I watched The Social Dilemma last night on Netflix. It’s a new docudrama about the effects of social media upon our brain and society. It shows the influence that sites like Facebook and Google have upon the thinking of society. It points to tremendous increases in suicides amongst middle schoolers, the confusion created by the irresponsible creation of fake news, and the political manipulation of an entire country. These are the unintentional consequences of developing digital tools that allow artificial intelligence to manipulate the obsessive parts of our brain. Spiritual communities have tried for centuries to educate the masses on how to self manage these evolutionary growing pains, and in just a decade, we’ve allowed AI to take advantage of this weakness and exploit it for money. This is the premise of the show. It is to the mind what pesticides and air pollution are to the physical body, and what rape is to the soul. The consequences are unfathomable.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and The Social Dilemma
AI as we know it learns within the parameters of the humans that programmed it. We can hardly find the solutions to our own emotional challenges, let alone trying to program a computer with the proper set of information to help it find those solutions for us. At best, we would program in the same reasoning, understanding, and behavior that we ourselves find most challenging to overcome. In fact, what if the ask was that we program in what it would be like to not have greed, delusion and aversion? These are the three poisons or flaws that afflict humans according to the Buddha.
AI is currently taking advantage of greed as a principle, built into the system for attention to do one thing, make money. The question is, can this be done without being greedy? Does any human being really need billions of dollars? Think of the education that this would pay for.
Imagine a planet filled with educated, loved, connected human beings. John Lennon imagines people that are capable of making healthy, ecological decisions that take into account how every thing that they do and think affects everyone else on the planet. What it would be like if there was no need for crime because everyone was cared for? What we have is greed running rampant on the planet, sucking our souls out of us in the endless competition of who’s better, richer, smarter, better looking, faster, stronger, etc. It doesn’t need to be like this.
We need to stop compounding an already difficult problem and desist from giving our worst traits over to artificial intelligence to refine taking advantage of the worst of humanity. We have a need for comfort and connection; to survive and to mean something to others. Starve these and you can get most people to do anything. This is what we’re teaching our computer systems to do to us. They’re doing this by taking advantage of our brain and it’s capacity to create unhealthy imperceptible patterns and habitual behavior. This is just what we don’t need. If AI isn’t going away, we need to teach it how to make us better humans, if this is possible. If not, it would be better to pull the plug until we figure it out ourselves.
“We’re allowing the technologists to frame this as a problem that they’re equipped to solve. That’s a lie. People talk about AI as if it will know truth. AI’s not going to solve these problems. AI cannot solve the problem of fake news. Google doesn’t have the option of saying, “Oh is this conspiracy? Is this truth?” Because they don’t know what truth is. They don’t have a proxy for truth that’s better than a click.”
~Cathy O’Neil, The Social Dilemma
Self Regulation
In The Social Dilemma docudrama, there was some talk about businesses self regulating their content. It reminded me of President Trump’s administration supporting changes to the EPA and the processes of self regulating around fracking. The problem with this is that people rarely know how to regulate their own behavior let alone an entire company. Spirituality and business don’t tend to go hand-in-hand. In fact, if you look at the way most companies are run, they almost seem diametrically opposed.
If you’ve watched “The Founder”, the story of the MacDonald brothers and Ray Kroc, you have a pretty clear picture of how most highly successful businesses are engineered. They attempt success at all costs for the sake of the business, not for the people. Corporate Personhood is this perspective in U.S. law. This is a prime example of AI in the digital media industry, success for the business at the expense of the person.
It’s funny that the motto for Google used to be “do no evil”. It’s not that they’re doing anything particularly evil, but that they seem to have watered down the ethics built into their tools and processes in the name of shareholder growth. Amazon has done the same thing. It’s not that these companies don’t provide something useful because they do. But why would they want to temper their growth? What’s the motivation for this? There is none. Is imposing regulations upon them the right thing to do?
Laws just seem to make lawyers’ worst qualities come out when they’re paid to circumvent these laws for money and personal gain. This means that all of these problems come back to money. When we complain about the state of the world or make excuses that we just have to deal with the way things are, that’s actually a scapegoat. We made things the way they are. Each and every person at every moment is responsible and we should own it.
“If we can’t agree on what’s true, or that there’s such a thing as truth, we’re toast. This is the problem beneath other problems. Because if we can’t agree on what’s true, then we can’t navigate out of any or our problems.”
~Tristan Harris, The Social Dilemma
The only thing that would inspire any person or business to self regulate is if they could see a direct effect of it. We tend to want things immediately which is why social media apps are so addictive. This is highly artificial because change tends to be more gradual. If you think about the seasons and having to wait for plants to grow, it’s natural that things take time. It used to be normal to wait. But those days are gone. There’s no need to wait any longer because in the digital age, you can have it now. Our relationship to technology has created a totally artificial experience that is not in alignment with nature. Unfortunately, our brain cannot distinguish the difference without some prompting.
Solutions for The Social Dilemma
We need to have more conversation about the matters of AI, social media, and the artificial world that technology is perpetuating. The companies that are developing these products need to have more scientific awareness of the long term effects of the products they’re creating. They need to be willing to change because it’s the right thing to do, not because some law or regulation is imposed upon them. No one likes to be restricted but everyone likes to be rewarded.
In a planetary culture that thrives on connection and support, we need to stop paying homage to the dollar and start paying homage to spiritual growth. The consequences are imperative. Mental slavery needs to be abolished. Bob Marley said, “None but ourselves can free our minds.” Giving power to AI to enslave our minds is a travesty and companies should take responsibility for what they’re doing before it reaches pandemic proportions, of which it’s already on its way. Myanmar is a prime example. The political dis-info wars in the U.S are another.
In Conclusion
The Social Dilemma movie’s web site has some ways to take action that are worth checking out. In the movie itself, there were a number of comments about turning off notifications on your devices to stop the nagging of them pulling on your attention. I also highly recommend meditating to keep the mind familiarized with attending to just being. There’s a great article that I wrote about it, How to Meditate – 3 Things You Should Know.
