Is automation hurting us?
Watch this postAs a new Silversurfers member, I have wondered why a couple of my polite article comments have utterly disappeared. And then it hit me: Both of those comments that disappeared contained URLs (i.e., "links") to YouTube videos, so the "system" must have interpreted my comments as SPAM and automatically removed them.
It's pretty much the same on most web sites. I spent a good deal of time carefully selecting videos for those very nice comments! When we stop to consider that a main feature of the internet is the usefulness of "hypertext links," a feature that allows us good folks to communicate in ways beyond just old-fashioned ways, we begun to understand that what bad folks do, combined with the "system" of "protection" that is in place, is actually HURTING us good folks, preventing us from enjoying a main, intended feature of the internet.
Do you feel that our being hurt like this should be addressed by our society? Sure, we can find workarounds to posting URLs, but workarounds tend to reduce the desired precision of our expression, sometimes to the point of pointlessness.
What do you think about this--what amounts to censorship--that is caused by anti-SPAM measures? Is there a better way than the current type of "automation"? What is the solution? Can we make our society BETTER?
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When we stop to consider that EVERYTHING that humans have ever come up with has been misused and abused, we begin to understand that AI will definitely deliver the hurt. We'll just have to take the bad with the good.
Perhaps an AI . . . "implementer" . . . might one day be good enough to determine correctly the CONTEXT of the posting of a particular URL and recognize whether it should be allowed or disallowed, in much the same way as a human can look at a URL and recognize whether it is a shameless plug or a genuine attempt to . . . maintain good culture.
In the mean time, I guess we'll just have to use our own smarts to outsmart the bad guys and our present-day algorithms, for the benefit of our culture.
It is machines vs machines, and with AI on the horizon I am guessing that this will continue in all that we encounter!