Addicted to YouTube
As a culture we have become addicted to YouTube. In episode #218 of The Making Sense Podcast, Sam Harris interviews Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, about the “cult factory” of social media. Tristan talks about several shocking things about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it is applied to social media. Tristan Harris also hosts the Podcast Your Undivided Attention with lot’s of interesting interviews along the lines of using technology wisely.
He states that is has often been a fear that technology would “Overwhelm human strength”. However, what has now happened, is far more dangerous, that AI is able to “Undermine human weakness”. He goes on to say, “They know us and our weaknesses better than we know ourselves.”
A startling fact is that “70% of a billion hours a day of YouTube is recommended videos.” That’s right. The default for YouTube is that when you finish watching one video, another will autoplay based on the AI’s recommendation for you. Specifically for you.
Keep in mind, this is not like leaving the TV on some random channel where you see whatever TV shows and commercials the station is broadcasting. This is literally “YouTube” where the channel is geared to you. Videos are geared to you. Ads are geared to you. Harris puts it this way, “what if you had TV channel that just showed you what it wanted instead of what you choose.”
So what’s the solution? You could log out of YouTube entirely. However, then you would miss out on any content that you actually choose to see. Instead, go to YouTube and disable these settings:
- Disable autoplay
- turn off notifications for subscriptions
- turn off notifications for recommended videos
By disabling these settings you put yourself back in control of what you watch and when!