🎥 Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6iRjYrDpey8
Old man
Can you believe it? Our children just stare at these stupid cell phones all day instead of talking to each other. They don’t even pay attention to their surroundings. They should be out in nature with friends and getting some exercise.
What’s actually going on in this old white man’s mind? What is he complaining about? Does it bother him that the children don’t notice him? Does he fear for the mental health of his grandchildren? Or is he afraid of the new world?
Young teenage girl
The old man looks annoyed. Now he’s even shaking his head. Probably another one of those people who would love to snatch away our cell phones. We have a right to freedom and to decide for ourselves what is good for us. Boomers, leave the kids alone!
Narrator
What does the young woman really care about? She wants to know what shoes are in fashion and what her friends did on vacation. She wants to compare herself with her rivals. She wants to defend her position amongst her classmates. A cell phone ban would restrict her freedom to compete. What’s more, the sheer arrival of a new message triggers a positive emotion, indeed it is even addictive.
Consequences
“Real life in nature” and “freedom” in the digital world are two strong values. Are they perhaps simply illusions?
Thought shortcuts
Values are shortcuts. Instead of thinking in detail about the consequences of actions at every opportunity, we like to stick to generally applicable rules. These may be inherent in our genes, such as freedom. Experience and upbringing teach us humanistic values. These include behavioral patterns such as discipline and honesty.
Values describe patterns of behavior that govern our lives, especially our coexistence. However, they conceal our underlying needs. Why does a girl want freedom to use her cell phone? She wants to satisfy her needs, such as looks or Instagram followers, and not be restricted. At the moment, it may not be important to her that she neglects school and sport to do so.
The satisfaction of needs creates joy, the violation of needs causes suffering. Needs are the determining factors in socio-technical evolution. We have derived a network of 13 needs that summarizes the current state of science to some extent. It can serve as a checklist for a balanced evaluation of alternative courses of action and help to adapt traditional values to the world of machine intelligence.
Narrator
What’s bothering you, old man? Are you being ignored because of those cell phones? Do you feel that old values like friendship and fitness are in peril?
And you young lady. Why are you looking at your friends’ vacation photos? Are you comparing your vacation with hers? Why have you already watched Taylor Swift’s latest video twice? Do you want to look like her? Is she a bit of a heroine who will help you realize your dreams? Your role model? What does the video do for you?
The old white man should reconsider his values regarding cell phone use, and the young girl should think about values that are conducive to her quality of life in the long term.
Rational rules instead of intuitive values
Ethical values are intuitive patterns of behavior that have evolved over thousands of years. Philosophers, theologians and ideologists have debated these values since time immemorial without arriving at operable rules of conduct. Traditional values are important for our coexistence, but are difficult to validate and even more difficult to enforce.
For the first time in human history, we have detailed automatic logs of human behavior. Digital activities, many forms of perception and, last but not least, emotions and moods are recorded. Recently, we also have artificial intelligence to derive models of human behavior from this data. Let’s use this knowledge to use digital services for the benefit of mankind!
Apple, Amazon, Instagram and Spotify manage to create individual purchase recommendations for customers based on personal and factual data. They show that recommender systems can identify and serve needs by observing people’s behavior. They aim to satisfy hedonistic needs quickly, while life engineering wants to inform people which services are more likely to harm them and which will contribute to their long-term well-being. In 20 to 30 years’ time, we may have foundation models with rules for good or bad behavior. Perhaps we will be able to supplement or replace intuitively developed values with scientifically proven ones.
Values harbor the danger of becoming ideologies. Those who oversimplify the world run the risk of chasing unrealistic values. This can lead to ultra-conservative humanism as well as utopian transhumanism, to atheistic communism as well as radical Islamism, to right-wing populism as well as pseudo-liberal wokism.
If spending too much time on social networks harms young people, as many studies have shown, then the weekly time spent on Instagram should be limited for young people under the age of 16, for example. In recent years, China has created and enforced such rules to great benefit of minors, but to the detriment of service providers. Physical and mental integrity is one of the UN’s fundamental rights.
It is high time we gained a better understanding of people’s needs and geared the development of technology towards them. If we — in 20 years- develop a viable and operational behavioral model, we can set this as a law for machine intelligence.
🤔 Questions
Does the value of freedom justify opposing a ban on cell phones in schools?
Which is more important: the humanistic value of equality or the need to use one’s own strengths for differentiation?
Do you think we can find well-grounded values for the digital world with machine learning?
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