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We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci

TED · Youtube · 227 HN points · 9 HN comments
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Youtube Summary
We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.

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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
That is not the case of YouTube, though. YT pushes recommended videos on you.

There is an interesting speech by Zeynap Tufekci on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI

toyg
> In this sense, it explains why Google tends to get heat over Youtube: because it's closer to a push model, both with homepage and suggestions.
> Anecdotally of course, as one of those tech-folks who's got nothing against good and relevant ads.

Be careful what you wish for. This TED talk[0] on persuasion architectures brings up some interesting moral arguments against this idea. If we generally accept that ad conversion is a metric of an ad's success, how do we handle the situation where people that are susceptible to addictive behaviors like gambling and compulsive shopping are exposed to ads that exploit their condition? Data-driven advertising systems are built particularly well to find and exploit these kinds of people. We already see this a lot in the scam call/email world. Once you fall for one, the amount of inbound traffic you receive from scammers increases dramatically.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI&t=872s

Izkata
> how do we handle the situation where people that are susceptible to addictive behaviors like gambling and compulsive shopping are exposed to ads that exploit their condition?

Ads like that used to be common. By your description, it sounds like they died out on their own.

save_ferris
How? Data-driven ad systems are built specifically to target people who have a high probability of conversion. The perfect person for such a system is one that would constantly (i.e. impulsively) buy or convert.
This is the point that's made here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI (ironic that's an YT video, oh well...)
M4v3R
This is probably one of the most important videos to watch on YouTube. Thanks for sharing that.
You’re repeating what I wrote - Big tech is likely to produce new tech, but new tech comes from other places too.

This discussion is mostly irrelevant to the fact that this particular company is completely reckless and unethical. The technology they accidentally produce while building a dystopia to make people click on ads[1] does not justify anything.

1: https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI

> Now, is it worth discussing the enormous power Google has over people's perceptions as a result of their market dominance? Absolutely.

There was a TED talk covering this titled "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads"[1].

It talks about how the same ad serving infrastructure that can segment populations into whether they are likely to buy X, can also segment people by political affiliation. Then you can simply target them and remind them to vote on election day (and it actually works and statistically affects voter turnout/results).

It is kind of crazy to think that the next election might be won by whoever can make a deal with Google/Facebook to target the precise swing voters they need. Facebook/google might even do the kingmaking themselves if they can figure out how to do it without backlash/leaks.

[1] https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI?t=820

wolco
Great idea.

On election day run get out and vote adwords ads for terms that target favourable voting blocks

zaroth
Did you miss the part where that’s exactly what they did last election? (see leaked memo from Eliana Murillo)

Or did the sarcasm fly right over my head?

wolco
Sarcasm seems to be lost these days.
15m 34s, Zeynep says: "as a public and as citizens" [1]

And HERE is the problem.

Facebook sees us ONLY as Product (our data) that can manipulate/buy/sell - and treat us accordingly.

Advertisers see us ONLY as Consumers they can sell to - and treat us accordingly.

Politicians see us ONLY as Votes (not voteRs) they can snatch - and treat us accordingly.

And we let them.

[1]: https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI?t=934

passivepinetree
Okay, so what is to be done about it?
ModernMech
Start with the politicians. Vote out anyone who doesn't support campaign finance reform. Then we can make our government a little less sociopathic.
etherealG
Start with your attention. The impact will be even bigger than your vote. Avoid services altogether that abuse you, even if there’s some benefit you gain out of it.
This comment is highly understating the power of social media micro-targeting by dubbing it as buying a few ads on FB and running twitterbots. I would request you to check out the Ted talk by Zeynep Tufekci (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI) to get a sense of how effective social media campaigns can be.
dna_polymerase
So Twitter found some $100k spent on ads from Russia during the campaign. Are you really suggesting that someone spending $100k could decide the outcome of an election as big as the U.S. one?

It's time to stop this "Russia hacked the Election" non-sense and just accept the fact that Hillary lost in a fair election.

s73v3r_
The last election showed that you only need to target a small amount of people in a few key states. $100k, coupled with some convenient gerrymandering, could easily reach that many people.
redux13
> Are you really suggesting that someone spending $100k could decide the outcome of an election as big as the U.S. one?

You are very conveniently omitting recent disclosures from facebook that over 126 million Americans may have seen Russia based political posts over a two-year period leading to the election. Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-socialme...

This isn't about a particular candidate winning or losing the election. The case would be equally horrifying if Hillary had won the election with the help of a foreign-state-sponsored social media campaign.

