Forget Privacy: You're Terrible at Targeting Anyway
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Forget Privacy: You're Terrible at Targeting Anyway
Algorithmic recommendations are the latest iteration of the Mechanical Turk: a series of human decisions that have been dressed up and automated as technological ones, at an inhuman scale and speed.
Designed and maintained by the engineers of monopolistic tech companies, and running on data that we users continuously provide by logging in each day,
... See moreToday most algorithms that recommend or suppress content act purely on the basis of inferred popularity. They look at how much time people spend engaging with a piece of content, and boost it to more people if the numbers look good. The content itself is almost purely a black box. Some algorithms try to classify content with tags like “food” or “fu
... See moreNathan Baschez • Noise-Canceling Filters for the Internet are Coming
Naturally, social media companies will not want to give up this control. But sometimes there are technological forces that are more powerful than even the biggest companies. To me, it seems clear that an LLM-based filtering system will be a naturally democratizing force. It will naturally nudge the world towards putting more control in the hands of... See more