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Comment by AngrySkillzz | Hacker News Reader

People are already contributing code and resources to the actual catastrophic, existential AI risk du jour, the one that is likely to cause massive political disruption and potentially attendant destruction of value and/or human life: the algorithmic news feed.

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Do the various social media news feeds actually use a significant amount of AI? I had understood they mostly used simpler, less computationally expensive statistical algorithms.

As usual, it depends on what falls under your definition of AI.

What kind of simpler statistical algorithms do you believe are used in news feeds (which do not belong in the "AI" category)?

I don't really consider any machine learning AI, but nobody agrees with me.

Some ML algorithms certainly can fall within the category of a narrow AI, as they perform exceptionally well on tasks in a narrow band of functionality.

> I don't really consider any machine learning AI

What matters is that the authors of the article mean machine learning when they say AI. So they’re talking about unethical machine learning.

Which is basically unethical maths, whatever that means.

> unethical maths, whatever that means

Are you suggesting that it would be strange to believe that ethics can be applied to mathematics?

AI is a meaningless term. Expert systems are AI. ML is AI. Regressions are AI. I know that's hilarious but until we get a better definition of AI than "a system that exhibits learning and decision making" then regressions are AI.

Echo chambers and problematic news feeds are completely capable of existing without AI. People are the problem. All you need is a simple algorithm that looks for content that has overlap with content you like, no AI necessary, and that is sufficient for your average person to echo chamber and self radicalize.

It's probably already done that. My bet on what the next AI disaster will be is a doctored video and audio, erasing people's trust in evidence and ruining the court system, more or less. You could even argue witnesses are no longer good evidence since everyone is being manipulated by AI news feeds ;)

I’m not worried about that at wrt courts; they already know how to handle hearsay and log files and other digital evidence subject to tampering. I’m worried about social media and news wrt deep fakes. With today’s media climate I can see this being exploited to trash someone’s reputation or spin a narrative way faster than anyone would be able to reliably prove the fakery. Imagine someone faking a video of you using racial slurs. By the time it can be demonstrated to be false, the damage is already done. And with cancel culture today companies might have already shut down your social media profile or business and you’re screwed. Or someone on Twitter doxes you and you get murdered by a mob. This isn’t hyperbole; there are horror stories about false posts on Facebook causing mobs to seek revenge against innocent people.

So the real trick is, how can we turn down the rhetoric so that we don’t get instantly worked up by every fake video that crosses our feed?

I don't think this is as much of a problem as the majority of hackernews seems to think. Of course, that is controversial to say here, but I was told I shouldn't be conventional minded.

At the end of the day the world is shaped more by material conditions than ideas. That doesn't excuse the cases you're worried about, but I think the majority of violently polarising media will only end up being so because there was already some resource dispute in the first place. It would make more sense, then, to tackle those issues, rather than fruitlessly trying to engineer the human brain to be less susceptible to rhetoric.

> more by material conditions than ideas

I suppose you have heard about religions and faiths. I'd hazard to say that about 1000 years of European history was shaped primarily by them. Major wars fought, new countries founded, major discoveries and inventions made or unmade and prohibited, people's daily lives shaped and defined.

A similar thing has been occurring to Arabic world and neighboring peoples for about 1500 years, and is actively continuing now.

Looking at the current situation in the US is also illustrative.

I would say that ideas greatly prevail over material conditions once immediate survival is secured.

In many cases, the religious conflict is just a pretext for an underlying power struggle. The reformation of the Church of England by Henry VIII, for example, was blatantly a political decision, not a matter of religious conviction.

You underestimate how those ideas are born. More often than not, there is an underlying material pretext. Christianity actually has a lot to say about resources for that very reason. Also, wars are fought over resources and then justified with religion by the select few that start them, primarily.

I don't think that control of Jerusalem would make a lot of business sense for medieval European states. Still they sent several crusades, each pretty expensive, and mostly failing.

Were it not for the special religious status of Jerusalem, they won't care. There were more important trade route chokepoints, and more convenient sea ports nearby, if trade control were the actual agenda.

Very little reported news relies on video, and even less on video that comes from outside a chain of known entities (I e. CNN broadcasting something they filmed themselves).

People getting their news from random videos posted on Facebook are already lost to democracy for all practical purposes, so little would really change.

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