And I would implore you to check out the Ted talk I have posted above. It is not about supporting any particular candidate - it simply talks about how powerful these micro-targeted campaigns can be, and we ignore their potential and their effects on democracy at our own peril.

foobarian
I feel that if some Facebook posts are able to affect the elections to a large degree, we as a people have failed and it doesn't matter what the outcome is since it's just a symptom of a larger problem.

Just like it didn't matter what the exact process by which GW won the contested election. The very fact that the counts were so close means we might as well have tossed a coin.

mc32
Well that would explain why they were so effective in the Ukaine campaign, right?

Or you're saying Americans are so much more deceived and gullible?

The Kochs and the Soroses pump so much more money into manipulating elections what the Russians did was peanuts. People would hardly be complaining if they had instead been on Team Bernie. But since the candidate who could not possibly lose lost a Sure shot, people want and need a ready made answer, enter twitterbots and FB ads.

Anyway, the agreeing narrative phenomenon is most clearly evident in the Assange issue. When he was exposing America's behavior in Europe and the middle east and it also aligned with left ideology, he was a hero, Swedish accusations be damned. Now that his leaks hurt the left, he's a tool of the Russians, of course.

alsetmusic
> The Kochs and the Soroses pump so much more money into manipulating elections what the Russians did was peanuts. People would hardly be complaining if they had instead been on Team Bernie. But since the candidate who could not possibly lose lost a Sure shot, people want and need a ready made answer, enter twitterbots and FB ads.

The Kochs (etc) are Americans manipulating the system with their wealth and probably within the law. I resent them for it, but that’s very different from a foreign government attempting to influence the results of a US election. I don’t pretend to know the actual pervasiveness of Russian influence; I’m only saying that your comparison falls flat.

I have to wonder if you might realize this yourself, but choose to ignore it in order to justify your own agenda.

Also, I would be angry with any outcome that was shown to be the result of election tampering. That goes for any candidate, even if I voted for them myself.

mc32
This gets tricky. So does that mean suddenly it's meddling when Saudi Arabia makes political FB ad buys, or Egypt, or Japan, or whomever wants favor from Americans?
arkades
Not the OP, but:

Yes. What’s so tricky about that?

mc32
Ok, where is the line drawn?

Can a Russian, Israeli or Saudi or Mexican citizen in their respective country buy political ads targeting Americans and favoring or disfavoring a particular American candidate for office?

What if they are on vacation in the US?

What if they have jobs in the US, are not citizens, but live here and have an interest in politics?

What if they are here illegally and buy ads favoring or disfavoring a candidate for office?

What if in some cases it was their own money, what if in other cases they were hired by people in their home countries to buy ads?

What if they work in DC and act as foreign agents and pay for lobbying?

Does FB, Tw, etc. track all that?

JumpCrisscross
> Can a Russian, Israeli or Saudi or Mexican citizen in their respective country buy political ads targeting American and favoring or disfavoring a particular American candidate for office?

Yes, lawfully [1]. This is a complicated area of law, which is why foreigners and foreign governments seeking to properly lobby in America hire proper counsel.

[1] https://www.fec.gov/updates/foreign-nationals/

emodendroket
Would anyone even care about the Facebook ad spend and meetings with campaign officials if it were Israelis or Saudis instead of Russians? I think if you do this mental exercise a lot of the "Russiagate" stories start to look weird.
you may have seen it but there is a really scary Ted talk suggesting that it's possible Facebook is using deep learning techniques to optimize for engagement and they have no idea why it picks what it picks but it's possible making people choose sides and argue happens to be the best way to meet its goals

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI

nautilus12
If this is true then it explains so much.

Facebook is trying to get people to be miserable because then they are using facebook more, and its engineered in such a way that it makes us addicted to facebook and want to use it more anyway.

Is this enough reason for our society to revolt against facebook? How do we actually make it go away when everyone is addicted to it. Does anyone have any practical tactical strategies to get rid of it?

trophycase
Just delete it, it's not that difficult.
nautilus12
I can delete it for myself, but what about all the people that are addicted and don't know any better?
maskedSlacker
It's incredibly liberating in fact. My life is so much better without it. And I'm not missing anything of value. The people who matter can get a hold of me if they want.
chowchowchow
Agreed. Deleted last year and, despite all the incredibly disheartening news and current events, my well being has improved so much over the past 14 months.
megy
Sure, and then I miss the fact that a friend from overseas is visiting, because he would rather write on facebook then post to everyone/keep their details updated.
bigbugbag
FOMO and network effect. Just keep in touch with your friends as we did before facebook took over your social interactions and you'll know what they're up to.

