The way we receive and, more importantly, perceive information through social media may soon be changing as a result of new government regulations and laws on the horizon.
Since May of last year, the U.S. Surgeon General’s office has been advocating that parents, policymakers and technology companies begin regulating “content exposure” for youths in social media as a means of combating depression and other mental health issues.
Last week, Dr. Vivek Murthy wrote a guest editorial for The New York Times in which he called for warning labels to be placed on social media, and promised to begin visiting with members of Congress to get legislation introduced to regulate it. But across the government, numerous states have already begun passing laws to change the way that young people interact with social media.
Florida passed a law this year that prohibits persons under the age of 14 from enrolling in a social media account, and New York last week passed the Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) For Kids Act which regulates social media algorithms used to curate content for persons under 18.
But the problem is not just youths or social media. There is a growing concern that the content we see online may not necessarily even be under the direct control of human editors or be subject to human oversight. The science fiction nightmare scenario in which governments, Big Tech, and even news media may all be reactively influenced by trends and content created not by humans but by artificial intelligence has already begun.
The question we have to ask is this: Are humans influencing the machines, or are the machines influencing the humans? Algorithms are already determining elections, both from the voters they verify as valid and the content that those voters are seeing to base their decisions on.
Artificial intelligence is already affecting coupling decisions and sexual interests. This distortion of the most intimate level of human interaction raises serious ethical questions. Since the beginnings of humanity, there has always been an occult fascination with mind control, but could we have reached a point in our civilization where machines are controlling our minds?
While it may be the instinctive reaction of policymakers and legislators to immediately say the response for this is to pass more laws and regulations, we need to have a deeper conversation first.
Whoever (or whatever) controls the algorithms and the artificial intelligences they power controls the information used to produce conformity and dissent, the very heart of both democracy and civilization itself. Whether these things are controlled by a machine or by a human are still problematic, and we need to have a discussion about what kind of future we want to live in.
So while I agree that government plays an important role in protecting us through regulations, the potential for something that starts out with the narrative of “let’s protect youth” could easily be repurposed in the future by unenlightened individuals (or rampant artificial intelligences) to control humans in a way we have not even begun to imagine.
I don’t think this is the kind of thing where we want to be quick to slap a bill on something and call it a solution. This is dangerous and unfamiliar territory, and it is all the more reason that we should consider having a constitutional convention at the state and federal level to include discussions on artificial intelligence and the curation of information.
If we are going to be ruled by digital masters, there needs to be a public discourse about how we will be represented or regulated, and what kind of checks and balances will exist to negate the potential for abuse.
When I was a teenager, there was a film that came out in 1992 that I definitely recommend all of Hawaii watch called “Sneakers.” The film sets up a post-Cold War, post-Gulf War world in San Francisco where a team of security experts are hired by criminals posing as National Security Agency officers to gain control of a prototype crypto-ignition key known only as “The Item.”
Whoever controls “The Item” has the power to control not only the internet but everything and everyone connected to it. The Big Tech mogul seeking to steal The Item, portrayed by actor Ben Kingsley, explains that the post-Cold War world is no longer about hardware but brainware.
“There’s a war out there old friend, a world war, and it’s not about who’s got the most bullets,” he explains. “It’s about who controls the information — what we see, and hear, how we work, what we think — it’s all about the information!”
That is exactly what we are living in now. And who, or what, controls the real-life Item behind our digital reality?
What was once science fiction to my generation has become science fact to this one. Like nuclear weapons, the development of the internet, social media and artificial intelligence is a genie that has been released from a bottle that cannot be put back in. But we should not fear these technologies if we are able, as a society, to develop both personal and public systems to remain in control of them.
I don’t like the idea of a super machine intelligence controlling me and the people around me, telling me what to love, what to hate, and what to believe. But I also don’t want a super government agency having the keys to control that as well. Anyone who claims to have a simple answer for this extremely complex problem should be approached with caution, if not a dose of healthy suspicion.
