The Singularity Is Here: Artifically intelligent advertising technology is poisoning our societies

Akhtar, Ayad. "The Singularity Is Here: Artifically intelligent advertising technology is poisoning our societies." The Atlantic 5 November 2021.[1] "This article appears in the December 2021 print edition."

For more than a generation, science-fiction writers and aficionados have speculated about the possibility and imminence of the singularity — that is, the moment when AI will finally eclipse human intelligence. To many, it’s meant the robot capable of thinking, and with an intellect surpassing our own. Let me suggest that digital problem-solving has already surpassed human capacity. Indeed, our advanced societies are now being ordered by a digital matrix of data collection, pattern recognition, and decision making that we cannot even begin to fathom — and that is happening every single successive millisecond. The synergy of data technology, computer-processing speeds and capacity, and an almost frictionless interconnectivity — all of this enables exchange; delivery of services; production of goods; growth of capital; and, most centrally, the endless catalog of our every interface, however glancing, however indirect, with this system’s sprawling and ubiquitous apparatus. The singularity is here — we could call it the era of automation — and its inescapable imprint on our inner lives is already apparent. [* * *]

Whether the concerns of the many are louder today than before is hard to know. But they may be more inescapable. One of the characteristics of the automating technology is how effective it is in herding opinion in ways not meaningfully different from policing it. The tech has created gathering places for our various camps of confirmed bias. These agglomerations of outrage are not just left-leaning or right-leaning, groupings superintended by slogans of belonging and creedal statements honed, like trademarks—or shibboleths—to the very locution. The result is a widespread and punitive stridency.[2]

Important essay for real-world on-line advertising and its addictive/manipulative effects on us — and more generally of web-addiction's effect on politics — but see in SF Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants for their take on a world ruled by ad agencies, and K. Vonnegut on automation in Player Piano. On the singularity, see here[3] and many places, perhaps ironically, on the web.

RDE, finishing, 18Dec21