Anyways even if this friend posts about visiting on facebook, this is not guaranteed you will be shown this post, as demonstrated by the actual HN submission you're commenting about.

lossolo
If he really wants to meet with you then he will find a way, even if you are not on facebook. You know there was no facebook 15 years ago, right? and my friends were always finding a way to contact me if they wanted to meet.
megy
Such a strange comment. He didn't expect to not find me on facebook, so had no idea I never saw his message. I still have an account, just do not check it.

And yes, there was no facebook 15 years ago. That is great, 15 years ago everyone new to SMS or email you. Now, everyone expects you to be on facebook. See the difference?

bigbugbag
So you are on facebook and he's used to you regularly logging in to facebook but you stopped doing that. This is something totally different to what your previous comment said.

It's akin to "I've used this email address for years and decided to stop checking it and use another one but did not tell anyone about it. Now I'm missing messages people send me to my old address I do not check anymore".

lerpa
If less people use it then less people expect others to also use it.
jacquesm
So you use Facebook, once to let everybody know you are no longer on Facebook.

I'm lucky in the sense that I made a FB account, tried it out for two weeks, realized it wasn't for me and then cancelled so I never got hooked. But I can see that once you are in it takes a bit more effort to get out. But being 'on Facebook' should not be a prerequisite for normal social interaction.

eropple
> But being 'on Facebook' should not be a prerequisite for normal social interaction.

Why not? Collectively it's proven to be the easiest way for groups of loosely and moderately connected people to communicate and coordinate socially, so it's what virtually everyone I know uses. We all use Facebook for events and for Facebook Messenger. The set of friends who live within train/car distance who I communicate with via something other than Facebook Messenger numbers around...four? Out of dozens? And it's not because We Don't Use Facebook, it's because we share a Slack and had an IRC channel before that.

By not using it, somebody my age and in my neck of the woods relies on making people who they ostensibly call friends treat them as a special case just to organize beers on a Friday. And it does make that person a special case: why would people use group-SMS anymore when Facebook chats are right there and you don't need to track down phone numbers to include everyone (and deal with sharded SMS threads if people are added, etc.)? The expectation that people special-case your edge-case life decisions has to be balanced against not being a pain in the ass for people you claim are your friends.

So, yes, in many quarters Facebook is a prerequisite for normal social interaction (unless you're That Guy, and it's good life advice to never be That Guy). And, TBH? It works fine. It's nothing special. It works fine. I very rarely see a news feed (I use Social Fixer) so I have no real opinion on the way it does likes/shares/etc.; I did tag some people as "close friends" so when they post it does reliably surface, but I don't remember the last time I even scrolled down the news feed and its existence has no impact on the other features of the platform.

It is just not that big a deal. It's certainly not worth the airs put on--not from you, but the I-don't-even-own-a-TV levels of smarm from people who don't use Facebook makes my eyes roll out of my head and bounce down the stairs--by people who don't use it.

guelo
I think your disagreement is somewhat off because when people rail against Facebook what they're talking about is the original product, the profiles, the friends, the feeds, the posts, etc. Messenger and to a lesser extent Events are separate products that happen to leverage the friends network. Kind of like how "Googling" is searching, not Gmail or maps or the rest.
eropple
I understand what people object to. But it's not a product. It's a platform, and getting all I-don't-even-own-a-TV about the news feed makes you social sandpaper in my neck of the woods because of everything else that Facebook provides.

It is really, really good at that stuff, and you can--you really can!--pick and choose what you want to use and what you care about.

bigbugbag
>> But being 'on Facebook' should not be a prerequisite for normal social interaction.

>Why not? Collectively it's proven to be the easiest way for groups of loosely and moderately connected people to communicate and coordinate socially

I'd be happy to have a source for this outlandish claim.

As to answer your question, there are many many reason not to let a private transnational company take control of your social interactions. Easy one: what happens to your social interactions when facebook disappears as every other so called social network before it did (remember friendsted, myspace, etc.) Another easy one: what happens when your account gets locked and you get banned from facebook ?

Harder ones are not so obvious for people who do not stay informed such as the deep impact on shaping people opinions and thoughts, the disappearance of empathy, intelligence dropping, destruction of internet, support of foreign dictatorship, massive tax fraud and tax evasion, emotional manipulation, organized abuse, sextorsion, and a lot more.

eropple
> I'd be happy to have a source for this outlandish claim.

