Is it weak willpower to not be able to put down the phone? Are Google, Facebook, and bicycles just like tools we use? Are algorithms and technology neutral? Why is fake news invincible? The first film I watched this holiday is Netflix's new documentary "Surveillance Capitalism: Smart Trap". It is shocking. At the end of the holiday, you can watch it if you have time.
One of the film’s narrative lines is told by practitioners from major international Internet companies such as Google, Facebook’s former employees, ins early employees, and Twitter’s senior deputy chief engineer. People, and even those who helped Facebook establish a business model, left one after another out of concerns about industry ethics. Now they have come forward again to tell the truth about what they saw and issue warnings. Below I will select 30 points that I think are important, so that you can quickly understand them.
1. All powerful things that enter the lives of mortals have their drawbacks -Sophocles
2. Tristan Harris, one of the protagonists, is a former Google employee who worked in the Google Mail team. He felt very tired because they had been discussing what the mailbox should look like and what color to use. He admitted that he was addicted to mail. , But what’s more interesting is that everyone in the team wants to make users addicted. But have you ever reflected on this phenomenon? He believes that Google has the moral responsibility to solve this problem. But the discussion didn't stop at Google.
3. The person in charge of Facebook commercialization said that he was responsible for helping Facebook figure out how to make money, and at that time he thought that the advertising model might be the most elegant model. We used to pay for hardware and software, but now these Internet products are free, but in fact they are not really free. Behind it is advertisers who are paying. Advertisers are customers of these Internet products, and users are actually the products being sold. . The classic saying is that if you don't spend money on the product, then you are the product being sold.
4. Google is not just a search tool. Facebook is not just a social tool for you to connect with your friends. In fact, all kinds of Internet products are grabbing our attention. Think carefully about how these Internet companies operate. Users are free, advertisers pay, why do advertisers pay? He wants to spend money in exchange for you to watch advertisements, and our focus is on the products sold to advertisers. It may be too simplistic to say that the product is actually a gradual, unnoticeable change in our behavior and cognition. This is the only thing they use to make money: change what you do, your way of thinking, change you as a person.
5. Every kind of business has a dream: put an advertisement, there is a guarantee of success, this is the business of the advertising platform, the certainty of selling. In order to succeed in this business, we must have the ability to predict, and excellent predictive ability starts with a necessary condition that is data.
6. All the behavioral data we use Internet social products are monitored and recorded, specific to how long you stay in a certain picture, our lonely and depressive moments, we love to read the information of our ex, what we do late at night, these systems all know . These data that we inadvertently reveal are fed to the system, and this hardly requires human attention. The system will continue to make better and better predictions to determine what kind of person we are and what we are going to do.
7. Many people have a misunderstanding that it is our data that is sold. Facebook’s interest is definitely not to sell data, but to use data to build a model that can predict our behavior. The company with the best model is the last Winner. We have used Internet technology to create a whole generation of people around the world. The background in which they grew up, their communication with each other, and their culture are permeated with manipulation ghosts.
8. Any sufficiently advanced technology is extremely similar to magic.
9. Magicians are almost the earliest neurologists and psychologists. They are the first to understand how people's thoughts work. The magician understands a certain part of your mind that you are not aware of. This is the key to making the illusion work.
10. Tristan Harris at the Persuasion Technology Laboratory at Stanford University studies how to persuade people with psychological knowledge and how to apply this to Internet technology. Many Internet companies in Silicon Valley have learned this knowledge. They want to modify a person's behavior so that people do what they want, such as constantly swiping their fingers on the screen to browse information. Pull down, the top is new content, and then pull down, the top is new again, the same every time, this is called positive reinforcement in psychology. You don't know when you can get it, or what you can get. This is actually the same principle as the slot machine in a casino.
11. Countless engineers have their work hacked into people's hearts like hackers, and then get more product data growth, more user growth, and more activity. They will do a lot of AB tests, and then continuously optimize based on the results to allow users to do what they want users to do. This is manipulation. Many times they appeal to the human subconscious, and you are not even aware of it when you are affected, because this is using the most vulnerable part of human psychology to make money.
12. When the bicycle came out, no one was dissatisfied. No one would say that it destroyed our society, because the bicycle widened the distance between parents and children, destroyed our democracy, and made it impossible for us to distinguish between the true and false news. If a thing is a tool, it will sit there loyally and wait patiently. If something is asking for you, it wants to seduce you, manipulate you, and profit from you, it is not as simple as a tool.
13. We have gone through a tool-based technological environment, and have come to a technological environment based on addiction and manipulation. Social media is not a tool waiting to be used in place. It has its own goals and its own methods to achieve these goals. Use your psychology to deal with you,
14. Social media is a kind of drug. We have basic biological desires such as keeping in touch with others. This directly affects the release of dopamine in the reward pathway. Behind this is millions of years of evolution. We live in groups and find partners to reproduce. There is no doubt that social media will optimize this connection, and there will naturally be the possibility of addiction.
15. These technical products are not designed by psychologists who work hard to protect children. Their design is to make the algorithm very good at recommending the next video to you, and very good at allowing you to take photos and add filters. These things are not only controlling where our attention is, but also getting deeper and deeper into the roots of the brain, taking away children's attention and self-worth. We have evolved a mechanism to care about the evaluation of other people in the community, which is very important. But do we need to care about what 10,000 people think of us when we evolve? Our evolution does not require social recognition every 5 minutes.
