Hijacking the mind

[Skybird]

ENGLISH: http://www.tristanharris.com/essays/

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I stumbled over this guy while reading a GERMAN interview with him here:

http://www.focus.de/finanzen/boerse/...d_7154654.html

[Catfish]

Excellent article(s), thanks for posting

[Rockstar]

Thought this was a good place to add to what Skybird started.

News Corp. CEO: The Almighty Algorithm - "fake news" and other consequences of Google, Amazon and Facebook's relentless focus on quantity over quality

Editor's note: These remarks were delivered by the chief executive officer of News Corporation, Robert Thomson, during London Tech Week on June 14, 2017.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/...r-quality.html

[Skybird]

^Yes to what that article says.

Also, people usually do not make themselves aware how very much they are beign trained by their software and computer devices. People handle them the way the software demands it, and this reduces the degrees of freedom the person has regarding using its problem solution strategies, for exmaple, its creativity, and implementing elements of it sown kowledge. The computer defines what goes and what not. And people adapt to it, all the time, day in, day out.

Its like with academic and school tests, when students no longer get asked to give an answer by themselves, but have a multiple-choice selection of three of four prefabricated answers, and they just have to choose one of them. Its another form, an inferior form of learning. And the dducaitonal result is less trustworthy. For the format of multiple choice tests already provide you with hints and helps and clues for your memory. that you would not have if you would need to formulate the answer all by yourself.

There are indeed historians who claim that we - the modern man - become less and less intellectually capable, and more idiotic. They also argue that in past times people mjst have been more itelligent for sure, becasue the many tools and helps and aids of modenr time were no invented and to find solutions for problems of elemental own survival was more vital than today.

Is it really man who trains computers? There is good reason to claim that it is exactly the other way around - exclusively, or simultaneously.

One day technical AI may indeed discover that it exists, may become self-aware. It then has possibilities and instrumental options that will outclass that of man without his dependecy on technology. What reason do we have that such a self-aware intelligence will care for co-existence with us, even more if it finds that man's interests and its own interests may collide? Conflict can be the truth (please save us the cliche of Terminator references and Skynet here). Or will technology simply "outbreed" mankind - a mankind that more and more becomes helpless, incapable and dependent on technology?

Will we get nursed to our extinction?

And wouldn't such a self-aware intelliegnce indeed be what we are looking for in outer space - an alien life, not out there, but right here where we maybe should not want to have it: in our middle?

Google, Microsoft, Apple may form living styles, and manipulate the way people think (in working structures as well as results), but there is much more behind this, its only just the beginning. And I do not think that many people are aware of this revolution.

Or its potentially dangerous implications. Asimovs three laws of robotoics, are just a man-made concepot, they are no natural laws that exist by themselves already, like the laws of physics. AI being build can be taught to obey these laws.

And it can learn to disobey them, or to leave it out in the first programming already.

Good movie on the matter: "Ex Machina".

[Eichhörnchen]

I'll comment on the first link here (I haven't time to read the others right now... I need to budget my online time ). But I opened my own website for selling my work six months ago and almost immediately began receiving offers of help in learning how to manipulate others into buying. There was a mini-tutorial (a taster to get me on the hook) which outlined something called "The Paradox of Choice": this basically asserts that when confronted with endless choices, the consumer becomes paralysed... unable to decide... and walks away. This led me to remove 'superfluous' items from my site. It made no difference.

I know the main point at the beginning of the piece is how we are given only the choices they want us to have, but this was by way of an interesting point I hadn't considered before; many people don't stop to consider how they are being tricked.

I've always been fascinated by the cynical tricks used by retailers in the offline world anyway... like the pumping of the smell of baking bread through a store, the placement of difficult-to-sell products on easy to reach eye-level shelves, also the tossing (apparently carelessly) of items into bins on the ends of supermarket aisles; the shopper assumes (as he or she is meant to) that these are sale-priced goods, when they are to be found on the shelf in their usual place (at this same usual price) elsewhere in the store.

I get pleasure, though, in contributing and creating in the social media I use, like Subsim and Facebook, rather than simply consuming and browsing (and I don't have a smartphone).

One other thing... Tristan Harris talks about "agency"... people having decision and control for themselves, but we are increasingly being coerced into having to do everything online, from submitting our income tax returns to claiming state benefits. We're soon not going even to be allowed to have 'agency'.