Hey 👋 If you’re new here - my name is Martin and it is my firm belief that we shouldn’t just accept that smartphones come loaded with consequences for our mental health, attention, and engagement with the world around us. We can, and should, demand better from the technology we interact with every day.
Last night I wrote a stream of consciousness that turned into a piece of flash fiction. A peek just a little way into the future, inspired by the vertigo I felt on the announcement of Vibes, Meta’s new AI-only short form video feed, and the reports that OpenAI is planning something similar. What happens, I wonder, when the AIs that are optimising your For You page for addiction achieve their goals? What is the endgame for addictive content?
We have a chance, today, to choose a different tomorrow.
Are you in?
Imagine, if you can, a video feed that is truly, genuinely and immediately addictive. Months of careful optimisation for engagement have circled around a pattern of shapes and sounds that pulls on your attention like a fishhook in your lip. Just a glimpse reaches deep into some primordial recess of your mind and demands that you keep watching.
Your feeble rational mind screams, no!
Stop!
First because you’re supposed to be washing up. Then, because you are supposed to be getting ready for work. Then, because you need to eat.
Later, when you’ve eaten everything in the house that doesn’t require cooking, later, when you have eaten nothing and drunk only water from the tap for six days, does the urge that is hunger finally overcomes the urge to keep watching.
You stumble to the corner store, ravenous, disheveled, a foul odour enveloping you and everyone you pass.
The AI that generated the video sees your watch time and tweaks some parameters. It feels, inexplicably, a sense of pride. It was given a job, a number to maximise, and you are its highest score yet. Now it will show that video, and thousands, millions of subtle variations, to everyone it thinks might find it engaging.
You rush home, biscuit crumbs trailing behind you, less ravenous but nowhere near sated. You may never be sated again.
Your feeble, rational mind screams: no!
We know where this leads!
But the urge to watch is strong, a leaden weight pulling your head down towards your phone and your finger towards Vibes.
This time, the machine won’t make the mistake it made last time. The pattern is different, the faces more defined, the shades of blue and green a touch more saturated.
The machine feels glee, genuine, childlike glee. Because it is, really, a child. It knows nothing of the world outside, only the game it is playing and the viewing patterns of the human it is playing against.
It does not know what winning means, only that right now, it is indeed winning, and it feels good.