When philosopher Nick Bostrom first conceived of the Paperclip Maximiser – an infamous thought experiment where a misaligned AI breaks down the universe to make paperclips - he likely thought it was safely contained within his imagination.
This, sadly, is not the case.
For at the exact same time Bostrom was writing about his AI gods gone wrong, its real-life equivalent was being created in a Harvard dormitory. This is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms are destroying society, and how one of Bostrom’s most famous warnings about the AI future has secretly been with us for decades.
The Matrix has you…
When it first arrived on the scene, social media was heralded as revolutionary. By connecting humanity, we would come together, resolve our differences, and co-create the future.
In many ways, it delivered on the promise. Social media has overthrown despots, created communities for the disenfranchised, and created opportunity through connection for millions.
But since the 2010s, social media has turned increasingly dark.
It has facilitated the rise of populist forces tearing apart the global order, ignited the explosion of conflict we’re now witnessing, and fuelled anti-science narratives which have claimed an astonishing number of deaths around the world.
This is the work of Pay-Per-Click Maximiser (PPC Max).
The PPC Max does not think. It does not feel. Its only goal is making advertising income for Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. And, just like the Paperclip Maximiser, the PPC Max does this by breaking down reality itself.
As you scroll through Facebook, the PPC Max is watching everything you do.
It is looking for any reaction it can exploit. Take the AI-generated video of migrants arriving in the UK. The social media algorithms - the PPC Max - doesn’t care if users know it’s fake. It just knows that to some, it feels right - and that it makes their brains dump dopamine like sewage into a Thames Water river.
The PPC Max sees this and doubles down.
It serves us up another shot of hate, another line of loathing, taking us further down the rabbit hole.
What started as supporting a friend’s status complaining about an overcrowded A&E ends with getting arrested at a Tommy Robinson march.
This is why the world shattered in the pandemic. We were all locked away with the PPC Max. It fed our fears, exploited our anxieties. It pulled us from a shared understanding of the world and imprisoned us in individualised bubble realities.
This is the PPC Max turning human beings into this:
There is no red pill
The Matrix introduced into our collective consciousness the idea of the red pill, language co-opted by those who believe they’ve ‘woken up’ from our shared reality.
The housewife turned anti-vax zealot, the downtrodden weaponised by the far-right, your happy son turned into a megaphone for the manosphere.
All these communities use the language of awakening, of seeing the world as it actually is.
All of them are still asleep.
They haven’t escaped the Matrix, they are just in a different partition. The PPC Max is indifferent as to which reality you inhabit so long as you are engaged with it.
Think of it like fields of crops. You might identify as wheat, others maize or cotton.
The PPC Max will reap the harvest all the same.
Even when you’re aware of the PPC Max, you are still in its control. If you’re reading this piece, the likelihood is that you are like me: smart, tech-adjacent, living comfortably. We, being the smartarses we all like to think we are, likely perceive ourselves as immune to its influence.
This, unfortunately, is a fallacy - the very kind The PPC Max is designed to exploit. The cognitive biases it manipulates affect minds of all shapes and sizes, and influence every member of the human race.
We are all in its grasp.
When my digital self was murdered by Mark Zuckerberg two years ago, I made the mistake of thinking I was free.
Being selected for deletion by the algorithm was initially disorientating – everyone I’d met, all the memories I’d collected, two decades of my life uploaded: executed without due process.
I soon learned though that life’s better without Meta. I reduced my social media footprint to just LinkedIn (because – I’ll be honest – I like money). I spent less time doomscrolling, more time out strolling.
But I soon came to realise – the PPC Max is no longer just lingering in social media. It was in the minds of everyone I interacted with.
Fewer and fewer people were reaching across the aisle, taking the time to consider others’ views, and treating people with respect.
Instead, all I’ve seen is a hardening of biases, an entrenchment of opinion, and hostility to anyone not in our own bubble.
When I recently returned to social media land to get my business going, I see why.
Yuval Noah Harari explains this eloquently in his recent book, Nexus. While the printing press gave us the Enlightenment, it also gave us the Malleus Maleficarum. For former raised humanity up, the latter labelled hundreds of thousands as witches and condemned them to horrific deaths.
While I’ve spent the past two years exploring how AI can be a force for good in the world, the PPC Max has used AI to force multiply the poison it is spreading throughout society.
Despite what the PPC Max may say otherwise, we all still share the same reality. Thus, even when you unplug, you are still in its grasp.
Free your mind
Neo doesn’t escape the Matrix - he learns to see the code and changes his perspective.
Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman would recognise this shift. What the PPC Max exploits is what he calls ‘System 1’ thinking: fast, subconscious, emotive. It is the abdication of cognitive effort to our lizard brain. It is the part of us that sees a headline about migrants and reacts before the sentence is finished.
Beating the PPC Max requires metacognition. This is thinking about thinking, Kahneman’s ‘System 2’ - slower, more methodical, rational and mindful thinking.
Say someone’s just insulted you. System 1 says “something must be done, let’s get angry and punch that sucker in the face’”
System 2, however, says “that’s literally just some air that’s passed through vocal cords.”
It is our reaction to this air bouncing off our face which turns it from warm carbon dioxide into rage and fury.
When we feel the outrage, the dopamine hit, the urge to correct something wrong on the internet, we can instead stop. Pause. Think. Choose how we respond.
This ability to use metacognition - to breathe before reacting, to expose your biases, to embrace uncertainty rather than defaulting to the norm - is exactly the skill that separates people who use AI from people who are used by it.
The PPC Max and the LLM you use are, at a fundamental level, the same: a system that will happily optimise for whatever you give it. It mirrors our System 1 biases, but it can also mirror System 2. This is core of the thesis for my new company: that AI scales thinking, not just speed. By accepting responsibility for our thinking, by harnessing metacognition, we become the master of both.
We won’t be able to release everyone from the grip of the PPC Max. But if enough of us learn to see the code of the Matrix, we can stop optimising the world for burning each other at the stake and start building towards a new enlightenment.
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Next time…