AI and Emotions
AI helping People with Disabilities
AI and Space Exploration: Articles
AI and ART
Intro to AI
Learn Machine Learning
AI and Coronavirus
Introductory Information
How AI is being used in Medicine
Adversarial AI or Adversarial machine learning
Morality and AI
AI Mistakes/Issues
AI Apps
Try out these apps that use AI:
Other interesting applications
Surveillance Capitalism and Social Media
One might assume that YouTube and Facebook employees do content moderation. However, direct employees of the technology companies do not do most content moderation. Watching and removing violent and hateful content is done by contractors or sub-contractors of contractors, many of whom are overseas. This system of contractors allows tech companies to distance themselves from any liability regarding the effect of sorting and tagging violent and sadistic videos and posts hour after hour for years on end could have on a person’s mind.
Ironically, it is the existence of sites that allow for direct upload, and streaming of content incentivizes the creation of such horrible videos. Beyond the removal of content, many content moderation companies create content for commercial interests, steering online discussions to match the corporate message (done by humans) and using bots to amplify and re-enforce the message.
I used to think that the online world was a digitized version of the physical world. This book makes it clear that the online world is a highly curated commercial world where paid-humans and ever sophisticated bots shape and distort digital reality. I highly recommend this book to all.
“..ironically, the most tech-cautious parents are the people who invented our iCulture. People are shocked to find out that tech god Steve Jobs was a low-tech parent; in 2010, when a reporter suggested that his children must love their just-released iPad, he replied: “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”-Page 31
I highly recommend this book, especially for those with young children or who are planning on having some! The author’s style of writing might not appeal to everyone. He is sometimes too wordy, for example, taking time to tell you whenever he intends for something to be a pun or not to be a pun, but the book also has lots of great examples and stories that help bring you along.