I don't know, I just went to find an ad in my feed and the first one was for a house plant that was easy to take care of. I'm not saying I'm the smartest cookie in the shed, but I didn't detect any manipulation. Seems like it was a person who just wanted me to know about their product.
I haven't seen the plant ad, but it sounds like once you start learning about how the ad industry works your mind will be blown. Insane amounts of money have been poured into research by the industry (including some highly questionable research being done on children and infants) and some of the results are fascinating.
The manipulation goes beyond even the content of the ads themselves. For example, one of the reasons companies are spending so much money collecting/buying/storing/securing every scrap of data they can get about you and your life is so that they can target ads at you at specific times when they know you'll be more vulnerable such as times when they know you'd normally be tired, or when they think your medication may be wearing off, or during periods where you're under high stress, or when you might be entering a manic phase, or when you're intoxicated, etc.
Like I said, understanding the many many ways that you are vulnerable to their tricks can help but it won't stop them from working on you. It's kind of like how you can't not see certain optical illusions even though you know you're interpreting them incorrectly. The conclusion I've come to is that it's best to do everything you can to avoid exposure to advertising where possible and to keep an eye out for when those tricks are being used against you elsewhere.
So a company should not be able to recommend therapy ads if I seem stressed? Ozempic if I seem like I want to lose weight? Laxatives if I seem constipated, or energy drinks if I'm sleep deprived?
Trying to moralize ad targeting is exhausting. It's not inherently a bad thing to target an ad to someone who's in a bad spot, or really in general.
People who buy the product are presumably competent enough to manage their own finances. Acting like they're being exploited constantly because ads hinted that they weren't masculine enough, or too fat, or being their peers, etc. is ridiculous. Ads aren't like cigarettes.
It's more like companies recommending an alcoholic who has been sober for 13 months his favorite drink because they know he is going through a divorce and is currently 15 feet from a bar, or a company targeting a person with Alzheimer's right at the time they know they'll start sundowning, or even just cranking up nostalgia in their advertising because they know your last surviving parent died and for the first time you won't be going home for the coming holidays.
Ad targeting these days can be intensely personal and manipulative. There are lots of ways ads could be used that aren't harmful, but also lots of ways that they can. Imagine an ad using a deepfake of your own child who died in a car crash telling you in his voice how he might still be alive if your car only had <insert new safety feature here>. There are clearly lines that can and should be drawn. There are extremely unethical practices happening today because companies are amoral monsters that only care about money and there are almost no laws or regulations to stop them from doing whatever they want.
Ads aren't like cigarettes. You make the choice to smoke or not, but ads are just forced on you. Only rarely are you given any opportunity to opt out of them, and the industry spends a lot of money trying to circumvent any efforts you take to cut them out of your life. You can quit cigarettes, but they wont let you quit advertising.
And it's worth noting that there are laws that restrict advertisement of cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
Meanwhile let's also not forget the post itself on which we are commenting: accusations that social media companies have, in fact, engineered their products to be addictive.
Either you intentionally misunderstood his point and deflected or you honestly seem to think this way. In either case, you misapprehended what he meant.
Which is certainly better than just having a human remote drive.
But it’s still not the impression they’ve been giving. It’s been an impression of full automation (ignoring getting stuck) and if it’s not navigating on its own that’s disingenuous.
This approach has two benefits: it can be unstuck without sending out a physical driver and while collecting training data, and it efficiently lets m humans control n cars with a wide range of acceptable m and n values.
It's intended for the ratio of m:n to smoothly shrink as the software gets better, but m will always be greater than zero.
> “They provide guidance. They do not remotely drive the vehicles,” Peña told the Senate committee. “The Waymo vehicle is always in charge of the dynamic driving tasks, so that is just one additional input.”
This indicates a very misleading title. It sounds like they aren’t remote “operators” any more than I “operate” the tv station by deciding what channel to watch.
You’re saying there were no forum boards nor comment sections anywhere? And everyone self hosted every single piece of content they wished to send it into the world?
Isn't the algorithm published monthly on GitHub since a couple of weeks ago? You think they are gonna find a commit message "feat(racism): improve antisemitism capabilities".
I currently live in a downtown area, and "walkable city" policies like this is why I'm going to move to a big open suburb when my lease is up. It makes life much more of a hassle, especially in cold weather.
If you're willing to put in the legwork, set up a event on your events platform of choice, take out an ad targeted locally and emphasize that it's free, and someone like me would sign up. I occasionally get ads for things happening locally but it's usually has some prepay component and feels like they are "dropshipping" an event. There are also [city] events pages on IG/fb
One thing you can do: glue the device into a dock, hook it up to the family TV then set the expectations that they can only use it when an adult is around (or take the power adaptor when you leave if you need to be strict about it).
But the author is right, it should be easy to set appropriate limits out of the box.
Let me know what I'm missing.
reply