AI has taken over our cultural evolution
Throughout the history, cultures have evolved and spread through memes.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture — often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme. — Wikipedia
Memes shape our cultural evolution. The stronger memes get broadcast faster and wider than the weaker ones, creating a unique narratives for different cultures, societies and faiths in the process.
This process is much like the biological evolution and its survival of the fittest competition that has shaped our species, and evolved people in different areas of the world to have different characteristics.
The survival of the fittest memes is why we still have rich narratives about the big battles and other major events of the recorded history written in books, but not so many details about ordinary events of those times.
The impact of broadcast media
The rise of broadcast media from early 1900s enabled us to collectively participate to the most important and historic moments. Profound radio or TV speeches by leaders like Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy or Ronald Reagan unified or rallied whole nations.
Broadcast media also made it possible to capture the public imagination and shape the culture of a nation. Hollywood movies and popular TV shows have had a lasting impact not only on American culture, but on other cultures across the world as well.
In the early days, the curation of content by major broadcast corporations and governments amounted to a massive, collective brainwash. Communist and capitalist countries captured their people’s imaginations with prime time TV. The content in communist regimes was created and selected to shape the public opinion. The content in capitalist countries, on the other hand, was broadcasted based on its potential to make money.
Depending on the era and the political system, this top down curation either enforced the dominant culture, or pushed new memes and values to the mainstream. The American TV of the 1950s popularized domestic comedy series, which promoted an ideal of a suburban white nuclear family with kids and a housewife.
In the 1960s, increased violence and global threats discussed in the news were countered with TV series focused on fantasy escapism. In the 1970s, traditional family values were replaced with racial and cultural diversity. 1980s saw a major growth of violence in TV, movies and popular video games, resulting in an average American kid seeing 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time they turn 18.
During this period between 1950 and 1990, the American culture evolved from an idealized “nuclear suburban white family life” to include and accommodate diversity. During the same time, the tolerance for violence increased significantly with most children being exposed to insane amounts of violent content during their childhoods.
The internet years
From 1990s onwards, the internet started entering the popular culture, and the TV gained a formidable competitor for people’s time and attention. TV channels started specializing and catering to a myriad of narrow niches.
The TV hosts and main characters in the shows started including people from niche cultures, including the rise of Ellen DeGeneres as the first openly gay TV show host in late 1990s. The show initially drew much controversy, and was canceled, but returned to the TV later as a highly successful long term show.
Increased competition between TV channels resulted in a massive rise of reality TV, where normal people were encouraged to drink excessively, have sex in public and do other controversial things. This was driven by viewer ratings that seemed to spike every time there was a new controversy. As the ratings had a direct effect on the advertising revenue, reality TV was a race to the bottom.
How social media changed everything
During the 2000s, social media entered the mainstream. It changed the way we received and consumed our information. Instead of the daily serving of mainstream broadcast brainwash, we started seeing content that was curated and personalized to us with algorithms.
This might sound good on the surface, but we have to understand how the algorithm works before making any judgments. All of the mainstream social media companies are in business to make money, and the money comes from their advertisers.
Former Facebook executive Eugene Wei wrote in his recent, brilliant blog post that people are status-seeking monkeys. He identifies utility, entertainment and social capital as the main contributors to the success of a social network.
The business of social networks is to convert this social capital and utility into a financial return. The goal of the social feed algorithms is to maximize advertising revenue. To achieve this goal, the social media platforms need to maximize the engagement, or rather, addiction, of their membership to their algorithmic feeds.
So how do you addict people to spend time on your page or app? Addiction algorithms are already so well understood and implemented by the games industry that all of the top grossing games on the Google Play store have “addictive” listed as the most used word in their ratings.
Don’t believe me? Go check it out yourself.
AI makes it possible to mass customize the addiction models to each individual. Once you have learned the types of content the person likes, you serve them a constant stream of dopamine hits with instant gratifications within their interests.
Another powerful way to keep people hooked is to appeal to their vices. The image on the side neatly captures the fact that all of our vices are already catered to by at least one social media platform.
So how do the addiction oriented algorithms of the major social media platforms effect our cultural evolution? Let me explain.
Memes spread in social networks
To maximize the addiction, the social network has to attract enough content sharing that the members stay hooked. And this is where the algorithms become evil.
The centrally curated memes we received earlier from broadcast media have now turned into a cacophony of social media memes curated by everyone. There’s a massive low-quality information overload that is being filtered by algorithms that optimize for the total session length, not on the truth value of the content.
Under this constant and heavy bombardment of notifications, our attention spans have shrunk to a few seconds. A video view is counted at 3 seconds, and they auto-play when you pass them in the feed. Why? Because most people drop early, and the networks need numbers to make their ad revenues.
Instead of providing context and helping us navigate to the important issues, profit-optimizing algorithms direct our attention to pointless dopamine loops that last a few seconds each. The hope is that we engage enough to drop the like before we scroll further. Instagram has optimized this loop to perfection.
Scroll, double-tap, scroll, double-tap, repeat.
What went wrong?
This dopamine-hit driven, context-less content consumption has confused the public. You don’t succeed for having substance, writing quality posts, or saying the truth. You succeed by sharing bold, crazy, but most of all, meme-worthy content. Truth be damned. Donald Trump won the presidency in part because his tweets were the most meme-worthy ones that consistently went viral, keeping him in the spotlight at all times.
This is why fake news spread so fast. It does not matter if the story is true, the criteria for its spread is its meme-worthiness, not its content.
I have studied and written about emotionally intelligent algorithms for a couple of years now. Once I started figuring out how they work, I tested my assumptions many times by posting content that I thought could go viral, and by optimizing everything for the algorithm. It wasn’t long before I had over a million viewers a month for my posts. I learned about the stuff that matters to the algorithms.
People who are on top of their game on social networks know that you have to respect the algorithm. It is true. If you go against it, you will always lose. This is disheartening. You will have to accept a smaller audience for your higher quality opinions, as they don’t monetize as well as the memes.
Social media companies can manipulate our worldviews. They can sway elections. They can divide nations. They can pick the winners and losers on the altar of public opinion. It is important to understand that most of the manipulation happens as an unintended consequence of the social feed algorithms trying to maximize the addiction and that way the profits.
As the natural language AIs have approached human skill levels, our ability to distinguish the objective truth from a sea of manipulation and fake news has greatly diminished, if not completely lost. We have entered an era, where AI controls the narrative and affects our cultural evolution.
Can we reverse this?
Yes, at least temporarily. First, we need to end the current mess by finding alternative ways to finance social media platforms that don’t have a goal to addict us and then manipulate us to make money. That’s a tall order, but the cutting edge blockchain-based models that Telegram and others are implementing could potentially enable us to get there.
Second, we need an AI-powered context machine, which provides us a daily guidance on what matters and what doesn’t. We need to filter the wheat from the chaff, and channel our public discussions and political actions out of pointless topics, like the border wall, to things that really matter, like the climate change. We need to get ourselves back on track and start making progress towards greater equality, justice and tolerance.
Third, we need to build algorithmic growth and distribution models for objective truths and higher quality content using benevolent AIs powerful enough to compete with the current social media algorithms. We should also create trustworthy sources of objective truths that we can rely on when assessing the truth value of the news and information we see in social media.
I’m currently building a global impact influencer group to discuss and create new exponential models to change the narrative. Message me if you are interested.
Berlin, 6.3.2019
Mikko Alasaarela
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I am the founder and CEO of Inbot, an AI-powered platform for business growth. Our AI finds out the person who’s introduction will build the most trust between you and your customer. Join our community of 66,000 members today, and earn income for your trusted referrals to businesses.
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