My entire friend group and extended friend group in the Boston area. Somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people within two hops of me and in the local area, geometric expansion's weird like that. If I want to talk to any of them, we will end up using Facebook. If a friend intros two people face-to-face and they want to talk later, we use Facebook. If I meet a girl at a bar, or if I meet somebody who might be cool to work with on a project, and we want to hang out later, we use Facebook. Suggesting SMS is usually tolerated but makes you a little weird and makes you harder to get ahold of and you're likely to be ignored and left out later; suggesting email (outside of an explicitly business context) makes you a dinosaur and makes it very likely that you are ignored.

I cannot remember one time in the last five years that somebody suggested SMS as a contact method to me. I have phone numbers for folks I knew before Facebook was a thing, sure. And phone numbers are a good-enough "front door" for stuff like online dates. But actual interaction? Overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly via Facebook Messenger.

Nobody's saying you have to use it. But, in my experience, making it harder for people to contact you means people don't. The fumfuh about "well my real friends" ignores that there are both social and transactional benefits to not being sand in the gears, not being a pain in the ass, for people who are not your real friends. Being sorta friends is still both fun and useful.

> As to answer your question, there are many many reason not to let a private transnational company take control of your social interactions.

The assertion I am making alongside that rhetorical statement--which, TBH, I'm not quite sure why you thought was not rhetorical enough to need a soapbox stand--which is missed in the less friended corners of HN, is that all of this matters a lot less than keeping in touch with people.

Datamining--whatever. Oh, no, Facebook knows I go out for a drink on Fridays. Oh, no, the like button on pages (which don't actually phone home, because I have a hosts-based ad-blocker on my phone and my browser) shows that I read the Times. The tradeoff of that whatevermining versus not having a functioning social life in the year 2017 is immense and the types who don't-own-a-TV about Facebook display a distinct lack of understanding that maybe that trade-off is okay for some people and that it does not necessarily come from ignorance but is weighed and calculated--because having a social life is really nice and not having a social life really sucks.

Facebook is often annoying and is kind of shitty, sure. It is also the only game in town. In plenty of social circles, you play or you don't participate. The lack of understanding and empathy out of the "oh, just don't use it" camp is not shocking--tech people choosing not to understand things they might not agree with and choosing not to employ human empathy is not and never will be shocking--but it remains profoundly annoying.

tinymollusk
So what? While I value each individual friendship I have, I have also found better life satisfaction with fewer, deeper, friendships. Is everyone else convinced that holding distant relationships, punctuated by infrequent in person, makes them happier/more fulfilled?
Scea91
Actually yes. I definitely enjoy keeping in touch with people I am not able to see on regular basis for various reasons.
tinymollusk
Is that healthy? Before I reduced social usage, I found myself spending time I 'enjoyed'. Now, I look back, and that time was unhealthy. (I believe seeing only other people's highlights helped trigger a depressive episode.)

It's like time spent watching TV. I enjoy it; sometimes it provides value; it's tendency is to take over and create an unhealthy life for me.

genofon
why do you argue on this? it's totally a personal preference and totally OT, if he/she wants to use FB that way let it be
tinymollusk
Because I am curious about the perspective and experience of another person.
rdtsc
There was another article recently about using deep learning to see if people are too depressed and are at suicide risk. It's a nice idea on the surface but it a bit dark thinking that maybe there counterpart to it, that is another AI algorithm which makes the person addicted and depressed to start with.

It's a bit like a parasite - it needs to control and extract usefulness from the host but not let the host die quickly because well it won't get the resources anymore and it would die with it.

nautilus12
But see my post above, suppose that it decides that it can get a strong burst of engagement from all the sympathy posts, would it chose to kill off some of its hosts that have outlived their usefulness (from an engagement perspective). Does facebook have enough power that it can chose to kill off certain people? Are there examples of people committing suicide solely because of their facebook feeds (I guess how would we know)
rdtsc
Just read it. It's a scary potential. It might start doing it automatically one day. If anyone discovers the bug it will be just "oh sorry, just an algorithm bug, we'll tweak it, we promise".

> Does facebook have enough power that it can chose to kill off certain people? A

I never signed up for Facebook to start with, but I got a glimpse of this power with Netflix. The movie recommendations were so good that I end up liking them if took its advice. Where normally I wouldn't have watched them based on rating, synopsis, or title. I had realized some algorithm at Netflix seems to know me better than I knew myself. Then thought what if it suddenly decided to use that against me, because it somehow would be more profitable for it.

njarboe
CGP Grey has an interesting 7 min video on how this might work [1]. Not so easy to summarize but the main part is that opposite sides of an issue are really part of the same meme that need each other to grow. The more polarization the better.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

tomrod
Machine Learning, meet economic theory, where people have time-inconsistent decisions and where macro observations of micro-decisions can really throw off your model (big K/little k problem[0]).

