Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

You have these people who constantly read all these conspiracy theories and fake news and so forth, and they don’t trust anybody. They don’t trust the government. They don’t trust the traditional media. They don’t trust science and the universities. These are all conspiracies to deceive us.

But they do trust the algorithms that show them all these stories. So it’s not that trust completely evaporated from their mind or from the world. It has shifted from humans to algorithms. This is happening in more and more systems.

The other thing, which is less essential but has been very important over the last decade or two, is that the algorithms of social media were given as their goal not the creation of trust, not the creation of truth, but the creation of engagement.

The goal given to the Facebook algorithm, to the X algorithm, to the TikTok algorithm, is to increase user engagement — which sounds nice. “Engagement” sounds like a good thing. But what it really means is that the algorithms experimented on millions, on billions, of human guinea pigs to see how we make humans more engaged.

How do we make humans spend longer on the platform and react to it more, for instance, by sharing the post with their friends?

And they discovered that the easiest way to make people engaged is to press the hate button or the greed button or the fear button in human minds, because hate is very engaging. Fear is very engaging. If something threatens your life, you are engaged. They have been flooding the world with hate and fear and anger and greed and so forth, and we are now living in a hyper-engaged world.

Engagement is a very close cousin of another word, which is very dominant in our language: “excitement.” “Excitement” simply means that your nervous system is working in a hyper level. Excitement is good in some situations and to some extent, just as engagement is good in some situations. But ultimately, biologically, if you keep an organism excited all the time, the organism eventually collapses and dies.

We are just not built to be excited all the time. In many cases, when I meet people, I would like to meet people who make me feel calm, not necessarily excited. Oh, it’s so calming to meet you. You look at U.S. politics or Israeli politics or world politics, and I think the whole world is overexcited…

Thinking about it, even in evolutionary terms, this comes from misusing our evolutionary programming. If you were walking around the African savanna tens of thousands of years ago, most of what you’d see is not very exciting. There are some bushes here, there are some gazelles there. That’s fine. And then there is a snake. Now, the snake is exciting. The snake excites your entire nervous system, and if you don’t focus your entire attention on the snake, you die.

So we are programmed that if something is exciting, we drop everything else and just focus on that. That makes sense in the African savanna. If you are on Instagram, you’re basically holding your phone and seeing snake, snake, snake, snake, snake.

The algorithm simply hacked our evolutionary program. They’ve hacked us. What we are seeing around us is just the beginning. As A.I. becomes more and more sophisticated, it will learn to hack us on a deeper and deeper level. If we don’t fight back to defend ourselves, the consequences will be much, much worse. (from the New York Times)