#80 | Not on LinkedIn
"You can’t understand how tech is going to affect a society if you don’t understand the society in question." — Nanjala Nyabola
“AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity – if AI has a goal and humanity just happens to come in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it, no hard feelings.” — Elon Musk
Social media is coming toward us, and it's big, hairy, has incisors and big clumsy paws. It is the umbilical cord to our social lives for many of us. It's also our connections to our professional networks.
I'm not active on LinkedIn. I'm not fond of it at all. It's like being at the world's worst networking event, where there's no security, where maniacs are welcome, and the nibbles are pre-fingered by Dave Johnson of PPT Paper Supplies. I’m trapped at the entrance at this networking event, caught between a "CEO Coach & Exited Founder" and a "LinkedIn Marketer" — both of whom are helping me find my professional voice. I'd rather be mute.
There's an opportunity cost to absolutely everything; even writing to you this week, I lost some sleep and felt some lowkey anxiety about whether what I'll publish is readable or sensible. There's an opportunity cost to socialising—you can't read at a party. But importantly, there's an opportunity cost to social media (*checks WhatsApp*), and no one would opt to spend ten hours a week at the world's worst networking event. Yet many do on LinkedIn!
And although it appears that some people get a lot of traffic or meet a lot of people, through the platform, we can use time much more effectively to meet people in real life.
It is, however, silly of me to neglect LinkedIn completely because social networks are the first place where "artificial intelligence" is encroaching on our sentient little lives. Our Facebook newsfeed is curated by AI, as is our Twitter feed. If I look at a friend's Twitter, none of the content interests me. It's dictated by who they follow, and who they follow is suggested by Twitter(!), and Twitter serves up the content. Their feed, and ultimately their information silo, is bespoke, differentiated, and alone. Mine is the same, as is yours.
LinkedIn's AI is already deciding who gets jobs, and it's purportedly making those decisions unfairly: it would select men over women since men are more likely to pursue the opportunity aggressively. In response, LinkedIn has developed AI models to counteract the intrinsic AI models within their own jobs matching system, as per their press release. The Vice President of jobs at Monster (which lists five million jobs at any one time) notes that "I think people underestimate the impact algorithms and recommendation engines have on jobs. … The way you present yourself is most likely read by thousands of machines and servers first, before it even gets to a human eye."
I just read The Age of AI by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher. In it, they comment:
'AI will usher in a world in which decisions are made in three primary ways: by humans (which is familiar), by machines (which is becoming familiar), and by collaboration between humans and machines (which is not only unfamiliar but also unprecedented). AI is also in the process of transforming machines — which, until now, have been our tools — into our partners. We will begin to give AI fewer specific instructions about how exactly to achieve the goals we assign it. Much more frequently, we will present AI with ambiguous goals and ask: "How, based on your conclusions, should we proceed?"'
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. But it’s not in Bromsgrove or Thika; it was at Silicon Valley for a while, and now, because of web3 and remote work, the future is harder to point at. It is, however, definitely at LinkedIn, with its jobs recommendation engine, and at Facebook with its content moderation AI.
Already no one can understand the depth and complexity of the AI that is recommending jobs or moderating content. No one can, aiside from in the most approximate way, completely answer the "why" about when content is shown or hidden, blocked or promoted. No human can understand the decisions made about what we see.
Therefore, we've crossed the Rubicon into a world where we have ceded control of some of our lives to machine partners. It's not that much of a leap to begin asking "pick the best person for this job", or "block the people you think we should block", or even "decide who I should date". This is a moment of significance for our species because we are no longer the lone flickering candle of reason in the Known Universe; we're accompanied and exceeded by machines that can reason and know more than we can dream.
My daily absence on LinkedIn is a small and irrelevant protest to the AI that governs our lives. Yet, perhaps it’s a mistake to opt-out, and not in.
My week in books
The Age of AI by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher; a fascinating insight into the good, bad, and sheer significance of AI and our time.
Live well,
Hector