The conversation about parenting is somewhat of a red herring here. This is not a ‘won’t somebody think of the children moral panic’, but a serious consideratio

The conversation about parenting is somewhat of a red herring here. This is not a ‘won’t somebody think of the children moral panic’, but a serious consideration of the unintended consequences of the systems we are building and what that means for us as a society. YouTube videos for kids is a fairly lighthearted entry to the subject - we could be discussing news, porn, education, whatever, and the problems and implications would be the same. The key issues raised here are: * The ‘delamination’ of content and author and how that affects the awareness and trust of its source. If, for example, a scientific paper and a bunch of woo is presented in the same way who can tell which is more legitimate? ‘Just teach critical thinking’ is not an acceptable solution as by the time enough people have been taught to provide herd immunity we will have long since succumbed to this pandemic of bullshit. * ‘...the impossibility of determining the degree of automation which is at work here’. If both humans and machines are creating content tailored for every possible niche, interest, fetish and keyword combination, and algorithmic personalisation makes it possible to exist entirely within our own personal tag clouds what does it mean for us as a society, which requires a basic set of shared values to function? Junk content and pandering to base instincts is not new, but our ability now to automate the creation and dissemination of such content to pander to every possible interest and unlikely combination of interests at vast scale is new - and we do not yet have the cultural toolkit to deal with the sheer quantity of it. I wonder whether in a few years time, once we’ve really felt the impact of all this, people will look on today’s enthusiasm for putting ‘social’ in everything with the contempt and horror we do with last century’s enthusiasm for putting radium in everything.