSM-V diagnosable conditions and join a few "woo" groups, Facebook can easily promote flat Earth, chemtrails, black helicopter, anti vaccine, autism conspiracy, "crisis actor" related discussions and groups at you.
Given the number of people they included in that experiment, there's a good chance they did actually drive some of them to suicide. Facebook probably even knows who, but I doubt they'll ever share that data and rat themselves out.
When you're already on the edge, an algorithm feeding you negativity would probably be enough to push you over.
Now imagine that this is not facebook's AI trying to get more engagement, but a global AI that has humanity's best interest as a goal: preventing wars and famines, greater good for greater number sort of thing.
What if the ultimate good AI decided that the best way to achieve it was by killing off a handful of possibly innocent people every year. It's not even necessary to kill future Hitlers, just find one random dude in Minnesota that would tip the balance and push him to off himself.
I think this would make for a great novel, kind of a mashup of Asimov's robots and Ada Palmer.
more realistically than the OP, americans endlessly bickering at each other about pro/anti-trump/anti-hillary sentiments during the 2016 election, and posting links to both "fake news" websites, "real news", snopes, etc.
AI algos are very easy to implement. But no one can think and know its consequence.
Its just biases and weight. What if we miss something or we can not able to predict cases like this or as we do not know how algo will behave. Than we are creating our own destroy ship.
Or people wake up in a world where corporations are king and people are treated like things to be exploited for revenue, there is no true community and we are kept vulnerable and separated because that makes us easier to advertise to. They see no point in living and decide to end the pain of existence.
Nah, people actually accommodate to being made separate and vulnerable pretty quickly. And they do it by forming new structures. This has been in the "population management" playbook for millennia: Assyria's famous for (among other things) breaking up foreign populations within its empire's borders and relocating them into a sort of "melting pot" in order to break down local power structures and foreign nationalistic identity and promote the formation of an Assyrian identity instead.
Is there a blackmirror episode where the existence of a program similar to black mirror ingrains paranoia in all the citizens and the country goes back to 80s tech? (e.g. become luddites)
I really like her commentary and glad she is getting more attention.
I think the issue is the magic of free and the irrationality of humans. Free creates irrational responses. People will use a lot of a thing if its free even if its bad rather than dealing with the perceived loss of paying 2 cents for something better.
So as long as no one figures out how to make micro-transactions cognitively easier than free stuff then free tech will prevail. And payment will be harvested via information and attention.
The dystopia we are building is not because we want free stuff, but because we are too lazy to make the choice about spending 2 cents.
I am trying to change that with oalrus.com but we shall see if i mange to build a large enough of a list of alpha users to give the network a chance.
I don't think people are averse to 2-cent payments. I can imagine a scenario where I regularly spend money on the Internet besides Amazon. I don't know how much I've spent on Steam, for instance.
What people are guarding against is optimization. I don't mind paying 2 cents. I do mind paying 2 cents and then becoming marked for upsell and becoming subject to a full-fledged marketing campaign, or having some recurring 2-cent payment be changed to $20. Cognitively, I know that I am no match for the kilonerds out there trying to extract money from my wallet. So the only move is not to play.
Fear of uncertainty makes sense and something I haven't thought about too much in this project. Sad that the modern net has created such a 'gotchya' impression. I would think that this comes from everyone promising free but actually desperately looking for revenue somewhere.
I feel like this is solvable with smart policies and good institutional culture. One thought that I had was that a user commits to depositing say $2 to use for micro payments for the month, but doesn't actually get charged until the end of the month. This delays the pain point of spending money (thereby reducing it) but also may minimize the sensation of risks.
There's a secondary common-knowledge/coordination effect here, though, it's not just “individuals being lazy”: if someone gets antsy about whether ey will look awkward in front of eir friends for making the assumption that they will be willing to spend on something, then that feeds into the feedback spiral of “I don't really believe it'll work and I feel reluctant and don't want to tell people about this in case it's uncool”.
A colleague of mine said that this suggested what was really necessary was to allow simple prosocial spending that wasn't too in-your-face, along the lines of how it's possible for one person to rent a game server for several people. Less individual anxiety over spending, since among other things there's enough of a social script for that.
Yeh, this is one of the reasons network effects are so powerful and so effective market capture. Anybody who wants to push against that is going to have to spend a lot of time and resource getting enough users to create even an echo of a network effect and overcome those individual insecurities that you mention.
So funny to see these posts here and getting votes - wasn’t too long ago (literally months) that practically anything against the ad ecosystem was impugned. Granted, it may not be the same people speaking or talking, but what of you, dear lurker? Have you finally changed your mind on the value of these platforms?
The previous system of TV + commercials wasn't perfect. It's often mocked and criticized for over romanticizing products (from daily health to polluting cars to cigarettes). But these era seems worse because it's disguising it's aim behind "real" ads (because they don't coat the product in glamour, because they use "more data") but in the end it's as bad if not worse as before; just a web based reincarnation of the same needs to make money.
