Honestly, I don't think the problem can get worse. Or at least, it won't get worse because of more information. The capacity of the human mind for rationalization is already essentially infinite, people are manipulated because they want to be manipulated.
It's pretty much to be expected, the world is really quite complicated and without a drive for consensus independent thought would lead you astray a hundred times before leading you to water.
I know! One day it's going to get so bad people are going to have to deploy critical thinking instead of accepting what they read at face value and suffer the indignity of having to think for themselves.
Check out the Flynn Effect. It is possible that all of us online idiots and the cohorts coming after are getting stupider every generation. I wouldn't be so hasty with the "things aren't getting worse" part just yet. It could get much worse!
Sure, the outcome is more likely to be rational for each single person, but when it's published on the internet, there are suddenly potentially millions of people involved, some of which are certain to be not rational and wise at all...
This exactly. No attempt at forcing logical or unbiased discourse will ever work, because people simply are not persuaded by logical argument, regardless of how many irrefutable facts are presented.
It's a laudable and understandable goal to try to fix online discourse using clever tech, but I am highly skeptical it will ever work, because people simply do not care to have their minds changed.
I'm unsure what the actual solution to this, if there ever will be one. Improving population education as a whole seems to me to be the only way, but I fear that even if possible that will take so long that it will no longer matter.
I legitimately fear that ultimately human beings are not evolved enough to be able to effectively manage the effortless global communication systems that we've developed.
I have a bad feeling by the time computational social scientists or whoever work anything out algos will suck society dry.
I have been in too many meetings where no one cares. Each time its the same story - ya the data is showing this random group of people over here are hooked like crazy, dont worry about why and what effects its having on them just keep them hooked.
Its like a big trap. Once you walk in there is no exit. The people who push back or try alternatives all get politically side lined. And we end up with cluelessly or crazy people in charge.
No one will ever have resources to suveil everyone and everything, given the rate at which info is exploding. People dont talk about the info explosion problem, cause there is no solution.
The biggest problem is that people seem unwilling to change their mind. People base their whole identity on their opinions and it’s getting worse.
I think it’s because the internet allows the people who have dumb ideas to meet other likeminded people. They can now form groups. And now it’s harder to be open to other opinions, because the existence of your group validates your opinion.
What an amazing analogy. I doubt there is a solution short of severe changes in how most people use the internet and media. Attention stealing apps and their consequent dopamine addictions seem to have killed rational thinking, so much that people will refuse to believe facts and evidence. It feels better to be part of a group that believes a thing than to process a conflict and adapt your worldview. Hmm, what else does that sound like? :-)
I don't see how to solve this. This is the same root cause that causes people to be 911 truthers or qanon or to vote for clearly nonsense candidates.
It's a lack of critical thinking, and it's an epidemic.
When you have people believing whatever they want on Facebook or whatever because someone makes minimal effort to photoshop something to look like a news post, of course that's something AI can take advantage of.
But it isn't a new problem, and the solution is the same.
But how do you educate a population that is aggressive and resistant to acquiring knowledge?
I'm just here to watch the band play as the ship goes down.
plus ca change ... humans have lived forever with highly suspect information (myths, legends, movements, religions, taboos) guiding their lives and creating death, division and destruction.
Only the rich and educated have the knowledge and resources to access higher quality information.
The internet is already awash with toxic lies even without AI.
Look at Trump followers. Half the electorate believing absurdities.
Look at this comment. It's based on nothing at all. Just a rando spitting bile with a baby crying on my lap. But it's probably going to be on the internet for 100 years.
The general lack of ability to engage in logical facts-based discussion is an existential threat to humanity. Even in this civilized forum reasoning not always wins. Things are definitely dire.
At one point about a decade ago, not long after college, I had this conviction that over time with more available granular information about the world, people would start to be more epistemic [1] about how they viewed the world. In fact what I found though, was that more information seems to have led to the opposite. That people's interpretation of the same information seems to reinforce already held beliefs about the state of things rather than update their beliefs.
Not sure where that leads the zeitgeist with ever increasing barrage and availability of information, skewed or otherwise.
When I was a kid ignorant people kept their thoughts in their heads safe and tucked away or maybe told a few people near them that knew better. Now they let them out on social media where they can find other ill-informed people and reinforce one another. I don’t know a way around this filter step. Maybe it naturally will resolve. As Stewart Brand said, information wants to be free. I will be optimistic enough to believe that means correct information. The science and empathy just isn’t well distributed yet. “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” -William Gibson
The internet was supposed to create an educated society with information at your fingertips, instead we got fake news and echo chambers spreading extreme thinking
We have huge groups of actively ignorant people supporting the growth of climate change, anti-vaccination, and a host of other dangerous actions.
Now those fighting Ebola outbreaks are getting attacked.
I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like rationality is fast disappearing from this world. It’s only a matter of time before we destroy ourselves.
I realize this type of gloom and doom stuff has always been predicted throughout history, it just seems “this time is different” for real with the intersection of technology and ignorance reaching levels we’ve never seen.
Yeah; I think it just speaks to the fact that there is no substitution to being a well-informed individual. If you're cognizant about understanding the world around you, you're generally pretty good at weeding bad information out and bringing good information in. Unfortunately, I think the internet has a siloing effect and the most sensational voices rise to the top. People get caught in their silos and don't have an easy way to peek outside. Misinformation spreads; and that's scary when trying to quantify the future of our society.
We can easily say the same for the knee jerk reactions to these articles that everything is fine.
What if people complain about this decade after decade because it is getting worse and worse? Of course, people in the conventional wisdom like you would never think of that.
I firmly believe that increased technology makes smaller and smaller cogs of us all, making us worse and worse, concentrating real experiences and all that creative stuff onto fewer and fewer people who can actually afford it.
Ease of communication means it's more difficult to separate your thoughts from others. You become ever closer to a mere regurgitator of pre packaged thoughts.
Luckily, if you regurgitate the thoughts of people who have better and healthier ideas (like how I'm regurgitating Baudrillard right now) the system is self defeating.
But it knows that as well, so there will always be zombies like you produced to promote the conventional wisdom!
It's pretty much to be expected, the world is really quite complicated and without a drive for consensus independent thought would lead you astray a hundred times before leading you to water.
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