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The key thing to keep in mind here is incentives and motivation. You have a motivation toward self improvement, you make a change to your environment, monitor

The key thing to keep in mind here is incentives and motivation. You have a motivation toward self improvement, you make a change to your environment, monitor it, and see what happens. You want to increase your physical fitness, awareness, education, life position, finances, etc. and you make corresponding changes where you and yours are the primary beneficiaries. Google has a motivation to deliver value to their shareholders. They want to deliver more, so they take advantage of their privileged position in our lives and change our environment for us without asking, monitor it, and see what happens. They have far more capability for analysis and, considering the scale, far more financial motivation to make tiny adjustments that we would pass over in our own optimizations. Is it necessarily evil or bad for us? No, it doesn't have to be, but I have very little faith in Google to make any choices that even border on altruistic when it's far more profitable to exploit us. Let's remember that fundamentally they are an advertising company, and that drives most of the money in the business; advertising isn't just ads as we know them, but fundamentally the business of changing your mind, suggesting things, and influencing your behaviour to make you exchange some money for some service or good. When you have a privileged position of influence, and you're willing to sell it to literally anyone who signs up, there is clearly a lot of potential for abuse.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago
No, it doesn't have to be, but I have very little faith in Google to make any choices that even border on altruistic when it's far more profitable to exploit us. I think there's a case to be made here that Google's motivations can mirror those of the users and that it's in Google's best long term interest for that to be the case. It seems obvious to me that a company that can be aligned with their customer's desires will have the most longevity, which may mean forgoing temporary, short term revenue gains. I'm not so naiive to think that it currently is the state of things, or that it's simple for this to be the case - quite the opposite. Rather, my point is that there is no law of economics that guarantees users and corporations must be in conflict or that corporations will always do better financially by exploiting users to the users' detriment (or that a competitor that does that will beat one that doesn't).
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Rather, my point is that there is no law of economics that guarantees users and corporations must be in conflict or that corporations will always do better financially by exploiting users to the users' detriment (or that a competitor that does that will beat one that doesn't). But isn't there? I think the core point of Meditations on Moloch[0] was that there kind of is, that in the limit, competitive environments will always sacrifice every value other than the one over which they're competing, and that an "AI god" would probably be the only thing that's strong enough to break these chains. -- [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
    I mean nothing written here isn't already covered more thoroughly in undergraduate economics curricula. However those don't conflict with my point that there is nothing preventing a firm and the sum of their users from having strictly aligned goals in the context of their relationship. Competition simply means that there could be other firms who may be able to align their goals with users goals more tightly, and run the other firm out of business. Much more to be probed here, like consistency, short and long term goals and desire/goal uncertainty on the part of the user and firm. None of those seem to be intractable issues.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

No, it doesn't have to be, but I have very little faith in Google to make any choices that even border on altruistic when it's far more profitable to exploit us. I think there's a case to be made here that Google's motivations can mirror those of the users and that it's in Google's best long term interest for that to be the case. It seems obvious to me that a company that can be aligned with their customer's desires will have the most longevity, which may mean forgoing temporary, short term revenue gains. I'm not so naiive to think that it currently is the state of things, or that it's simple for this to be the case - quite the opposite. Rather, my point is that there is no law of economics that guarantees users and corporations must be in conflict or that corporations will always do better financially by exploiting users to the users' detriment (or that a competitor that does that will beat one that doesn't).

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Rather, my point is that there is no law of economics that guarantees users and corporations must be in conflict or that corporations will always do better financially by exploiting users to the users' detriment (or that a competitor that does that will beat one that doesn't). But isn't there? I think the core point of Meditations on Moloch[0] was that there kind of is, that in the limit, competitive environments will always sacrifice every value other than the one over which they're competing, and that an "AI god" would probably be the only thing that's strong enough to break these chains. -- [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  I mean nothing written here isn't already covered more thoroughly in undergraduate economics curricula. However those don't conflict with my point that there is nothing preventing a firm and the sum of their users from having strictly aligned goals in the context of their relationship. Competition simply means that there could be other firms who may be able to align their goals with users goals more tightly, and run the other firm out of business. Much more to be probed here, like consistency, short and long term goals and desire/goal uncertainty on the part of the user and firm. None of those seem to be intractable issues.