Do you read me, HAL?

When we scroll through the movies and shows that Netflix lists on our home page, we rarely see anything that interests us.  It is awful.

But, we do watch quite a few movies in Netflix.

It is just that we don't care for what Netflix's AI offers.  We do our own homework, like reading Anthony Lane's reviews, and decide on what we want to watch.  More importantly, we never rate any of the movies that we watch.

Netflix's AI can't figure our our tastes, and I am happy about it ;)

I suppose we employ a version of lateral reading.  We gather information about movies from different sources, evaluate the ratings, and then search for those movies in Netflix.  Of course, not always do we find them in Netflix, but there are plenty of good ones that we have been able to watch.

No, this is is not merely about Netflix.  It is about something much bigger.  It is about my worry that artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to run/ruin our lives by telling us what to watch, what to cook, where to go, how to go, ...  It is almost as if AI is beginning to kill whatever free will I have.

We are merely at the beginning stages of AI, and it is getting smarter by the second.  Two researchers from the U. of Mass. (Boston) write:

Algorithms could soon – if they don’t already – have a better idea about which show you’d like to watch next and which job candidate you should hire than you do. One day, humans may even find a way machines can make these decisions without some of the biases that humans typically display.

But to the extent that unpredictability is part of how people understand themselves and part of what people like about themselves, humanity is in the process of losing something significant. As they become more and more predictable, the creatures inhabiting the increasingly AI-mediated world will become less and less like us.

Think about what AI is doing, and will do, to distort what it means to be human.  Don't just take my word though--do some lateral reading and conclude for yourself.

BTW, have you watched Burning or Tune in for love? ;)