Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, has issued a warning over social media algorithms and Elon Musk actually agrees with him.
The cofounder of the popular social media platform has said he feels conflicted over his own creation.
Speaking at the 16th annual Oslo Freedom Forum on Wednesday, he explained he was torn over wanting open-source protocols but them being persuaded by trying to survive in the competitive market.
Dorsey, who is said to be worth $4bn, gave a warning over social media and internet companies and the idea of free will, detailing the free speech debate isn’t what people should be focusing on.
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He said: “This is going to sound a little bit crazy, but I think the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will”.
Big technology giants, Google and Facebook, changed the world wide web landscape, and now companies like OpenAI are doing the same for artificial intelligence.
Dorsey added: “We are being programmed. We are being programmed based on what we say we’re interested in, and we’re told through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting—and as we engage and interact with this content, the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias.”
Jack Dorsey left Twitter in 2022, the year Elon Musk purchased the social media platform for $44bn. He left the board of the microblogging platform, and ever since, Musk has completed a total overhaul of the platform, with mass firings, rebranding and walking back on decisions and protocols put in place beforehand, such as suspending accounts who wrote derogatory and hateful remarks on various topics, to sexism, racism and threats of violence.
But Elon Musk agrees with him, posting ‘Yeah, Jack is right’, on Wednesday.
But Dorsey says revealing the underlying code to establish trust and transparency, won’t help the situation.
He believes an algorithm is a black box, even if it is open-source.
The tech entrepreneur warns it can be changed at any time and it is impossible to predict how it’ll work.
He warned: “Because people have become so dependent on it, it’s actually changing and impacting the agency we have.
“We can resist it all we want, but it knows us better than we know us, because we tell it our preferences implicitly and explicitly all the time, and it just feels super dangerous to continue to rely on that.”
Instead, he believes there should be a market for algorithms, so users can choose which black boxes they want to use, and be able to switch between them, or build their own.
“Five companies are building tools that we will all become entirely dependent upon,” Dorsey added. “And because they’re so complicated, we have no idea how to verify the correctness, we have no idea how to verify how they work, [or] what they’re actually doing.”
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