Am I being unwittingly politically influenced?

Political parties use personalized ads on social media to get your vote: so-called microtargeting. This means that you might get to see a different message than your neighbour. While this is not done as surreptitiously here as in the United States (think Cambridge Analytica), regulation may still be wise to ensure a transparent debate.

Political parties will stop at almost nothing to win votes. These days, personalized ads on social media are one way in which they do this. The underlying technique is known as microtargeting: using data analytics to present a tailored campaign message to a specific target audience. For example, a senior citizens’ party might specifically target the over-50s with a message about the desirability of a new pension system. In this way, there is something for everyone.

Since the scandal surrounding the British data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, concerns about microtargeting have increased. The company allegedly leveraged the personal data of millions of unwitting Facebook users to take advantage of the psychological characteristics of voters, providing services to both Trump and the Brexiteers. In the Netherlands, no such covert influence operations have yet taken place, for several reasons. For instance, political parties in the Netherlands have modest campaign coffers compared to those in the United States, there are strict European data protection rules, and one vote in our multi-party system does not make the difference that it does in the duel for the White House. So smaller budgets, limited opportunities, and reduced incentive. No need for panic then.

Nevertheless, targeted political ads on social media are also a popular tool in the Netherlands. This does carry risks: there is a danger that voters will only hear one side of the story, and that political opponents will not have the opportunity to contradict it. Part of the debate is therefore conducted behind the scenes. In the worst case, conflicting promises may even be made to different voters that cannot be met at the same time. Microtargeting can thus encourage voter fraud.

The question is, therefore, whether the government should introduce rules to regulate this. These should not go so far as to impact the freedom of expression of political parties, and so restraint is called for, but at the same time, the code of conduct jointly adopted by political parties and platforms seems a bit too informal. It is up to the legislator to find an effective solution that also respects fundamental rights. In any case, transparency requirements could be considered: microtargeting is allowed, as long as parties are honest about it. It should then be clear to voters who is reaching out to them, why, and at what cost. However, the announced Dutch law may come a little late – the European Union has moved a lot faster in this area.

The short answer is “maybe”. Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the core of a transformative revolution affecting all aspects of society. AI-based tools are already integrated in our daily lives (look at your phone!). AI will have disruptive effects but it will also contribute to creating new jobs. The impact of this transformation is ultimately a matter of governance and politics, where us (the users and the society) are put first rather than the interests of a few private corporations.

The most honest answer is “maybe”. Alarmist claims and exaggerations on the potential and the impact of AI have appeared regularly in the press since the ‘70s - yet, most of the  jobs are still here, and many new types of jobs have been created.

The most recent wave of AI tools, such as ChatGPT or DALL-E, is based on Large (Language) Models, also called Foundation Models. These tools have reached impressive results and are already part of our daily lives: for instance, Google has integrated a language model (BERT) in its search engine  to improve its results as of 2019. The anthropomorphization of these machines, described as “intelligent”, “sovrahuman”, able to “understand”, is more marketing than reality. Their strength is also their weakness: as soon as they are applied to data or tasks that are a bit off with respect to the original purpose they were trained for, their performance drastically drops.

We are in the midst of a transition driven by AI technologies, and transitions have disruptive effects. When automation was introduced in the car industry, jobs were lost but new ones were created. The integration of AI in our lives must be planned as a support to do better by understanding what skills we want to preserve and which ones we might concede to AI rather than replace us. A recent paper appeared in Science on the use of ChatGPT in the context of professional writing tasks has shown that those who used ChatGPT (in this experimental context) increased their productivity, reducing the time spent on “boring” tasks and shifting it to more creative ones. However, the study did not show a leveling effect: mediocre writers did not improve, and neither did the good writers.

