In a lot of science-fiction stories, you will find this increasingly-boring narrative of humans serving an AI overlord. This cannot be closer to the truth. Life imitates art. For we are serving AI overlords in the form of algorithms. Let me explain.
The simplest example is on YouTube. If I am a content creator, I cannot simply post what I like. If I want to be a serious creator and make money and gain notoriety, I must adhere to the YouTube algorithm. This means sculpting the title, thumbnail, description, video content, and more to maximize my chances that the algorithm picks up my video and percolates it. I smirk when writing “maximize my chances” because it sounds like I am in love with the algorithm and I am doing everything possible to make the algorithm like me. Replace algorithm with “female” and you have the modern dating market.
Oh! Speaking of which, the same adherence can be applied to dating apps. Search on YouTube for “Hinge hacks” or “Tinder strategies” and you get similar notions of relying on the algorithm to find you a match. The same for social media. The same for Google SEO. The same for online shopping. The same for music. The same for video streaming services. The same for forums. The same for adult videos…anyway.
It seems clear that culture is influenced by algorithms. But this observation is simple and doesn’t do much alone. What are the effects of an algorithm-dependent culture?
Our minds become hacked by algorithms, for one. Think about it. If all I see are influencers living the life on social media, then it makes sense why young people gravitate to this lifestyle and ‘career.’ It’s simple mimesis, similar to how babies imitate the emotions they see being displayed.
Using this logic on politics, it makes sense why most forums or social media sites seem like the majority are left-wing. Big Tech’s algorithm favours left-wing content, and despises (generally) right-wing content. Thus, in order to fit in, people must adhere to the algorithm otherwise they will lose out. Adhering to the algorithm means adopting and enforcing left-wing ideals, and attacking right-wing ideals. A feedback loop occurs, producing more and more left-wing users and less and less right-wing users. People use this example as an attack on the Left, which I do not intend on doing. We could imagine a hypothetical scenario where Big Tech was right-wing, and the same concept would apply: more and more right-wing users, less and less left-wing. What matters is that our daily interactions with algorithms are influencing the way we think, which in turn influence how we interact with algorithms, which in turn influence the way we think, ad infinitum.
Does this influence elections? Does this change the way countries interact with opposing political ideas? Take a wild guess.
Another more disturbing reality is that of attention spans and focus. Going back to social media algorithms, the current ‘hacks’ are to capture user attention in the first 3-5 seconds. The best videos are less than a minute (YouTube Shorts are capped at 59 seconds), hovering around 7-15 seconds to maximize consumption and distribution. Thus, algorithms favour shorter videos to maximize user attention to keep them on the platform so that they consume more which means more ad dollars and blah blah blah. The effects of this are outrageous because they result in lowered attention span and focus abilities. For a 50 year old, it’s dangerous. For a 5 year old, it’s an abomination of unimaginable sorts.
We become apoplectic when hearing about parents who inject their children with drugs, hoping they find the quickest way to hell. Yet, when parents give their child devices that addict them and blast them with dopamine-stimulating content that predicates their cognitive abilities on less-than-30-second clips, we go silent. Worse, when the child is unable to pay attention in school, or “develops” ADD/ADHD, we blame the child!!
Here’s the irony of today in a nutshell: we have created a static society built for people who never had digital devices meaning longer attention spans and focus, and introduced children and young adults who have digital technologies and far, far less focus and attention spans, and then blamed these younger folks for their inability to deal with the real world. We refer to these younger people as Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
The worst part about this predicament is that we cannot blame the generation(s), nor can we blame the parents, nor Big Tech. The latter would simply respond with, “then put the phone down / delete the account.” The irresponsibility and unaccountability of these companies in making heavily-addictive technologies with billions of dollars in neuroscience and data science research, making these technologies the bedrock of modern sociality and connection, and then putting the onus on the user to have the singular willpower to refrain from being impacted and behaviourally-modified is extremely shocking, wicked, and vile.
Ironically, the only way to find this text will be, in some way, through an algorithm. Thus, I bow my head to the AI overlords.