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.

Okay; enough already of the nihilistic Terminator-esque moaning — the JC is a glass half-empty sort of fellow; this isn’t really his style. His question is why should this state of affairs persist?

Regular readers will know the JC is no subscriber to the dystopian futurism of Ray Kurzweil or Daniel Susskind. Unless your occupation is involves mindlessly following a predefined process — and if it is, will you really miss it? — there will always be plenty to keep you busy.

Even if your operating theory is that our fleshy cerebella are no match for the overwhelming power of a neural network, there is a limit. Even our friends at that most underwhelming of social media platforms LinkedIn hint at it, with their AI-assisted “predictive comment” functionality. Not because it is so currently hopeless — with happy work-iversary!, your honour, I rest my case — but because the fact that it can even exist gives us a route out of the Matrix.

How so? Like so: if AI can map, track and anticipate all human frailty, and thereby predict with greater certainty even than we can, our next moves, then AI can emulate human frailty. It can impersonate it. If it can impersonate it, it can fake it. The point must soon arrive, therefore, when we can deploy AI to do our doom-scrolling on our behalf. And that ought to be devastating. Think GameStop, only with the Redditors tooled up with the machines the hedgies have. Call this implementation an “avatar”.

As Douglas Adams once remarked of the video cassette player which watches television for us that we don't have time to watch ourselves,: 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.