> What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control,

> What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. There is a feedback problem, though, which is that your preferences are modified by what you see. So the AI problem devolves to showing you the kind of content that makes you want to see more of it, i.e. maximize engagement. I think a lot of people are addicted to controversy, "rage porn," anger-inducing content, and these agents are not going to help with this issue. If we could train AI agents to analyze the preferences of people, I think the best use for them wouldn't be to curate your own content, but to use them to see the world from other people's perspective. If you know in what "opinion cluster" someone lies and can predict their emotional reaction to some content, you may be able to identify the articles from cluster A that people from cluster B react the least negatively to, and vice versa. And this could be leveraged to break echo chambers, I think: imagine that article X is rated +10 by cluster A and -10 by cluster B, and article Y is rated +10 by cluster A but only -2 by cluster B. It might be a good idea to promote Y over X, because unlike X, Y represents the views of cluster A in a way that cluster B can understand, whereas X is probably some inflammatory rag. The key is that you can't simply choose content according to a user's current preferences, they also have to be shown adversarial content so that they have all the information they need about what others think. This is how they can retain their agency. Show them stuff they disagree with, but that they can respect. I expect that a system like the one I'm describing would naturally penalize content that paint people with opposing points of view as evil or idiots, because such content is the most likely to be very highly rated by the "smart" side and profoundly hated by the "stupid" side. Again, note that I'm not saying content everyone likes should be promoted, it's more like, we should promote the +10/-2 kind of polarization (well thought out opinion pieces that focus on ideas which might be unpopular or uncomfortable) over the +10/-10 kind of polarization (people who disagree with me are evil cretins).