Submitted by Prototype47 t3_zo4zlu in Futurology
Prince_of_Old t1_j0n1sf2 wrote
Reply to comment by Cercy_Leigh in The Reality of Universal Basic Income Future by Prototype47
You may not be alone in taking those internet breaks but you are in a tiny minority, especially among younger generations.
Why is algorithmic content inherently negative outlook oriented? If people want more positive content, the algorithms will create it. The reason alarmist content is made is because it is effective at keeping people engaged, if that stops being true the content will change.
Cercy_Leigh t1_j0nb09v wrote
It does but it needs to be carefully and consciously curated. You also have to know what’s healthy and good for mental health and bad for mental health. Material planted by marketing, domestic propaganda and foreign propaganda or influence doesn’t start off in your feed seeming like anything nefarious. We all are constantly targeted for influence for whatever reason benefits the entity doing it. Sometimes you don’t understand or know your mental outlook or opinion is being manipulated until a long time after or ever.
This is the reality of living in a consumer society and America has manipulated its people long before the internet. What’s negative? What’s positive? Sometimes you don’t know until your behaviors and choices in your life begins to be effected.
The younger generation is online more but as I said, history and human nature have proven time and time again that a portion of us will be effected by the artificial creep very differently. And those of that grew up with the birth of the internet have experience with how tech changes and grows, it’s complete indifference to what effect it has on users and the pitfalls we’ve experienced and why. Good things will come too and amazing innovations and progress and discoveries but it’s about whatever is also going on while you’re playing that you don’t know about. Like using Facebook for instance when they offered it and the running list of damaging and life altering things that was done on purpose like the fact that we lost our anonymity and privacy and everything anyone would want to know was collected and sold to the highest bidder for who knows what purpose. I could go on and on like giving child exploitation a platform to conduct business and a bloody civil war that was started using Facebook by a government that resulted in a massively bloody hand to hand war.
We have peeked into the visions presented to us and also what has leaked out from the tech companies for the next iteration of the web and many many of us don’t have any interest in it; apart from casual use. I have a pretty good idea of what sorts of things they want from us and it’s unfortunately never a better quality of life, unless of course it happens to benefit the corporate or political overlords.
If you’re aware of American history and it’s endless hunger to make profits using the citizens and the endless human rights tragedies that corporate entities were aware they were committing and offer no remorse only denial, you’d know that anything new especially on a large scale better be approached with awareness and caution and sometimes you have to know when to resist.
Prince_of_Old t1_j0nixeq wrote
I think what you're saying here supports my original doubt that people will come together as a community to create things. The entertainment industry has a profit motive for keeping people using their entertainment. If people stop wanting negative content, then the entertainment industry will adapt (or the content already that way will become more successful to the same effect). The profit motive, as you describe it, only makes it less likely that we will move away from spending our time online in the future as profit incentives push online entertainment to become more addictive/appealing/exciting/pleasurable or whatever keeps people coming back.
At the end of the day, my worry is that your worldview (as I understand it from our few messages, please correct me if I get something wrong) is not compatible with a future where technology stops progressing. If technology keeps progressing there will be a point where AI can be a better "human" companion than a human (e.g. be like a human perfectly optimized to be your friend). When this point is reached, the idea of a community starts to break down it seems to me. The day will also come when our understanding of the brain is so good that we can cut out the middle man of our senses and stimulate our pleasure centers directly without long-term health effects. Considering that all "good feelings" are combinations of brain chemicals and neural circuits it follows that stimulating the pleasure centers directly is the best way to maximize "good feelings".
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