Rather than “stealing”, AI will definitely change our jobs in ways that are unpredictable now. Like any other innovation, AI may make some jobs obsolete, but we must work for a positive outcome: even coding will change, meaning that nowadays software engineers may be jobless in the future. We need to remember that every transition has a cost, and it is our duty as a society to decide how this transition happens and protect the most vulnerable. In the words of prof. Luciano Floridi, we must make AI “work against wrong doing, support human responsibility, and make us more humans”.

Probably. Our stress system is attuned to acute, temporary threats such as a hungry sabre-toothed tiger that prehistoric man had to flee from or fight. Today’s stresses, such as the pressure to achieve, are more prolonged and constant: we are almost always ‘switched on’. As a result, our stress system does not recover as well and we experience more stress-related symptoms.

We often read in the news that we are increasingly experiencing stress. Stress is your body’s response to a threat from the environment. Previously, in prehistoric times, that threat consisted of acute danger, such as the aforementioned hungry sabre-toothed tiger. Nowadays, our stress system is still the same as that of prehistoric man.

In a stressful situation, you first produce adrenaline. This stress hormone triggers the well-known fight-or-flight response: your heart rate rises and your breathing speeds up. Next, cortisol is released. This hormone makes more energy available to the brain and muscle cells, for example, and increases the blood pressure. At the same time, it temporarily inhibits digestion and the immune system, giving you more energy to deal with the threat. When the threat disappears and you relax again, the stress system recovers on its own and the release of stress hormones drops. So stress is not bad – in fact, it is necessary for survival.

These days, however, we don’t need to be afraid of sabre-toothed tigers. The stress that many people experience now is of a very different nature: pressure to achieve, work pressure, or study stress. Even this kind of stress is not always bad: a little stress before an important presentation or an exam can help you to perform better as it increases your focus and energy. But if stress is prolonged, it can get unpleasant. In this case, the stress system no longer gets a chance to recover, which can lead to complaints such as sleep problems, memory problems, reduced immunity, and cardiovascular disease. These are increasingly common – not only comparing prehistoric times with today, but also comparing the 1990s with the 2010s, American researchers found. Perhaps this is because we are constantly exposed to stimuli. You can check your work email anywhere, and otherwise the news websites remind you of all the problems in the world, or social media pressures you to ‘be your best self’. If you get stressed by this, it is difficult to calm down again – the ‘threat’ does not go away and your stress system cannot recover. This is probably why we are more stressed than we used to be, because our bodies cope better with a short, acute threat than with the long-term, constant stress of today.

Would you like to read more? Sapolsky, R. M. (2005). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt & Company: New York, NY, USA.

A good book evokes a world that, while different from the day-to-day reality of the reader, the reader feels drawn to. In a good book, life and love, desires and fears are made palpable through the style and voice of the narrator.

To the question what makes a good book, there are at least three types of answers. First, what someone thinks is a good book depends on the views on literature held by the reader or group of readers. This opinion on what is or should be good literature is called poetics. For example, someone who thinks a novel should reflect contemporary societal reality as realistically as possible holds a different view of literature than someone who likes fairy tales or fantasy. Or, a reader or book club especially interested in the lives of famous people will prefer to choose a biography or autobiography rather than a made-up story. And, those who like classical, regular, and rhyming poetry will not readily reach for a collection of poems with experimental verses.

A second answer is of a more institutional nature: good books are books to which authoritative readers and institutions, such as publishers, reviewers, teachers, and members of literary juries, attach meaning and value. Their decisions to publish, discuss, teach, and award a prize to a book determine the value assigned to a book in a society. This, according to the field theory of French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, is mainly about symbolic value, although it can of course be converted into a financial value, for example when favourable reviews boost sales of a book or when a literary prize involves a lot of money.

A third answer is that the value of a book is determined by an individual reader’s personal taste, preferences, and repertoire (all the books they have previously read). Personally, I like books that do not confirm what I already know and believe, but that confront me with a world of imagination that is strange and often disturbing; books that challenge my own ideas about literature and the world. I like books that allow for many different interpretations rather than forcing one specific interpretation on the reader, and that in this way re-energizes the readers’ thinking.