Joe Rogan Experience #1236 - Jack Dorsey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mP9OmOFxc4
It seems to me that Jack Dorsey from Twitter admits he/they have a problem they don't know how to solve.
With their algorithms they try to force excesses (mob and bot tweeting) more into the background but only people can really ban other people from the network, at least for now. And there is the first problem.
Those algorithms are very poor judges in assessing contextual meaning or "reading between the lines" which is especially necessary for distinguishing humor (joking, satire, sarcasm, irony) from sentences that are meant to be understood literally. Also human beings exist that have no sense of humor and even have a problem with analogies; autists. It is simply foolish to hire autists to judge, censor or upgrade/down grade presence of posters. They can produce statistics and facts about subjects and posters, information that needs further analysis and human/non-autistic judgement. That is where the buck needs to stop it seems to me. Autists can be very gifted data collectors and scripters but are very poor judges. AI better be understood as Autistic Intelligence, just as a warning.
Dorsey however wants his algorithms to become so sophisticated that they can identify, upgrade/downgrade presence
and ban where necessary. The argument probably being that there is simply no manpower available to do the job for a massive medium like twitter. But in that direction only more problems arise making it actually harder for Dorsey and his people to manage their service in a responsible, aqa Western way. They seem to have chosen to move in that direction nonetheless, with a big risk of their service ultimately falling apart or be out-competed because it will not be able to fulfill its social responsibility of being that public square where free speech is the holiest of rules. Together with the already existing red-line that speech directly inciting to physical violence is not allowed. They will not be able to live up to our cherished Western values. This has consequences, one way or other, probably sooner than later.
Autistic censorship cannot survive very long, but the end-controls in the hands of a small class of human beings at the very top in technology+politics could. The Chinese are ahead of the curve. The Communist Technocrat Pragmatists have the controls and decided to keep it. Ride that horse, tame, control and use technology instead of being a whimsy slave of it, not knowing what your Master will do the next day. Better not be pulled around by a wild horse with a rope through the village of shame! China is also a society of caged birds however; they need mass surveillance, fanatic social engineering and control not to fall apart. How long such a technocratic big-brother-is-watching-you dictatorship can survive remains to be seen.
What the Chinese maybe fear most is an economic downfall of the US because they own most of its dept. They want to drown-out the US and the petro-dollar, but not kill Uncle Sam let alone the West as a whole. They need raw international capitalist free markets as much as anyone, but use national controls to tweak and maximize profits for themselves.
With economic power comes military power and the ability to impose rules on others also in the financial system. Just like the US has been doing, but for how long still? The Renminbi is coming. Technological innovations emerging from silicon valley are used by China for its own benefit. They probably love it that people like Dorsey are trapped in silly discussions about free speech and censorship; problems they don't have to deal with. That Dorsey and his US social media compatriot CEOs want to create better, smarter AI-bots to monitor and control their platforms.. must be music to their ears.
Oh the weaknesses of the naive West! Creating more
controls in the name of freedom... how FUNNY is that?
As with that laughable Western Judeo-Christian obsession with the individual. The real power dynamics are always in the collective and the big numbers. No matter how smart and philosophically-morally correct you try to prove the opposite.
Take that sod-sad figure Jordan B Peterson. He promotes the idea that the biggest hero of the West is a man who got killed rather quickly and easily! No wonder there is so much mental depression in the West. Testosterone is needed for the will and ability to win. Love and empathy is there to ease the pain of the wounded, for those who lost a battle and need care. Giving love and care to people who didn't loose a battle, i.e. don't need it, is making them depressed and setting them up to loose real battles... when they come. It also makes them hallucinate problems that don't exist, feeling like victims without being victims.
China, its behavior once so aptly described by Colonel Sun as an elephant in musth, is watching how the West is depleting itself culturally from testosterone. Donald Trump was probably elected because of an instinctive understanding of this emerging weakness, but his behavior is wild.. and more importantly, short term. He will be gone in a few years, whereas XI Jinping & Co are declared dictator in chief for life. Which allows for long-term strategies and tactics. The West is becoming like a leaf in the wind. Or even a leaf in a storm of its own making.
The Chinese seem to have only one simple rule of life: what works will win. A little devil and detail: what works is not forever. One day also China has to face the real dragon of unpredictability and chaos that always lurks in the cosmos and forces everybody to change tricks. Especially after a cataclysm. JBP will then say: told ya! But he may not be around anymore by then. And you never know what a new balance between order and chaos looks like. A new ice age could also change the looks of the landscape rather dramatically. Some new dragonfly may evolve that can survive in arctic conditions.