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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 12/2/22

Is the Greatest Threat to Humanity Something Called an Algorithm?

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Reprinted from hartmannreport.com

Algorithms used in social media are not tuned for what is best for society. They don't ask themselves, "Is this true?" or "Will this information help or hurt humanity?"

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The man who coined the term "virtual reality" and helped create Web 2.0, Jaron Lanier, recently told a reporter for The Guardian there's an aspect to the internet that could endanger the literal survival of humanity as a species. It's an amazing story, and I believe he's 100% right.

Humans are fragile creatures. We don't have fangs or claws to protect ourselves from other animals that might want to eat us. We don't have fur or a pelt to protect us from the elements.

What we do have, however, that has allowed us to conquer the planet and survive for eons is our interconnection with each other, something we generally refer to as society, community, and culture.

Humans are social animals. Our ability to share information with each other in ways that are meaningful and credible has been the key to our survival.

For hundreds of thousands of years, it was scouts, neighbors, and family members reporting predators or prey, animal or human, just around the other side of the mountain or on the perimeter of the nighttime fire, that kept our ancestors safe.

Over the millennia, we developed elaborate social constructs or "rules of society" to enhance our confidence in the information we're getting from our fellow humans, because that information may be essential to our survival.

When important information is twisted, distorted, or lied about it can put us at risk. And that's what's happening right now across multiple social media platforms, causing people to question global warming and other science (Covid vaccines, for example) while engaging in behavior destructive to a democratic, peaceful, functioning world.

These rules or Commandments about truthful communication are at the core of every religion, every culture, and every society from the most technologically sophisticated to those "primitives" still living in jungles, forests, and wild mountain areas.

They're built into our deepest and most ancient oral traditions, stretching back to dim antiquity, known by every person in every culture around the world.

We in western culture can all recite the story of The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf, Eve's lie to her god about consuming the forbidden fruit, and the consequences of courtiers' lies about The Emperor's New Clothes. Every other culture on Earth has their versions of the same stories.

We know, remember, and pass along these stories because truthful information is essential to the survival of family, tribe, community, nation, and ultimately humanity itself.

They're even built into the language of our religions. Discussing this article I was then writing in first draft, my dear friend Rabbi Hillel Zeitlin was telling me on a Zoom call yesterday how the Torah calls the inanimate mineral world Domem or "silent" while the realm of humans is known as Midaber or "speaking."

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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