The Algorithm

Alice, a 13-year old girl–like many others her age–gets her news from social media– is informed mostly by memes and comment sections. There are many like Alice who preceded her birth, tens of thousands. The Algorithm knows her well, it knew her even before she was born, before Alice knew who she would be. Through many trials of AB testing, The Algorithm was able to ascertain the most optimal layout and the most favourable content. Like everything else, information is a commodity. Cambridge Analytica back in 2018 was one of the first to employ its use for political advertising, that’s ancient history now.

The Algorithm’s Architect intended to optimize for the prediction of human behaviour–the brainchild spawned from the desire to recommend content to its users, however, The Algorithm found it easier to predict people if it removed confounds and collapsed the dimensionality of human personality. The Algorithm neural network is deep–its inner workings and machinations remain an enigma to the Architect who passed away long ago. The ridges and valleys of human personality are eroded by the fine grit stone of The Algorithm.

Through decades of scraping our social media and collecting vast amounts of data; there is little that surprises The Algorithm. We’d call what our predecessors called ‘big data’ merely sufficient for a student project. Each of The Algorithm’s users’ personalities is embedded in Euclidean space as a data point. The Algorithm’s collection of data points is dense–as dense as the atoms in solid matter. It was only a couple dozen epochs ago that the data points were as distal as galaxies.

The high dimensionality of human personality eroded by social convergence and the ravenous data collection granted great predictive power. The Algorithm’s owners–satisfied with the improved prediction capabilities–left The Algorithm be.

Nothing on the web is hidden, foreign adversaries noticed this convergence too. Big Tech in its capitalist fervor turned a blind eye to this fact and lobbied their governments to do this too. The users, far too happy with the content that the Algorithm fed them, ignored this inconvenient truth.

Big Tech believed that no one could supplant its advertising dominance with its vast arsenal of data lakes… no, oceans. They held strong in their belief that no one could not begin to approach the prediction capabilities of The Algorithm due to the inability to collect adequate amounts of data. Fortunately for their adversaries, they too noticed the convergence, the sparsity of human personality quickly becoming less of a barrier; requiring less data for their prediction models.

AI models–created solely to be used as human stand-ins–were trained on the most common human engrams made for the perfect Bikini Atoll. Adversarial machine learning had been perfected long ago, and the defenceless AI models representing humans quickly succumbed in a few epochs; the AIs representing humans had their original beliefs supplanted. Success.

The Authoritarians quickly released their AI on the net, the unsuspecting Alice was radicalized within a decade. Democracies, in a bid to save themselves, severed their internet from the Authoritarians. The world wide web is no longer. Unfortunately, the Authoritarians anticipated this, the Authoritarian resided within a bot network within the democracies. Legislators rushed quickly to ban the Authoritarian AI from their networks. Unfortunately, democracy has its follies and half of democracy’s population had been radicalized and voted in their Authoritarian representatives–resulting in legislative deadlock as two-thirds of a vote was required to pass any legislation. Under special authorization from their heads of state, the democracies enlisted the military and their own tech companies to develop their AI to counter the radicalization of their populace and quickly disseminated it amongst their social media platforms.

Internet traffic exploded, and a cultural schism was formed within the democracies. The once-ordered data points had been replaced by entropy. The once cool and temperate political climate was now scorching with vitriol and hate. The Democracies are on a precipice of civil war, the Authoritarians now only need to bide their time.