Existential Threats Call For Radical Measures
Data as a new religion, Trump's new Executive Order, and Australia's ban of social media accounts for children under 16.
In the 21st century data has become a new religion.
Decades ago, people would pray to God or consult with friends and family when they were faced with difficult decisions and hardship. Nowadays, they can turn to ChatGPT or browse the internet for advice. In fact, the world’s largest economy favors and pushes people to approach their life’s challenges in this way – not by seeking strength and guidance from their community or a higher power, but by deferring to data. If a solution cannot be immediately found, we just need more and higher-quality data.
Benchmark tests prove the capabilities of AI models in the same way as grades in school show how hirable students will be in the job market. Companies use personality tests and logical tests to screen through the last few candidates and ensure that they indeed have found the right match. Data don’t lie, but the candidates might.
IQ tests are typically treated as a near-perfect proxy for a person’s intellectual abilities, PRs in the gym show exactly how strong a person is, their net worth, salary and material possessions show how successful they are, and their height, age and number of social media followers show their dating potential on apps. If a person is not doing well in life, all they have to do is improve their wealth, looks, social status, intelligence, social media followers, and perhaps even their height through a surgical intervention. Then, the person may evolve to the next level in the life, like a computer game. Self-improvement and self-optimization always lead to better outcomes in life.
At the root of our obsession with data and metrics is an attempt to eliminate uncertainty. The modern human cannot tolerate uncertainty, including lingering doubts, too much complexity, or ambiguity. Most people are deadly afraid to navigate through the darkness without the guiding light of facts, statistics, metrics, and numbers. When we act according to the best data available, there is no reason to fear the judgement of others or a supernatural punishment if it turns out we have made a bad call.
What more and more people are starting to realize in conjunction with the AI revolution is that uncertainty is a basic premise of life. No matter how much data we have or how well the next version of ChatGPT performs on benchmark tests, it’s impossible to predict with any empirical certainty if actions we take in our life are good or bad in ultimate terms. That is why we can’t rely on data, chatbots or internet search when we are faced with difficult situations and decisions. Rather, we should rely on our intuition and inner values. Instead of asking ourselves what the data is saying, we should ask ourselves: Who do I want to be? What do I want to represent? What kind of impact do I want to make on the world? Reflecting on such questions may inspire us to take the right action.
Trump is a champion at making decisions based on his gut instinct and inner values. That is why so many Americans love him. While other politicians can only formulate policies and words that are backed by data such as voter polls, Trump exclusively uses his internal compass to make decisions. For instance, just yesterday Trump signed an Executive Order that seeks to prevent states from regulating AI - even though a similar proposal was struck down in the Senate with a 99-1 vote against it. Trump doesn’t care, not as long as the new policy furthers his personal interests and fuels the stocks of BigTech. Trump may be the tyrant that George Washington warned about, but his values are clear and transparent and no amount of high-quality data makes him second-guess his actions.
The same type of data-resistant determination was displayed with another (unpopular) policy that took effect in Australia this Wednesday, which requires social media platforms such Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat to take “reasonable steps” to prevent Australians under-16s from having accounts or potentially face fines of up to AUD $49.5 million.
Quoting from Jonathan Haidt’s post about the new policy:
“This reform finally corrects two major mistakes made in the early days of the internet: the United States (and then much of the world) set the age of “internet adulthood” to 13, and companies were given no responsibility to verify age at all. As long as a child could type “13,” companies could treat them like adults.
Australia is the first country to correct those mistakes. Under the new policy, children under age 16 can still watch videos, read posts, and look things up online. What changes is that some of the largest companies on earth can no longer form business relationships with young children or use their personal data to keep them hooked on feeds, likes, and alerts.”
The new policy has received a fair amount of criticism, and not just from Big Tech companies, advertisers, and lobbyists (Reddit went so far as to file a lawsuit against Australia to reverse the policy). Amnesty International sums up the most common points of critique in a blog post which concludes “A ban is ineffective and out of step with the realities of a generation that lives both on and offline”.
Needless to say, I wholeheartedly disagree with Amnesty International on this one. I think a social media ban for children under 16 is a radical and brave measure, exactly what is needed to limit the increasingly negative impacts American social media platforms have on society. Other radical measures I have been advocating for are to ban targeted advertisement, reform Section 230 or recognize that Meta is a criminal company that should cease to operate. If we wait for a sufficient amount of data before taking radical measures such as these - or for a green light from the leading AI models - we will wait until eternity. We have to be brave and act according to our intuition and inner values to deal with existential threats.