This is brilliant from Ted Gioia on the “future cultural food chain—pursued aggressively by tech platforms that now dominate every aspect of our lives”:
I had a conversation with Helen Beetham earlier about whether generative AI will prove addictive. I struggle to see how conversational agents will be, but it is easy to imagine how the engagement mechanisms of social media could be turbocharged through the real time generation of content. Consider what Gioia describes here:
- The platforms are all shifting to scrolling and reeling interfaces where stimuli optimize the dopamine doom loop.
- Anything that might persuade you to leave the platform—a news story, or any outside link—is brutally punished by their algorithms. It might liberate you from your dependent junkie status, and that can’t be allowed.
- But wait, there’s more! Apple, Facebook, and others are now telling you to put on their virtual reality headsets—where you are swallowed up by the stimuli, like those tiny fish in my food chain charts. You’re invited to live as a passive recipient of make-believe experiences, like a pod slave in The Matrix.
The gamification mechanisms built into Replica give a sense of what this might look like in practice. Combine these with real time personalised content generation and you have a deeply unsettling picture of how digital media could get more rather addictive with time.
Mark Carrigan 