2020-08-04 07:24
TED Talk - James Bridle
This egg video 30 million people watching surprise candy egg videos
It’s a strange world.
But there are easier ways! Steal stuff or make things up. There are millions of peppa pig and paw patrol videos that aren’t coming from the original sources. Who knows what their motivations are? We’re basically training these kids from birth to value fake news.
Some are professional, some are wholesome, some are auto-generated, some are very, very unsettling.
Keyword stuffing into the titles creates a meaningless mash of language. The humans aren’t the audience here, because these are meant for tiny children that kinda just smoosh their little hands against a tablet screen. They’re meant for autoplay. In a dozen videos, autoplay can literally take you from a singing train to masturbating mickey mouse.
So at best content creators are still forced to act out and/or animate these increasingly bizarre and meaningless keyword combinations. At worst kid’s worst nightmares are being spoonfed and monitized as children are sucked down a strange rabbit-hole into the realm of violence against cartoon characters, perversions of network shows, and bizarre pranks that may seem utterly bizarre to adults but can be uniquely terrigying to children.
“If you have small children, keep them the hell away from YouTube.”
THIS IS ALSO THE WAY WE ARE BUILDING THE ENTIRE WORLD!
Automated, huge flawed datasets are used in predicting policing programs, credit reports, autogenerated sentencing, etc.
Automation without oversight! Algorithmically governed and policed? But is the alternative any better?
Instead of kids we have underpaid contract workers without proper mental health support being subjected to these videos endlessly.
Agency:
How we know how to act in our own best interests. Impossible to do with systems that we don’t understand.
Inequality of power leads to violence. Inequality of understanding leads to violence.
We’ve built a global system that is instantiating and codifying larger societal problems. We must stop seeing technology as a solution to problems and instead as a magnifying lens of those problems so that we can finally work towards solutions.