Society in an echo chamber

The internet is like the force in Star Wars
"It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together"

The internet empowers us, it gives a voice to those that previously had none, it has been used to great effect in toppling unjust governments and revealing corruption in those we thought to be uncorrupt.

Yet now I can see an accidental sinicism rearing its ugly head.  I don't mean the obvious ability to allow unimpeded communication between inhumain groups, or facillitating the exchange of degrading and humiliating information, no this latest wrong doing isn't planned, it has no direction and isn't promoted by a single voice moreover it's promoted by every voice.

Information services such as google, twitter and facebook seek to present the user (us) with only the information we find useful or interesting, for if they didn't we wouldn't consider them very good information services, and here's where the dilema starts.

Let's take twitter as a prime example because the links are more obvious to see.  The information that Twitter promotes to me are tweets, retweets and messages from a group of people I've chosen to follow.  Just as with real life physical friendships we don't befriend people we don't like, people whose views and opinions are contrary to our own.  This means that the tweets that I am most likely to see are those from people whose opinions already match my own, my twitter feed has thus become a source of validation of my own views and opinions be they right or wrong.

The same is true of every user of these information services too, therefore these services now simply re-enforce views of those that use them, there's little or no counter argument to a users view from the followers they have.

With the human race using this wonderful tool, and let's face it the internet truly is a wonderful tool, we may be sleep walking into a world where we as humans are blinkered to what is really going on around us.  We already defer more and more decision making to artificial intelligence, so if we have the devil on one shoulder telling us to do something and nothing countering that then we do exactly what we're told.  For example would Theresa May have called a general election if she listened to anyone other than the 'yes' men and women that surround her, doubtful because that would make her incompetent.  

If a confused young adult is grappling with the decision to commit something that they deep down know to be wrong and there's no voice of reason that they trust telling them to think again, then of course they'll act on those unfettered impulses.

I learnt today that there's another aspect to this, learning!  That's right learning is disrupted by the world becoming more efficient at giving us what we want, by becoming good at something it's actually making us bad at something, seriously how counter-intuitive is that!?!?  There's method to my madness, it comes from television, the way in which we consume media has changed, drastically irrevocably and in most cases for the better, but there's one unfortunate yet obvious conclusion that can be derived from it, we don't see what we don't want to see which isn't always advantageous.

When I was growing up I would be at the mercy of broadcast telivision schedules, I had to watch only the subject matter that was chosen by someone else at a time that someone else had devised.  This meant that on occasion when I was winding down I did end up watching subject matter I wouldn't have chosen had there been something else on.  Let me put it this way, if a child is given a choice between healthy food and sweets then nine times out of ten they'll go for sweets, do this often enough and the child suffers bad teeth and diabetes.  Now take that choice away, as in the case that there are only 4 broadcast chanels and no on demand services, and that same child will eat the healthy food because despite it not being what they'd chose given the choice they are still hungry after all.  It's largely for this reason as a child I ended up watching many beautiful programs with the wonderful Sir David Attenborough, through his pograms I witnessed the love songs between humpback whales, the amazing journey taken by salmon each year and the invisible movement of plants, all of which I cherish now, yet at the time if I was given the choice between that or cartoons I think I'd have wasted my intellect watching an inept coyote single handedly fund Acme whilst in pursuit of a fast paced bird, why he never simply ordered take-out I'll never understand :)

So that's it, there no evil or malice behind the AI that's serving us precisely the data we request in an ever more efficient way, but the eventual destination of us as a race is slowly revealing itself and it isn't a pretty picture, as VIKI says in I, Robot "my logic is undeniable"