16. When we are training and regulating the entire generation, when we are uncomfortable, uncertain, lonely, and afraid, we have our own digital comfort, which makes our ability to deal with our emotions degraded.
17. There is a saying that we should adapt to it. We have to learn to coexist with these devices, just as we learn to coexist with other things. But what this statement ignores is that some things are obviously brand new. The most dangerous of these is that this is exponentially moving forward driven by technology. Since the 1960s, computer processing power has increased hundreds of millions of times, and nothing around us has grown at this rate. In terms of our human physiology, the brain has not evolved at all. Our brains have existed for millions of years, and then such a screen appeared. On the other end of the screen are thousands of engineers and supercomputers with different goals than you. So who will win this game?
18. The view that the algorithm is embedded in the code, the algorithm is not objectively neutral, and the algorithm is optimized by a certain successful definition. You give AI a goal. I want such a result. AI learns how to achieve it by itself. This is the origin of the concept of machine learning. No one really understands what they are doing in order to achieve this goal.
19. Algorithms have their own ideas, although they are written by people. It was written for the purpose of building a machine that will change by itself. As humans, we have almost lost control of these systems because they are controlling the information we see.
20. Imagine that you use Facebook, your opponent is artificial intelligence, it knows everything about you, can predict your future behavior, and you know nothing about it, this is not fair competition at all.
21. We are all worried at this moment, when will technology surpass human wisdom and power. But at an earlier moment, when technology surpassed human weakness, this transcendence point was addiction. Polarization, radicalization, intensification of anger, and intensification of vanity are suppressing human nature and damaging human nature.
22. Facebook's push method is very wrong. If we open a Wikipedia page, what you see is the same as others. This is one of the few things we share in a unified manner on the Internet. Imagine if Wikipedia says that we want to give each person a personalized definition. Someone gives us money to let us do this. Wikipedia will monitor you and calculate what we need to do to represent some business interests, and let this person produce something. Change, right? Then the entire entry will be changed. Can you imagine? Facebook is like this, your youtube feed is like this.
23. After watching this video, I found out that when we searched on Google in different places, we got different results. For example, if we enter "climate change is" in the search box, in some cities you will see the auto-filled prompt is "climate change is a scam" and in other places you will see "climate change is the destruction of nature" . This feature does not all provide the truth about climate change, but depends on where you search and Google's understanding of your personal interests (for example, if you are a conspiracy theorist, it will tell you that climate change is a scam content).
Even two very similar friends see completely different content, because the algorithm will present the content according to how it is most perfect for a person. Gradually you will have an illusion that everyone agrees with you, because everyone in the news that is pushed to you is extremely similar to you. Once you reach this state, you will be easily manipulated, the same as being manipulated by a magician. The way.
24. The former oil pipeline algorithm recommendation engineer confessed that an algorithm he studied has increased the polarization of society. But from the perspective of online time, this two-level differentiation approach is extremely effective in keeping people watching online.
25. The famous basketball player Kyrie Irving said he believed that the earth was flat, and later publicly apologized and said that this was the pot of the tubing algorithm. The statement that the earth is flat has been recommended hundreds of millions of times by the algorithm, and it is easy to judge that only a few fools really believe it. But the scary thing is that algorithms are getting smarter every day. Today it can convince a small number of people that the earth is flat, and tomorrow it can convince you to believe in a completely false thing.
26. The spread of fake news on Twitter is 6 times faster than real news. What happens in the world when one person has a 6 times advantage over another person? As you can imagine, some things have tilted the fundamentals of humanity. Make some actions harder and some actions easier. Although you can always walk up the slopes freely, there are fewer and fewer people like this. Therefore, on a larger scale, the foundation of the entire society has been tilted, changing the thinking and behavior of billions of people.
We created a system that favors fake information, not because we want to do it, but because fake news makes it easier for these companies to make money. You know, real information is boring. This is a business model that uses false information for profit, allowing unsupervised information to be pushed to more people, selling it at a better price, and making money.
27. Facebook pushes trillions of news information every day, and they cannot know which information is true and which is false. There has never been a tool that can reach such a wide range of people at such a low cost and efficiently as Facebook. Algorithms and politicians have become more and more professional in learning how to motivate us, and are very good at creating fake news that we can easily accept to make us believe it. We seem to have less and less control over who we are and our beliefs. If everyone has the right to cling to their own truth, there is no need to compromise and unite. We need to have some common understanding of reality, otherwise we will not be one country.
28. Google doesn't know the truth, it only knows clicks. If we do not agree with the truth, we will not be able to find a solution to any problem. Many people in Silicon Valley believe in a theory that we are building some global super brains. All our users are just interactable neurons. We are not important at all. It makes people obey such a strange role. You are like a small programming element. We use our behavioral manipulation to program. In order to serve this giant brain, we will not give you money or let you see the truth. You have no autonomy, because you are just a node of programming and you are not important at all.
29. Technology is not a threat to human survival, but technology can bring out the worst things in human society, and the worst things in society are threats to human survival. If you don't know how you are in the matrix, how do you wake up from the matrix.
30. In the entire human history, every time something gets better, it's because someone has stepped up and said that this is too stupid and we can do better. It is the critics who promote improvement, and the critics are the true optimists.
At the end of the film, the voice-over asked Tristan Harris, do you think we can change all this to make them better? Tristan Harris said that we must achieve it.
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