You are being profitably “clicker-trained” by large corporations, using your private data, to make you produce behaviours on demand, and you get the human equivalent of cat treats.
… and that’s when everything is working as intended.
If you’re lucky, the behaviours just consist of buying a coconut goji-berry spiced latte at Second Buck’s in exchange for a Pokemon.
It only gets worse when things break, data leaks, state actors come to play.
Bought the book after reading this post. I’m glad to find out about Tristan Harris, student of Stanford professor B.J. Fogg who wrote the book Persuasive Technology. Harris founded the Center for Humane Technology.
McNamee writes: “Tristan makes the case that platforms compete in a race to the bottom of the brain stem–where AIs present content that appeals to the low-level emotions of the lizard brain, things like immediate rewards, outrage, and fear.”
I immediately thought about last night’s SOTU, and the tactics of politicians in general.
