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I would love an AI to curate my feed to transition from enragement equals engagement to pure enchantment feeding me things it decides I would enjoy. And I think that's completely within the abilities of current models. It's just that it's less profitable than driving me into an endless doom scroll loop of despair.

And that's just off the top of my head. AI is neither good or evil, but we've made some pretty poor choices deploying it.

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While I find the aspiration noble, it seems to me that we don't even know ourselves what we want, or, alternatively, we re-discover every day how our revealed preferences differ from our stated ones. We don't even trick other people, we trick ourselves.

There was also some evolutionary biology/psychology theory developed by Robert Trivers years ago on self-deception and fitness.

We buy a book thinking we are going to like it, and then we don't even open it. The recommender systems give us more of what we interact with (with some quite extreme funnel effects at times, like when we curiously look at a pimple popper video and for the next ten minutes the algo gives us pimple after pimple), but we find out, as stated but not as revealed, that we don't want more of what we interact with.

Nobody wants, in theory and as stated, to be constantly enraged by social media, but most of us, since numbers don't lie, are revealed to enjoy getting enraged.

I don't think AI will have a different effect in the near future, as the main problem is that we don't know, broadly speaking, what we want, apart from the obvious, e.g., I want to watch a football game and I am going to turn on the tv and watch it.




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