[0] A decent review with code, a Noble laureate, and a top notch Computational Economist: https://lectures.quantecon.org/jl/rational_expectations.html

hinkley
See, this is the same thing that has turned me off since the very first time I heard of neural nets.

I have no interest at all in a solution that can’t be explained. That’s not a solution, that’s a remedy.

I don’t have a lot of time for humans that know things but can’t articulate them. Why would I make time for a computer that does the same? It doesn’t even earn the courtesy of give a human.

I was drawn into this field by the idea of understanding things and solving problems with them. If AI can’t “show it’s work” homework style, then it might find me a shorter route to the mall but it hasn’t solved anything.

None
None
standyro
Explain in detail all of the minute muscle movements that you make to throw a ball.

Not all things that humans learn are easily articulated or explained, not because those humans aren't articulate, but because they learned actions that are more easily intuited.

Also, on this topic, explainability of machine learning models is a hot field: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP7-JtFMLo4 https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04938 https://github.com/marcotcr/lime

trophycase
Don't mean to be rude but isn't it fairly well known that facebook is using deep learning to optimize the feed for engagement? I mean do you really think they are hand tuning these algorithms?
gaius
The issue isn't the use of DL per se, it's that the resulting NN has independently discovered it can achieve its goal of increasing "engagement" by fuelling negative feedback loops in its test subjects (us). There's blind faith in its effectiveness on the part of its owner, and no oversight.
nautilus12
Wait, so theoretically, suppose that a deep learning algorithm figures out that if they bombard someone with tons of images of other people happy during an acutely sad event of their life that they can drive them to suicide, and that this causes a massive peak of engagement from all the people expressing sympathy on their wall, would it do so? Given the fact that facebook is engineered to be addictive and holds the dopamine button on so many people's brains, wouldn't this practically be manslaughter?
keithnz
Sounds plausable. I certainly like it as a plot line to a story instead of a sentient AI trying to take over the world that unaware deep learning AI takes over and kills us as it adapts to our preferences of sensationalisim and find those destructive social cycles
nautilus12
Basically at that point AI becomes an echo chamber for our own evil tendencies...until the point it totally drowns us out.

It would make a good novel, but it would be too confusing and depressing, like the Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman, but more frustrating and confusing.

flycaliguy
Sounds like a great Black Mirror episode. Just imagine if that algorithm was paid for by the cosmetics industry to sell make up and face cream.
amigoingtodie
The virus kills the host?
civilitty
IANAL but based on my understanding, manslaughter generally includes some form of negligence (instead of premeditation like homicide) so until our laws and culture catch up to the power these developers/decision makers actually hold, it's unlikely that a jury would blame the developers (or that a judge would even be sympathetic to the argument). Our society has agreed long ago that drinking and driving is irresponsible so thats why drunk driving fatalities are often prosecuted as manslaughter but the same is not true of software engineers and their creations. We need a sweeping cultural change outside of software engineering just like we had with civil engineers in the 20th century.

Nowadays, a professional engineer (a phrase with a precise legal meaning) can be held criminally and civilly liable for negligence even when they are "just following irders." Unfortunately, we're at the very early wild wild west stages of the industry, before some big exposé or calamity completely shakes up the industry (i.e. Sinclair's The Jungle did for food, Carson's Silent Spring for pesticide use, or the 1906 SF earthquake for building codes).

WillReplyfFood
This does not always follow the rational way. If you hack society, and society rejects the hack- you can end up in a concentration camp.
nautilus12
If you build a machine that builds random types of robots but are negligent to make sure it doesn't create robots that kill people, isn't that still criminal negligence?

I think of these algorithms as being algorithms created and vetted out by algorithms, therefore, its negligent to not understand what they are doing. Since its difficult to know what they are doing, then the risk to use them in this way should be viewed as too great

dorgo
It's the point of machine learning that no human needs (or often even can) understand how the machine is doing something as long as the target metric is optimized. We are building black boxes which translate input into desired output. And tomorrow we will have black boxes building other black boxes.

