Sat-navs, Alexa, Siri, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… Forget Artifical Intelligence, this technology is making us stupid
IF YOU ever visit California’s Death Valley by car it is really worth reading National Park Service guidance: “GPS Navigation to remote locations like Death Valley is notoriously unreliable. Numerous travellers have been directed to the wrong location or even dead-end or closed roads.”
The advice is aimed at those suffering from a modern phenomenon known as “death by GPS” – an extreme version of something most of us have already encountered.
It happens when someone follows SatNav instructions even when it is plainly obvious that the route is wrong.
In 2012, Apple hurriedly amended its Maps app after a glitch began guiding Australians hoping to visit the city of Mildura into remote wilderness.
Three years later, a driver ignored road warning signs and followed his GPS navigation off a demolished bridge in Indiana.
And on a smaller scale the small South Yorkshire village of Wales often plays host to tourists and lorry drivers who think they have arrived in another country.
SUCH incidents may seem insignificant when set against the huge benefits of technology. But what is going on in someone’s head when they blindly follow technology, even if it leads them to act in a dangerous way?
The answer, I believe, is AI – not Artificial Intelligence but Artificial Idiocy.
This is the human tendency to believe and follow whatever their smartphone tells them.
Consider two tweets sent by the same person in the aftermath of a terror attack on April 23, 2018, in Toronto, when a deeply troubled young man drove a rented van through a crowd, killing 10 people.
The first tweet reported an eyewitness identifying the attacker as an angry man of Middle-Eastern origin. The second tweet reported an eyewitness identifying him as white.
The second was correct, while the first was wrong: the attacker was a white 25-year-old from Ontario.
Yet an investigation by Chris Meserole of the Brookings Institution think tank revealed that, in the 24 hours following
the attack, the erroneous tweet received 1,000 per cent more retweets and likes than the correct one.
Once enough people had picked up on the false narrative of Middle-Eastern terrorism, Twitter’s own algorithms boosted its visibility.
“At its worst,” Meserole noted, “this cycle can turn social media into a kind of ‘confirmation bias machine’, one perfectly tailored for the spread of misinformation.”
By the standards of fake news in the 21st century, sharing one inaccurate tweet may seem pretty mild.
But the differing fates of these two pieces of information, released at the same time by the same person, illustrate the problem of digital platforms that value emotional impact over accuracy.
And a system that does this not only embodies a certain worldview but also elicits certain emotional responses in its users.
Anger, anxiety, disgust and surprise are much more likely to go “viral” than doubt or qualified endorsement.
You do not see many trending tweets beginning: “I’m not sure what to think about…” It is all about certainty, rather than constructive debate or disagreement. The same applies when speed of response is prioritised over measured insight.
Equally, the cute animal pictures and videos that pop up on your Facebook feed are not as random as they seem.
They are fed to you via sophisticated algorithms of the sort used by casino gaming machines.
And they are solely designed to encourage you to keep clicking on that smartphone or tablet.
When the world’s most influential social media platforms deploy these systems, dangerously deluded thinking is being actively engineered.
This is not to say that people themselves are stupid.
Online, humanity may often look like a mess of tribal emotions
Tom Chatfield
and baseless rumours. But this tells you as much about online environments as it does about humanity.
People can be plenty of other things in different circumstances.
Education, democratic debate, community, family, faith all call forth different “selves”.
However, while a service engineered to produce Artificial Idiots may prove profitable in terms of data and profiling, it is also an appetizing hunting ground for those who would seek to deceive and control us. I have spent the