This is an excellent documentary on Netflix that questions the power we give social networks, specifically the power that AI that recommends things to us has. A few interesting points.

Forget AI overwhelming human strengths like Terminator, long before that it will overwhelm our weaknesses and lead us to polarization and confirmation bias in a quest to keep our attention and sell it.

Facebook may be the greatest means of controlling human thoughts ever created. You’re a fool if you don’t think that governments and other groups aren’t using it on you.

Tech has the tools to destabilize society for the price of a click.

AI is only going to get better at predicting what we’ll pay attention to and exploiting our weaknesses.

Technology is both magic, and a dystopia. The difficulty is, how do we benefit from one without being harmed by the other.

I’ve already disengaged from Facebook years ago but this makes me wonder why and how I use YouTube and Twitter to extract value while giving them as little of my attention as possible. Right now, I give YouTube far to much attention. It’s become my default mode of entertainment when I don’t have a direct task to do. I’d rather say I read more books than watched more YouTube videos though.