The problem is much deeper: in the roughly 25 years of WWW we have not really figured out better ways than ads.
In the fourth quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.2 billion monthly active users, ad rev was 12.779B thus if active users on average paid somehow a little under two dollars a month, it'd be the same. I am not saying, by far, that a flat fee is realistic, I am just showing there's a lot of room for improvement.
you point out something important. for-pay models don't properly deal with income disparities. you can be sure that for a portion of current 2.2b users $2 a month for access would be a significant chuck of their income.
What's the benefit to Facebook for catering to such people? Presumably, advertisers can only sell cars to people that can afford cars. Or is this where Cambridge Analytica comes in? Then the equation stops being about selling things and becomes selling consensus. Maybe that was the plan all along.
The cool "starving artist" types putting up their events/content on Facebook is what makes it valuable to the rich people they want to advertise to. So it's not as simple as just keeping the people who can afford to pay.
People who can't afford cars still buy other things, therefore 'such people' also contribute, albeit less in absolute values. The amount of a purchase of a big spender is greater, therefore he is worth more to an advertiser. This means each person financial contribution to a ad supported service is proportional to its spending (or more precisely to his ad motivated spending). That is not equal to being proportional to each viewers income, but these amounts are probably correlated.
Also, as lmm commented, the more people using some services, the more value they provide, so having a fixed price would be a net loss for everyone.
Many possibilities to overcome this. Tell N friends about us and you get a month free subscription. Deals, coupons etc.. There are ways to achieve price discrimination. Who doesn't can/want to pay can get the service for free but has to endure a little more inconvinience.
It's not just about viral videos.
People in general is being educated to trade being with possessing in the pursuit of an immediate short time satisfaction (which is sad because someone could take away what you have but not what you are). So it makes perfectly sense to me that driving people into sadness, paranoia etc. in many ways (news, music, movies etc.) could also be not just exploited but willingly planned for business reasons. This goes beyond the obvious "someone could invade the country -> buy more weapons" or "the big one quake/tsunami/plague etc. is coming soon -> amass food and stuff"; if people is being driven into thinking their life is miserable or they're in danger, most of them will seek immediate gratification by buying more of this or that.
Net Neutrality is about taxing content, not charging for it. Right now everyone (you, your neighbor, Netflix, Facebook, Google, ISP themselves) already pay to move bits between each other. ISPs want the ability to extort money from end-nodes of the Internet who they don't currently have any direct business relationship or physical connection with.
Right now it's all just bits come across their network from peers but if they can start blocking traffic from specific sites, like Netflix, they can also make deals to ensure that doesn't happen. Maybe even make those bits move a little bit faster.
In no way does this lead to an ad free future. It would probably lead to more ads as content providers would have additional costs to recoup that they don't currently have.
This is ultimately not about ads, as Zaynep points out. It's about building an architecture of self-reinforcing social manipulation on a large scale, while how it works (and the fact that it is being done at all) remains totally opaque to the persons who are part of somebody's A/B experiment.
That's like saying that because we hate traffic, we should privatize all the roads and let for-profit companies control them and toll them however they want because they might potentially solve our traffic problems!
I mean, it's more like if we had already privatized nearly all the roads, the companies covered them with orders of magnitude more billboards along with tolls, and you say "we should let these companies charge different tolls depending on brands of cars or have preference for drivers going to certain destinations over others, because maybe if we let them do that, they'll take the billboards and cameras away…"
- The ISPs already charge too much and little of it is going towards innovations/network advancement, instead they want to be content creators and ad platforms instead of charging more to get to gigabit and beyond. ISPs need to get back to innovating on providing better/faster internet service, what they are.
- ISPs should not be involved in content/ads/selling private data as that leads to bias and throttling, we need to have a separation of power from ISPs, the network gateway to the internet, and content creators on top of the internet.
When is it a good idea to have content creators own the network outright? All that leads to is bias, preferential treatment and monopolies (furthering them).
We have made immense mistakes in 2017 allowing ISPs to sell your private data, remove privacy protections at the network level AND the removal of net neutrality.
Net neutrality makes the network provider neutral, simple as that.
1. There are other markets than US. Europe probably not follow suit even if US allowed it's utilities more rent seeking
2. Market for adds and ISP:s operate on different levels. Just because the downstream utility offering the datastream becomes more expensive, it does not mean content providers would echew ads. Sure, the ISP might want a cut of the third party add but that does not translate to any consumer benefit
ISPs are paid to handle the connection between you and the WWW. The bandwidth they charge you for is the highway. Them throttling services is not fair because you're paying for that highway. What about them charging more would make you think the rest of the internet will eliminate ads?
Now Facebook is finally dying... I haven't been on it in ~6 months. People are paying for more and more subscriptions. Nextcloud is becoming a better and better replacement for Gapps. DuckDuckGo is good enough I can 'google' for 95% of my stuff on it. Firefox is now competitive with Chrome. I think we are better off now then we were a few years ago.