Recommender Systems, trained to maximize revenue, are punishing kids for being curious.
I'm specially refering to YouTube here. Take for example the "cell biology" subject. In a few videos ahead you'll start getting non-scientific videos, as "recommendations".
Suffices to say that those videos speak about widely discredited life theories but with nicer stories.
These recommendations exploit the human brain in ways that even the creators can not comprehend.
We could, for example, use these technologies to teach children to solve equations. Use ML to find the optimal, user specific, series of teaching material that takes a child from zero to "can solve any equation involving +,-,* or /". But no, "we don't have the resources". Ah! want to go from cell biology to cute animations of pidgeons? Yes, we have de optimal path to get you there for free on YouTube.
Was watching a (non-related) YouTube video the other day when a recommended video on Sumerian tablets popped up. Being a bit of an ancient history buff I clicked on it. Took like 5 minutes plus to determine it was a crackpot UFO aliens created Sumerian culture video. Because it looked convincing at first.
This reminds me of the recent story of automated content generation for kids on youtube, some of which is borderline abuse, and a lot of which is nonsensical in its entirety(lots of money being made, regardless).
The problem is that because of this flood of automatically generated content, anyone who actually is creating content has to do similar things or else be left behind by the recommendation algorithm.
I'm specially refering to YouTube here. Take for example the "cell biology" subject. In a few videos ahead you'll start getting non-scientific videos, as "recommendations".
Suffices to say that those videos speak about widely discredited life theories but with nicer stories.
These recommendations exploit the human brain in ways that even the creators can not comprehend.
We could, for example, use these technologies to teach children to solve equations. Use ML to find the optimal, user specific, series of teaching material that takes a child from zero to "can solve any equation involving +,-,* or /". But no, "we don't have the resources". Ah! want to go from cell biology to cute animations of pidgeons? Yes, we have de optimal path to get you there for free on YouTube.