The only way to ensure nobody is killed is to add "0 people killed" to the target function of the black box.

mygo
“World without end” amen
doomjunky
Every heuristic algorithm needs a tollerance

    peopleKilled() < ε
Dec 10, 2017 · 227 points, 50 comments · submitted by DyslexicAtheist
jchw
I don't think AI signed our death warrant, it just made for better plausible deniability. I think being able to measure effectiveness fairly concretely even on the micro level is what did it.

What if you couldn't run JavaScript code on a webpage, track every movement and send it to a server? What if you couldn't even tell if someone viewed your webpage? Would AI seem so scary then?

We're giving away too much for too little in return. Better ad tracking isn't worth losing almost all of our privacy on the most important and influential information platform of our time.

0x445442
I remember a story in Wired back in the 99-00 time frame about two guys that were diamond retailers in Canada. They were enticed by venture capitalists to move to California to dotcom their business.

After a year or so they shut it down and went back to Canada to return to the business they'd built over generations. I forget all the details but there is one detail I remember. They owners were disenchanted with the whole affair and their take was the internet was nothing more than a massive direct marketing platform.

dooglius
If you want to stop ad-related problems, change the incentives. Consider using AdNauseam (https://adnauseam.io/), which not only hides ads like a traditional adblocker, but also clicks them for you. If enough people use it, it lowers the value of an ad click, and thus lowers the incentive to optimize for them.
cooper12
The title reminded me of a quote from an early Facebook employee [0] :

> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads [1]

There's the transcript of the video here btw: https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...

[0]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/

[1]: The quote itself is a reference to the first line of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl

> I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

JohnJamesRambo
I'd say since he or she worked at Facebook they already had a skewed idea about just what defines a "best mind" and what the goals of that best mind should be.
jeffreyrogers
Maybe, but if I think of the five or so people I know who are truly brilliant two work at Google, a couple work in finance and one is getting a PhD in math. A lot of people would consider at least two of those fields not worthwhile for such talented people.

But to be honest, the whole "best minds" thing is sort of silly because the actual hard problems that we have to deal with aren't hard because smart people aren't working on them. They're hard because they touch on human issues and have a lot of tradeoffs and no solution that is satisfying to everyone.

threeseed
> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads

I've worked in the industry for a few years now and worked with hundreds of data scientists and for me this is not true. They are smart, no doubt, but they are on par with programmers. Majority aren't doing pure research but just applying the knowledge of others to new problems.

The best minds for me are still those in universities doing pure research. And that hasn't changed.

api
A generation ago the best minds were working on ways if killing the maximum number of people at minimum cost. Maybe this is progress.
jon_richards
And now it's being weaponized.
ModernMech
I remember thinking the same thing in gradschool. There was a lab partnered with Microsoft, and all their research was focused on ranking search results. That's it. I felt so bad for the grad students there, who had big dreams about changing the world, but instead were optimizing ways to get people to click search results.
iwintermute
Ranking search results is not the same as clicking ads - it's about organizing information.
dvfjsdhgfv
Who is "we"?

Because this is what really matters, what makes a difference: are you deliberately creating what makes people click to get money, without any consideration of consequences, or are you creating something beneficial for others - they find it beneficial and that's the reason they click? Unfortunately, most content creators, especially on YT, belong to the first category.

soared
It's comical how hn always thinks they're above the lowly YouTube famous content. That type of content exists because people like it. When Jon doe gets off his 12 hour shift at the factory he's not interest in hn style content, he wants some mindless slapstick comedy.
oarsinsync
When I’m done with a 10 hour day working on infrastructure and code, I have no interest in HN style content. I want mindless slapstick comedy, mostly because I have no mind left after 10 hours in the office.
sasaf5
sad truth...
siliconc0w
My hope if we will adapt and improve own heuristics and filers to get better at information processing. It used to be if you saw someone credible looking on TV tell you something, you mostly filed it away as 'true'. We are learning that 'truth' isn't really a thing you are told. Someone can tell you something but they have motives and even with the best of intentions, they're conveying one perspective or approximation of a complex and chaotic reality. We learn to be suspicious of entertainment masquerading as news or to catch ourselves when we begin slipping into a pattern of mindless consumption. In some respects this is a good thing - we're becoming more cognizant and critical of our reality.
anigbrowl
We need a better way to automate that filtering. I'm about as good as one can get at epistemological filtering and it consumes way too much of my mental effort. I'd like to just ignore the news and concentrate on artistic activities but that's irresponsible at this juncture.
username223
It's even better: we're building massive surveillance so a few amoral people can pay poor people to pretend to be rich people clicking on ads. When that bubble implodes, the holders of the surveillance data will find worse ways to make money from it.
wallacoloo
Can you elaborate? Are you referring to "advertising fraud", where these amoral people host ads and hire poor people to click them, getting a penny from the advertiser each time? And the poor people are incentivized to pretend to be rich people because ad impressions on a rich person's eyes are more valuable?

