The Social Dilemma
/*Thank you Netflix for making 'The Social Dilemma' - it's very well made and addresses the need of the hour. I've tried to put down my understanding in the form of quotes from the show itself. My comments (a few only) are within comment symbols like this one.*/
/*Current situation:*/
"We are a nation of people... that no longer speak to each other. We are a nation of people who have stopped being friends with people because of who they voted for in the last election. We are a nation of people who have isolated ourselves to only watch channels that tell us that we're right."
/*Reason:*/
"...fake news on Twitter spreads six times faster than true news. What is that world gonna look like when one has a six-times advantage to the other one? You can imagine these things are sort of like... they... they tilt the floor of... of human behavior.
They make some behavior harder and some easier. And you're always free to walk up the hill, but fewer people do, and so, at scale, at society's scale, you really are just tilting the floor and changing what billions of people think and do."
/*Effect:*/
"What are you most worried about?
[sighs] I think,
in the... in the shortest time horizon...civil war."
/*Is it just another tech?*/
"roughly, if you say from, like, the 1960s to today, processing power has gone up about a trillion times. Nothing else that we have has improved at anything near that rate. Like, cars are, you know, roughly twice as fast. And almost everything else is negligible. And perhaps most importantly, our human-- our physiology, our brains have evolved not at all. [Tristan] Human beings, at a mind and body and sort of physical level, are not gonna fundamentally change."
/*Reason deep down:*/
"There are only two industries that call their customers 'users': illegal drugs and software - Edward Tufte"
'It basically just said, you know, never before in history have 50 designers-- in California-- made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people. Two billion people will have thoughts that they didn't intend to have because a designer at Google said, "This is how notifications work on that screen that you wake up to in the morning."'
"A lot of people in Silicon Valley subscribe to some kind of theory that we're building some global super brain, and all of our users are just interchangeable little neurons, no one of which is important. And it subjugates people into this weird role where you're just, like, this little computing element that we're programming through our behavior manipulation for the service of this giant brain, and you don't matter. You're not gonna get paid. You're not gonna get acknowledged. You don't have self-determination. We'll sneakily just manipulate you because you're a computing node, so we need to program you 'cause that's what you do with computing nodes."
/*personally, I think Tech people sometimes live in this superficial bubble that they are superior to others and there is a hidden joke associated with the word - user, as if the user is supposed to be stupid and make stupid mistakes - I am myself guilty of the same. We should probably replace the word stupid with 'humane' and call those mistakes humane. */
/*Is everything ruined?*/
"The way the technology works is not a law of physics. It is not set in stone. These are choices that human beings like myself have been making. And human beings can change those technologies. [Tristan] And the question now is whether or not we're willing to admit that those bad outcomes are coming directly as a product of our work. It's that we built these things, and we have a responsibility to change it. [static crackling] [Tristan] The attention extraction model is not how we want to treat human beings."
"We can demand that these products be designed humanely. We can demand to not be treated as an extractable resource. The intention could be: "How do we make the world better?" [Jaron] Throughout history, every single time something's gotten better, it's because somebody has come along to say, "This is stupid. We can do better." [laughs] Like, it's the critics that drive improvement. It's the critics who are the true optimists."
"The world's beautiful.
Look. Look, it's great out there."