Let's start with an opinion piece from the MIT Tech Review, just to get ourselves acquainted with the word "User" and the world we now live in:
It’s time to retire the term “user” - The proliferation of AI means we need a new word
April 19 2024, Taylor Majewski for MIT Tech Review
A user is also, of course, someone who struggles with addiction. To be an addict is - at least partl - to live in a state of powerlessness. Today, power users - title originally bestowed upon people who had mastered skills like keyboard shortcuts and web design - aren’t measured by their technical prowess. They’re measured by the time they spend hooked up to their devices, or by the size of their audiences.As early as 2008, Norman [Don Norman, user experience legend] alighted on this shortcoming and began advocating for replacing “user” with “person” or “human” when designing for people. (The subsequent years have seen an explosion of bots, which has made the issue that much more complicated.) “Psychologists depersonalize the people they study by calling them ‘subjects.’ We depersonalize the people we study by calling them ‘users.’ Both terms are derogatory,” he wrote then. “If we are designing for people, why not call them that?”What were once called AI bots have been assigned lofty titles like “copilot” and “assistant” and “collaborator” to convey a sense of partnership instead of a sense of automation. Large language models have been quick to ditch words like “bot” altogether.
Image credit: AI Art - Homer Simpson with Hugh Wads of Money - 2024
And now let's go back to December 2023, to remember that kids have to be called users, because if we called them people, we might have to admit that they're not full-fledged, legitimate, 18-year-old, registered-to-vote, licensed-to-drive, eligible-for-military-service people perfectly capable of making decisions on procreation etc. Kids are the best users - they have no lawyers, and they have no prefrontal cortex, and that's what we like:
Social media platforms generate billions in annual ad revenue from US youth
Dec 2023, phys.org
Social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube collectively derived nearly $11 billion in advertising revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18 in 2022.
(But how much would it cost to get them to stop committing suicide? I wonder.)
via Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: Social media platforms generate billions of dollars in revenue from U.S. youth: Findings from a simulated revenue model, PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0295337
Here we are reminded that it's not just helpless, innocent children being harvested for their parents' bank accounts, but their parents too. And it's not even about taking your money anymore, but something else:
Roku patent invents a way to show ads over anything you plug into your TV
Apr 2024, Ars Technica
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