Fine-tuned without permission

It’s not often you read a particular book or short story that you can’t shake off, like that album or song that’s an absolute banger and captures a special moment or mood that always takes you back.

Greg Egan’s Reasons to Be Cheerful from 1997 is one of those rare gems (part of the Luminous short story collection).

I’ve been recommending this short story collection to friends (actually anything Egan has written would possibly qualify).

This one particularly resonated with the occasional uneasiness that is prevalent about our future today and that of our children with the AI onslaught. (Disclaimer: I started this post thinking it was going to be a book review but it ended up somewhere else possibly due to the gloomy news cycle especially around the Gates essay and the Stanford report.)

Synopsis

I won’t spoil it but a brief synopsis is that a man with an inherent brain chemistry that lets him be always happy goes through an unavoidable treatment to save his life that counters the ever-happy syndrome and makes him unable to feel joy at all. He then seeks treatment via an implant that lets him choose the situations and things that make him happy essentially making happiness a self-serve tool by which he tries to engineer his life.

My favorite part of the story is when the implants start shaping what he wants. Not just what he feels but what he thinks he wants. It stops reflecting his own tastes but starts constructing them like fine-tuning his own mental model weights that he did not ask for.

“Everyone had to carve a life out of the same legacy: half universal, half particular; half sharpened by relentless natural selection, half softened by the freedom of chance. I’d just had to face the details a little more starkly.”

Reasons to Be Cheerful, Greg Egan

If you could engineer happiness and you had an option to let you alter your emotions to anything, would it still retain your identity, judgement and authenticity?

Today’s implant

That implant today is our AI consumption and being “fine-tuned” without permission is a problem.

Your mind is inundated by feeds largely written/controlled/performed by AI, you are bombarded with recommendations from algorithms that steer you towards your own biases and views, your social media feed is full of people who think and act like you or people who you want to think and act like, dissenting views are suppressed unless as a medium to reinforce your own thoughts and chatbots tell you you’re right.

Clicking on stuff before I decide to open it, listening to an algo recommended playlist that feeds my dopamine driven track skipping, asking a chatbot to just show me v1 since the brain is too exhausted to review anything but the minimum is all part of borrowed thought. Non-participation is not a choice and you either consume or you will be left behind.

While hyper productivity using AI is a verifiable result, it also creates a by-product of losing control over your thoughts served by another entity or corporation.

Being in Tech and working on AI-enabled workflows all day long makes you an AI optimist but it’s essential to take pause and reflect on the larger implications of your small action of pressing that enter key on the prompt window every day.

I work on marketing, data and personalization and am amidst whatever is going on here, I realize I ‘m another small cog in the supply side of it (maybe wearing an identical blank facial mask marching into a massive meat grinder ? … I digress).

Possible options

Ensuring your own exploration, agency, long term purpose and preferences are not being externally engineered is a key awareness we all need to develop.

While algorithms pressure you to choose them, making a conscious choice to seek difficult books, unfamiliar music, different views, strange cultures and following people who enlarge your worldview is a must.

While the algorithms try to mould you to what it needs your identity to become, our own identity is not a finished product. Our own journeys shape what that eventually becomes and that is always an unmerged branch in development.

Friendships, relationships, shared work, humor, care cannot be reduced to tokens and will be the bulwark against algorithmic isolation.

Doing things for longer term meaning beyond immediate pleasure are the activities to find.

All this is damn hard and easy to sermon on but the key reason to be cheerful in all this is that we still have the capacity to notice “this is changing me” and do something about it.