Why, Exactly, Are We Letting All These Machines Make Our Decisions For Us?
Will Leitch, writing at his Medium page, has a few thoughts on AI, algorithms, and making decisions.
The ability to organize your own thoughts — either through writing them down, or just simple, straightforward cognitive processing — is fundamental to being a person. It is what makes us who we are. The notion that someone would want to outsource this to a robot — or, worse, to allow a corporation to define it for them so that corporation may more efficiently sell you shit — deprives us of the very point of being a human being in the first place. It’s not about being a good writer, or even a good person. It’s about having your thoughts and beliefs and emotions be your own. It’s about having control of your own life.
That, to me, is what I find most confusing as I get older, my sitting-at-the-breakfast-table-and-grousing-”the whole world’s going straight to hell” moment:
It’s not that people are making choices that are different than the ones I would make, or that people are somehow worse than they were before, or even that we’re staring at our phones too much in the first place. I use many of these services myself, after all. It’s that it has become commonplace, even almost trendy, to opt out of decision making entirely. We let Spotify tell us what music we like. We let Amazon tell us what we want to buy. We let ChatGPT tell us how to express ourselves, or even how to construct thoughts in the first place. We let YouTube, Netflix and TikTok algorithms tell us what we want to watch. We let our cars drive us around. We all have infinite options, the opportunity to make the world whatever we want it be, to discover who we are and what we might have to offer this life and the people in it, and it is becoming increasingly clear that we are collectively deciding to beg out of it entirely. We had the opportunity to use technology and connectivity as a way to elevate ourselves, to evolve into something bigger, to discover our best selves. We have instead ceded everything. We have become a Trad Wife to technology.
I don’t know how to fix this, and, more to the point, I’m not sure people even want to. Life is hard, you know? It’s exhausting to be alive. It’s easier, even comforting, sometimes, to let someone else take the wheel. But, at the (very real) risk of sounding hectoring or helplessly lame, we only get to do this once, people. This is the sole life you get to live. Maybe we should try to actually live it? Because one thing is clear: These tech companies, their algorithms, their ravenous need to shove us away from a life that belongs to us … they’re driving us into a ditch.