Or are you saying that the advertising networks themselves train their users to act like rich people because an ad network with rich people is more valuable to advertisers (although in this case, the networks aren't paying the poor people)?

username223
The former: surveillance companies don't have much incentive to stamp out click-farms, even when they don't run them themselves. See e.g. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530961/the-hidden-world-o...
wallacoloo
Certainly this is a waste of human potential. I can see that one could argue that the platforms may be acting unethically by not stomping these like farms out, or by misleading advertisers by including these unauthentic ad impressions in their reports, but how are the rich people operating these like farms acting immorally?

Side note: I'm not convinced that the people operating the like farms are wealthy by western standards. Having at one point been involved in the business side of paid captcha solving, this type of business attracts a lot of entrepreneurs with little experience who just want to make a quick buck.

username223
> Side note: I'm not convinced that the people operating the like farms are wealthy by western standards.

I completely agree -- click farming is a way for second-world people to make a living using third-world labor. In the short term, this benefits the surveillance companies at the expense of their clients. In the medium to long term, it probably costs their investors and helps inflate another tech bubble. Seriously shady folks (think Experian, but completely unregulated, at best) will buy the data when it bursts.

netsharc
Is the whole "Facebook records what you type, even if you don't hit post" real, or just an urban legend?

I've seen Facebook offer me to save a draft of the wall post so I can continue in case I switch devices, in that case of course it would store my draft server-side; but I feel like that reiterated claim is an urban legend.

lazulicurio
Yep, they even released a study based on the data they collected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831574
cup-of-tea
Yeah we told you this would happen 15 years ago.
foxhop
Related: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2017/11/...
LeoNatan25
The following is a conversation between Sam Harris and Zeynep Tufekci, where they further explore the topic: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/persuasion-and-contro...
tootie
Absolute freaking nonsense. I can't even. You don't like targeted advertising? Fine. Me neither. Dystopia? Ludicrous.
fuzzfactor
Your opinion is very clearly stated and easy to understand for a fluent English reader.

I agree, it's not very much of a dystopia unless you spend all your time on the web, and in places that are unpleasantly inundated with ads which you are clicking on when you would rather not.

The foundation of manipulative advertising is nothing new, the internet just put it on steroids, moving the balance of benefit faster and more in favor of the advertiser and less for the consumer.

arca_vorago
If a surveillance engine that listens to everything, everywhere, shares that data with corporations and governments around the globe, keeps systems vulnerable on purpose with backdoors, systems sold with false promises of security by consumer monopolies, all so ad companies can make more money doesn't seem dystopian to you, well I don't know what would.
anigbrowl
If you can't even put a sentence together then maybe you should compose your thoughts a little longer.
roywiggins
It's not about targeted advertising, it's about the infrastructure that's been built to enable it.
BetterThanSlave
Why cry about ads when we can use them to train AI to generate the metadata of minorities?

Of course, this means admitting minorities generate race-specific or gender-specific or culture-specific metadata, which is always nice to deny (we're all equal after all, amirite?) at your pretentious dinner parties... until someone like this comes along and explains precisely why such blanket denials are scietifically wrong:

http://www.cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/

And instead of presenting it as a white paper, it's presented as a political attack that completely undermines the contemporary humanism that powers those pretentious dinner parties.

It's not all dystopia. At least identity will be so commoditized, no one will put all their eggs in that basket ever again!

cerealbad
utopians building dystopia? more empty alarmist sedation.

bad ideas should be pushed to the front, so they can be viewed and scrutinized by all.

oxymoran
If Facebook gave a damn about any of this, they would stop selling ads and start charging users for their services. Simple as that. Your move Zuck.
benatkin
Facebook is a publicly traded company, with a duty to its shareholders to m̶a̶x̶i̶m̶i̶z̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶f̶i̶t̶s̶serve their best interests. If Zuck decided to he probably would get thrown out.
drb91
What crap. First, Zuck owns the company. Second, you didn’t actually point out how multiple forms of income don’t serve shareholder interests.

People like ads because they get rich without having to make a product people will spend cash on. It’s so much easier to milk views on existing content rather than convince people to pay for, well, anything.

Zuck is a leech on capitalism’s neck.

