San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The foibles of online life and misuse of tech
Near the end of Andrew Marantz’s “Antisocial” — his dispatch, by turns amusing and alarming, from the fringes of the internet — he recounts the tale of Reddit’s 2017 April Fool’s Day experiment.
The online forum rolled out a blank slate called Place, a grid consisting of a million pixels, and welcomed users to work together (or against each other) to create some sort of image by systematically changing the color of each pixel. When the experiment went live, the Reddit project manager in charge stood by in horror as people began designing swastikas and penises, among other predictably offensive things. One group devised a plan to create an American flag at the center of the space; other users conspired to change the pixels so the flag would appear to be on fire, or consumed by a black hole. Eventually, the standardbearers managed to repel the attacks.
“In the end,” Marantz writes, “the flag was still there.”
Marantz, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has carved out a space for himself covering the adverse effects that social media has had on our national discourse. Like an old Hunter S. Thompson report from the campaign trail (without the horse tranquilizers), “Antisocial” is an entertaining read about a distressing subject.
Marantz embeds himself behind enemy lines, as it were, to understand how the internet’s selfappointed “edgelords” learned to take advantage of the medium’s unforeseen power vacuum. They spread viral ideas intended to trigger the strong emotions, both pro and con, for which the internet has proved to be ideally designed.
“Anyone with web access, anywhere in the world, was now not only a receiver of news but also a transmitter,” he writes.
As the old reliables of journalism fell victim to dwindling audiences, “(i)nformational power was being democratized, or at least entrepreneurialized: you could spread almost any message you wanted, as long as you could get a crowd to listen.”
Scandal and controversy are readymade memes; they generate strong activating emotions. “In a perfect democracy, each person gets one vote,” Marantz reminds us. “In a world of trending topics and algorithmic feedback loops, equal representation isn’t just impossible; it’s not even the goal.”
The darker sides of human ingenuity are on full display in two more new books, both about the challenges we face in preparing for the coming “technological singularity,” as inventor Ray Kurzweil calls it, when artificial intelligence will surpass the intelligence of its maker.
Neither Flynn Coleman’s “A Human Algorithm” nor Stuart Russell’s “Human Compatible” shy away from the grimmest potential prospects for AI. But both authors argue that the algorithms of machine learning — if they are instilled with human ethics and values — could bring about a new era of enlightenment.
If we succeed in designing new forms of intelligence that are a gift, rather than a Pandora’s box, Coleman suggests, they will be “not a replicated model of our own brains, but an expansion of our lens and our vantage point as to what intelligence, life, meaning, and
humanity are and can be.”
Russell, a leading AI researcher and a longtime computer science professor at UC Berkeley, believes that artificial intelligence could, for instance, raise the standard of living for everyone on the planet, sustainably.
Of course, technology can also be exploited. Automation without a contingency plan could make us “a species without a purpose,” as Coleman warns, costing us “any sense of happiness, meaning, or satisfaction.”
Then there are the implications of the cyber world we’ve created for ourselves. Consider the proliferation of doctored photos and videos, which experts have predicted could bring about — if it hasn’t yet arrived — “the end of truth.” Or consider, as Russell notes, the automated blackmail systems that have already paralyzed dozens of municipalities.
Which brings us back to Marantz’s merry band of provocateurs. The innovators who gave us the online world they inhabit — Reddit, Twitter, Facebook — “didn’t pretend to know exactly how social media would be used,” he writes, “and they gave even less thought to how it might be misused.”
We’re experiencing the consequences now — “the hijacking of the American conversation,” as Marantz puts it. Rather than stand by as we’re besieged by the next wave of algorithms, maybe it’s time to remind ourselves of some oldfashioned principles.