Facebook's blunt instrument algorithms would be comical if they weren't so dangerous. I just made a disparaging comment about an EMS "alleged" fitness device (that's a device that promises to make you into Arnold Schwarzenegger from the comfort of your armchair ... it's utter fucking nonsense, for the idle but still vain). However, in the few seconds between poking a hole in the advertising blurb for the hard-of-thinking, somewhere in Meta's server farm one of their crawlers picked up the activity, but not the essence. This is critical, the essence of the comment, not the activity of making the comment is the important part. The result: a slew of new adverts for things that promise the Earth in terms of fitness but will never deliver.
What's so amusing and the thing that demonstrates how myopic and blunt these so-called emergent AI's are, is the fact that my post from earlier clearly states I swam a mile this morning.
And therein lies the problem. I've effectively given Meta all the right information, and yet it comes probing at me with dumb feelers. Besides that, and this is where you move from dumb to dangerous, those same algorithms are now shifting my meta-data towards what it thinks is my goal. And that is how you accidentally profile and stream people -and if you get it wrong and clearly all social media gets it wrong all the time because we haven't evolved with this technology- you end up pushing people up blind alleys, or worse into polarised positions.
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