Someone else gets more quality time with your spouse, your kids, and your friends than you do. Like most people, you probably enjoy just about an hour, while your new rivals are taking a whopping 2 hours and 15 minutes each day. But save your jealousy. Your rivals are tremendously charming, and you have probably fallen for them as well.
I am talking about intelligent software agents, a fancy name for something everyone is familiar with: the algorithms that curate your Facebook newsfeed, that recommend the next Netflix film to watch, and that complete your search query on Google or Bing.
Your relationships aren’t any of my business. But I want to warn you. I am concerned that you, together with the other approximately 3 billion social media users, are being manipulated by intelligent software agents online.
Here’s how. The intelligent software agents that you interact with online are ‘intelligent agents’ in the sense that they try to predict your behaviour taking into account what you did in your online past (e.g. what kind of movies you usually watch), and then they structure your options for online behaviour. For example, they offer you a selection of movies to watch next.
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Hazel’s comment:
Reading this I was thinking something along the lines of “is it that simple?” and realising that for many people it is. When offered the next part of a box set do you go to bed or do you stay up to watch? Have you got a mind of your own?
Setting myself up as above all that I realised that I have been persuaded into spending money on things that might be nice to have but which I neither need nor can afford.
There is a more thought-out comment on the original post which you may like to read as well.
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