How clicking on internet ads can change the world.
Don’t be a slave to the algorithms, be their master.
Big tech is bad.
Players such as Google and Facebook provide free services in exchange for your data. That data fuels massive algorithms that in the end tell big business what people want, politicians which direction to lean, and marketers how to shape their advertising and who to target it to.
Yesterday, I searched for what was healthier, coffee or tea. The next day my feeds were filled with steaming cups of coffee. Neat, except for the fact that I kicked my caffeine habit the same week.
Almost all of our online presence is recorded. There have even been reports that our phones, our smart speakers, and even our TVs have been used as passive listening devices, feeding our voices to the algorithms as if they were elder gods. Elder gods hungry for data.
And all this data serves one purpose. To build models that can predict our behaviour, and it’s not that hard. We’re just biological machines with a sprinkling of noise on top.
Predictable humans
Take the Libet experiments, which can predict what choice you will make, a whole 7 seconds before you consciously decide to do it! Or consider how bad we are at predicting how much we’ll enjoy…
