Tim Berners-Lee: ‘We need social networks where bad things happen less’

Tim Berners-Lee: ‘We need social networks where bad things happen less’ The father of the world wide web talks about its first 30 years, the rise of the toxic internet – and whether Facebook needs to be broken up https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/15/tim-berners-lee-we-need-social-networks-where-bad-things-happen-less

“But then you should step back. It’s making a good case about how one particular wave of social networks can work, if you train the AI to maximise the engagement of the teenager. But if you train the AI to maximise the happiness of the teenager, or the efficiency of the teenager – well, then the whole thing would produce a very different outcome. You use the same software – you just turn the dial. You could imagine two social networks where most of the code is mostly the same – it’s just that one is optimised for one thing, and the other is optimised for another. And the unintended consequences in each case are completely different.”

D J

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