When you go the website the first line is literally “Say hello to Freedom Chat—a next-generation messaging app that keeps your conversations actually private
Honestly, that's not a bad idea for a start up. Maybe a marketplace where people can see what things cost in different places and book a surgery directly.
"Dumping" (selling at an artificially low price) is widely considered an attack on economic activity of the competitors, even though it may spur the economic activity of the consumers of the products being dumped.
In this regard, the Chinese government pouring large subsidies into solar panel production both spurred the economic activity around installing solar panels, and attacked / thwarted in around production of the panels themselves, if the production happens outside China. Only the US was able to somehow develop solar panel production.
I'm not really disagreeing with you as it's not like there is a 100% true definition of a free market, different people can have different conceptions, but the original Adam Smith / classical view is that a free market should essentially be 100% driven by the private market on supply and demand - with as little government intervention as possible on either side of the ledger (subsidy or blocking)
Except it isn't at all. The properties to buy all have a fixed price, costs of houses/hotels are fixed, rents are fixed and can't be adjusted, and most importantly, a) you can only buy a property if you randomly happen to land on it and b) people have no choice of what property to stay at (again, chosen by random dice)
Ok, but If elections are decided by the small swing group, wouldnt that mean a small targeted impact from AI would could *more* effective not less? If all it needs to do it have a 1 percent of impact that makes a huge difference.
Yes, but I guess my point is that this is just another symptom of the polarization problem, and not some unique nightmare scenario where AI has mass influence over what people think and vote on.
So it matters in the same way that the billions of dollars currently put toward this small silver matter, just in a more efficient and effective way. That isn't something to ignore, but it's also not a doomsday scenario IMO.
I think it's actually the other way around. The US Civil War predated social media by 150 years. The root causes were slavery and states rights. The result was a bloody conflict whose effects lasted for generations. That's an existence proof that existing communication mechanisms are sufficient if people really want a war.
So why is social media-based propaganda so effective today? One reason that the current polarization seems so durable is that similarly persistent root causes (such as immigration, economic dislocation, and racial attitudes) have arisen again. Blaming social media obscures the fact that attitudes have hardened. People are looking for support and social media makes it very easy to find. It seems more like a feedback loop than a root cause.
Just my $0.02. It's the sort of problem that should make us all feel pretty humble about diagnosing it easily.
Pre socials, you could attend a gathering of like minded people and come away energized and pumped about whatever the event was about, but that "high" eventually fades away as you re-entered the real world and got away from that echo chamber of an event.
Today, you can stay in the echo chamber and never hear anything other than like minded views because that's what the algo thinks you should see more of which means you never come down from that "high".
It's way worse in post-social algos than anything that's come before
> It's way worse in post-social algos than anything that's come before
By what standard? Judged by outcomes it's hard for me to see that the effects will be worse than historical events like the French Revolution or the Killing Fields of Cambodia. [0,1] They and many others included periods of indiscriminate slaughter that tore apart societies.
I don't mean to undersell the effect of the Internet. Technologies do come along that make things fundamentally different. Social media amplifies fringe views and makes it possible for people holding those views to find each other more easily. The guardrails for bad behavior are also much weaker online. At the same time many IRL institutions that held US society together have become far weaker. [2] It's hard to untangle these effects in the moment, but some of the forces pulling US society apart date back to the 1960s or earlier.
Pre socials all the social movements around had been already captured by vocal "status quo defenders" that insisted (violently if needed) that the way to get what you want is to do the no-impact highly-performative action they picked.
Your only chance of attending a gathering of like minded people was by somebody organizing a new one, and only before those vocal bad elements discovered it.
Today, you just join a Reddit thread or Telegram channel or follow someone on social. You don't have to seek it out. It is now just delivered to you with a notification that your twitchy little brain just can't find a way to ignore and must investigate the new new. Not only are you being fed nonsense, but you're having it fed to you in the most addictive way possible. Cult leaders would dream of having that much control.
> Cult leaders would dream of having that much control.
These days they no longer need merely dream of it. They just set up a recruiting website and a propaganda channel on their favorite social media channel and they're good to go.
A good chunk of the polarization comes from plurality / "first past the post" voting, with its huge spoiler-effects.
That choice of algorithm--which is not required by the Constitution--creates deep and very real "if you're not with us, you're against us" situations, entrenching a polarized political duopoly.
I do agree that social media might make it worse, though. But again I don’t know if AI is really going to impact the people that are voting based on identity factors or major issues like the economy doing poorly.
I could see how AI influences people to associate their identity more with a particular political stance, though. That seems like a bigger risk than any particular viewpoint or falsehood being pushed.
> I don’t agree that polarization is caused by social media, and I think it definitely precedes social media by decades.
I tend to think you're right. It's just been magnified and multiplied and handed a microphone with a worldwide amplifier by (anti)social media (and much of the more "traditional" media landscape in general as well).
Isn’t that the exact same case for software though?
It seems interesting to me the one of the highest paying professions- software engineer and the lowest- author are both that way because of scalability.
reply