ForHackernews
He can't be thrown out. Facebook issues special classes of share so that Zuckerberg can never lose control of the company.

https://www.economist.com/news/business/21729813-multiple-cl...

jdavis703
Facebook has an ARPU of over $21 in the U.S. I'm sure a large amount of people would not spend this much.
hobls
Woah, no shit??

(One google later...)

Daaaaaamn. Makes sense, but seeing it called out is very striking.

kjrose
Essentially the moment our society had food, housing and basic necessities guaranteed pretty much by default. The optimal way for people to make money is advertising. If we can automate it so that we increase clicks (a measure for demand) even artificially then of course that is what will be done until we discover that has no long term use.
notduncansmith
It’s great that you have food, housing and basic necessities, but that is not the “default” experience and we have a lot of work to do before it is.
gboudrias
If food and housing were guaranteed, there would be no homelessness and losing your job wouldn't be stressful. It's true that we can have more now but we still always have to worry about falling down to nothing again.
kjrose
Let me clarify. I mean for all intents and purposes we don’t have a vast majority of the population working in industries that would be essential for life and well being but rather producing goods which are not really needed but wanted and thus need to be marketed for people to want them.

Mea culpa for a lack of clarity.

log_base_login
Without sounding pedantic, I think it's fair to say that the mass media put out a LOT of material into the public domain merely to acquire the largest market share of attention.

It is very rare that I read a story in a newspaper or hear one on television that isn't some form of salacious gossip or eye catching spectacle.

Though I haven't read most of it, Chris Hedges' book: Empire of Illusion, speaks to this with much greater acuity than I can.

I wish we could all just take a breath of fresh air (whoops, there is an allusion to another, though admittedly fairly neutral, piece of media) and remember that we are often much better off without the media dictating what we think should be important. I fear that the fractionism that George Washington cautioned us against in his farewell address is driving most of what we consume from the mass media.

I hesitate even to post this for fear of sounding too alarmist, and for the possible repercussions on myself from the powers that be in their never ending fight to be 'right', but I do think that this is a subject that is important enough to stand up and say "enough is enough". I know I sound paranoid, but as we become ever more connected, it is not as far fetched as it might seem that such things transpire. It is imperative that the power remain in the purview of the public and not those with access to what information money can buy, or cookies can acquire.

Retra
> I fear that the fractionism that George Washington cautioned us against in his farewell address is driving most of what we consume from the mass media.

If you have a significant part of people's attention, then people will give you campaign funds when running for office. So what do you do as a media company? Say everything you can to get people to talk about politics. You don't even need to sell advertising anymore once you can collect campaign contributions directly by selling airtime. It doesn't matter who runs for office, all that matters is that everybody hates them enough to run counter-campaigns, and that nobody wins who has to the power to restrict campaign spending.

All of this is why we had campaign spending limits in the first place.

coliveira
That's why the two party system used in the US, while in the surface looks democratic, engenders quite the opposite result. The nature of US politics is that everything a party will support (like global warming) will be bashed or denied by the other. Republican call this, quite accurately, wedge issues. Very soon, the only way to do anything is to get more and more money to be able to win enough support to maintain power (for a limited amount of time). It is clear that such a political system will benefit the owners of capital and restrict the voices of everyone else. We are just looking at the disfunction of a two-party system unfolding before our own eyes.
Jedd
Let me allay your concerns - 2pp as exercised by the USA doesn't look like democracy to anyone else. Even 'common' party politics, as seen in most other western societies, are mislabelled as democracies.
hkon
Thank you for your service :)

Paranoid? Just look at the last few years. Insane.

None
None
threeseed
> I read a story in a newspaper or hear one on television that isn't some form of salacious gossip or eye catching spectacle.

I am not American and can't comment on all of the stations but I know PBS has neither of those. Likewise similar public broadcasters do tend to be more serious and moderate in their reporting: BBC (UK), Deutsche Welle (Germany), ABC/SBS (Australia) etc

Unfortunately in a competitive media landscape you need viewers. And humans are just wired to respond to gossip and spectacles.

log_base_login
Thanks for making my point for me.

Every one of your statements is in some way a defense of the current mass media structure. Even your counterexamples of public news sources maintain a sufficiently small enough market share as would be counted as noise in a t-test.

ta909123
> And humans are just wired to respond to gossip and spectacles.

A lot of the more worrying things happen as a result of our evolutionary background I think. We evolved to trust one another ("Was there really a lion over there, Bob?"), and that trust can easily be manipulated if you leave your ethics/morals at the door.

I think there should be laws/regulations against anything that manipulates people based on our evolutionary "upbringing".

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