Social media, identity politics & AI (Top3ics, Jan 17)

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.

The lone prediction in my end of year edition (on blockchains) was going to be just a foretaste of this edition, in which I expected to curate the best of the inevitable plague of “What’s to come in 2016” posts. Yet quite frankly most of them were obvious, boring or both, so instead let’s talk social media, identity politics and AI.

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Does social media just change who you pretend to be …

Last week I posted Where is social media taking you in 2016?, on how social media platforms force us to curate and project a false image of ourselves and/or manipulate us into narcissism, so I mention it here without a trace of irony. I quoted these articles:

• Am I too old or too sick for Snapchat?
• Living Wisely in the Digital Age
• All Social Media Is Showing Off
• ‘Brand You’: how Facebook, Google and Twitter are turning us into narcissists

But I should probably have also worked in a mention of How to Spot a Narcissist Online. And while on the topic of social media and curation, I drew a bunch of dots to explain why social media is broken is a good intro to This. - I recommend both.

… or does it change who you are?

I missed an opportunity in my post to point out that carefully curating your external image does more than make you narcissistic and unhappy - it risks driving you so deep into identity politics that public discourse becomes impossible.

“You have to be willing to sacrifice your carefully curated social performance and be willing to work with people who are not like you.“

That’s from Fredrik deBoer’s “Getting Past the Coalition of the Cool”, but I discovered it via Sean Blanda's The Other Side” Is Not Dumb, one of the best recent posts I’ve read about how a toxic combination of algorithm-driven filter bubbles, human flaws like false-consensus bias and online business models create:

”a subconscious belief that we and our friends are the sane ones and that there’s a crazy “Other Side” … that just doesn’t “get it,” and is clearly not as intelligent as “us.” … the worst kind of echo chamber, one where those inside are increasingly convinced that everyone shares their world view, that their ranks are growing when they aren’t.

[something] event happens and your social media circle is shocked when a non-social media peer group public reacts to news in an unexpected way. They then mock the Other Side for being “out of touch” or “dumb” … 

[some] sites exist almost solely to produce content to be shared so friends can pat each other on the back and mock the Other Side… this holier-than-thou social media behaviour is counterproductive self-aggrandizement at the cost of actual nuanced discourse … signals that we’d rather be smug assholes than consider alternative views.“

I’d quote more but this is supposed to be curation, not plagiarism, so go read it.

And in case you don’t see identity politics as a problem, try The Daily Hate: Corbyn, Trump and the New Politics of Spite, or even the rant in my last edition about Trump. 

More: I only have 3 resources tagged identity (so far), but there are 49 tagged psychology and 34 about filter bubbles.

Keeping up with AI

The number of powerful, interesting articles tagged #AI really leapt upwards recently, reflecting not just the fears artificial intelligence provokes, but also the sheer number of applications driven by the 'light’ forms of AI. But probably the most interesting area is ethics. My recent faves:

• Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill
• The search for the killer bot
• Trusting AI with important decisions: capabilities and challenges
• Elon Musk is right about the threat of AI, but he’s dangerously wrong about why
• Can This Man Make AI More Human?
• Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us

More: all resources tagged AI (see also autonomous), with sideservings of resources specifically on bots (as in software) or ethics.

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