Electric monk

The JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. Go Premium Technology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

So here is the thing I don’t understand. Where are the the buy-side bots?

Everything we know about information revolution tells us they cannot be far away. Wikipedia, crowd-sourced and free-for-all, vanquished Encyclopaedia Britannica. Reddit vanquished the hedgies. Yet, still, we all seem to be on a hiding to nothing from the monstrous technology conglomerates and their artificially intelligent catnip social media engines, systematically exploiting humankind’s innate horror of boredom — filling our heads with clangorous, quadrophonic noise that pleases us because it obscures the abysmal silence that otherwise would predominate — thereby aggregating, parsing tracking our every move, anticipating our every thought, nudging our preferences around as if we are cups on some giant Ouija board, from it extracting some magical well of human weakness into which it relentlessly jams its products, thereby consigning us by degrees to some stale, mute, digital oblivion.

now if your operating Theory is that the human mind is simply no match for the aggregated power of a neural network, then fine: but even here there is a limit comma and even our friends at LinkedIn are hinting at it with their ai-assisted comment prediction functionality. If AI can map, track and anticipate all human frailty and can thereby predict with greater certainty even then we we are next move, then the point must soon arrive when when AI is available for all of us to do our doom scrolling on our behalf. As Douglas Adams once remarked of a video cassette player, it is a labour saving device: it watching television for us that we don't have time to watch ourselves. And if I can have one boot perfectly emulating my my human browsing habits, surely I can have 1000. and if the technology is as good as billed — and I have no reason to believe it is not — then the forthcoming apocalyptic battle will not be between human and machine, but between our technology and theirs, and since their technology has no way of telling ours from us, it seems to me we have a natural advantage. If we each deploy 1,000 avatars to browse, like, and share are internet content at random, constrained only by the requirement that it's browsing habits should emulate as nearly as possible those of some human, then all that wondrous aggregated data that Facebook, Google, Amazon and others gather is instantly worthless.

Systems Theory, folks: the same kind of algorithm that can extract profound insight from data can inject absurdity into it.

Commerce is, ultimately, a profoundly human endeavour. “Demand” is the aggregated output of profoundly human wants and needs, and its digital footprint, on which the massed algorithmic armies feast, to decrypt our most secret communiqués, is only a second-order derivative. Just as skynet’s machines can hack it, so can ours.

It has only become one-sided through a conjuring trick; a sleight-of-hand foisted upon us, wherein a few corporations have harnessed the network effect to generate apparent monopolies. they have the technology, they have the scale, we are but ants.

But enough ants can do some damage. The beast is a waking from its “dogmatic slumber”: and the fight is only one-sided to the extent vendors really do have the scale to deploy tools that the ants do not. We now know — we have known for some years, in fact, but had forgotten — that the ants, if if only they can co-ordinate, have a scale that any vendor can only dream of.