“For Facebook and Google and Instagram and Twitter, the
business goal quickly became maximizing and monetizing
human attention via addictive dopamine hits. Attention, they
meticulously found, is correlated with emotional intensity,
outrage, shock and provocation. Give artificial intelligence this
simple knowledge about what distracts and compels humans,
let the algorithms do their work, and the profits snowball. The
cumulative effect — and it’s always in the same incendiary
direction — is mass detachment from reality...
“With each passing second online, news stories, graphic
videos, incendiary quotes, and outrages demonstrate their
stunning utility to advertisers as attention seizers, are
endlessly tweaked and finessed by AI to be even more effective,
and thereby prime our brains for more of the same. They
literally restructure our minds...
“And if you live in such a madhouse all the time, you will
become mad. You don’t go down a rabbit-hole; your mind
increasingly is the rabbit hole — rewired that way by
algorithmic practice...But the thing about algorithms and
artificial intelligence is that they don’t rest, they have no
human flaws, they exploit every weakness we have, and
have already taken over. This is not a future dystopia in which
some kind of AI robot takes power and kills us all. It is a
dystopia already here — burrowed into our minds, literally
disabling the basic mental tools.”
Andrew Sullivan