Algo vs Democracy

One of my favorite engineers just left our team to go work for a social media giant.  

What follows is for him.  A blog for one.

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The usual motivational template for living your best life is “[verb] your life or someone else will.”  Own your life or someone else will.  Take charge of your life... Plan... Design… Prioritize… Change… Control…. 

If you believe the posters, there is always some aggressive, planful other, who-- with nefarious intent-- is waiting to [verb] your life if you don’t.

I haven’t found that to be true.  Life isn’t conspiring against me or you.  If anything, it's that, aside from your Mom, no one has the time or patience to “[verb] your life”... because they’re living theirs.

Not particularly satisfying if you’re trying to sell sneakers or get likes. But instructive, because the popularity of the template shows that our bias toward loss aversion can be employed to great purpose-- to motivate us, to improve our lives and the lives of those around us.

Usually I’d end there, wish you the best and tell you that you’re always welcome back. 

But here’s the dark twist: algorithms have both the time and the patience.  They might not have nefarious intent but commercial intent without explicit safeguards is worse. Because the unintended consequences of algorithmically driving scaled outcomes creates divisive persuasion architectures-- my pet name for your next adventure-- that can negatively impact billions of people.

The standard “own your life” motivation template misdirects us to look for some person— some wealthy, inaccessible and unsympathetic other— to blame... when a large part of the problem is data science without controls.  It’s code gone wild. 

Derailing democracy is a bug, not a feature. And the devil is in the details of the algorithms you’ll soon work on... applied at scale.  

#CodingMatters

Those two words motivate me to own my life more than the threat that someone else will.  And thankfully, we have that in common.

I trust you.  Always will.  And I’d say “I’ll miss you” but I’ll be calling.  Often.