Volume, Velocity, Virality

Soon we will be like ants. Seemingly mindless. Living as if we were in eusocial colonies. At least that’s what an extraterrestial observing Earth might surmise by looking at the largest growing entity on our planet. What is this entity? The Meganet. Huh… what? We’ll be looking at the features of a meganet from the point of view of David Auerbach, author of Meganets – subtitled “How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities”.

 

Let’s begin with Auerbach’s concise definition: “A meganet is a persistent, evolving, and opaque data network that controls how we see the world.” And why these three qualities?

·      “persistent because its value comes from it never being offline and never being reset… there is no way to restart or even pause a meganet without destroying it.”

·      “evolving because thousands if not millions of entities, whether user or programmers or AIs, are constantly modifying it.”

·      “opaque because it is difficult and frequently impossible to gauge why the meganet behaved in a particular way.”

 

The meganet is a complex system – more than the sum of its parts. It is tightly integrated with a tangle of feedback loops that make it impossible to predict what will happen next. Global weather and climate change are also complex systems. You can’t turn them off. Tiny entities, atoms and molecules, in the gazillions, contribute to macroscale effects that we can only partially model. And that’s even when we understand a lot of what’s going on from the physical sciences. Any large scale modern A.I. today? It’s mostly a black box to even the best computational scientists.

 

Why are meganets complex? Auerbach stresses the three V’s: Volume, Velocity, Virality. What makes a tweet go viral? Re-tweeting. A lot. Like spreading a virus. It’s an exponential increase. Even if every person that received a tweet echoed it to two other individuals who hadn’t yet, you’d reach over a billion people in just thirty steps. That’s a high-volume tweet. And thanks to fiber optics, it literally moves at close to light-speed. High-velocity! Humans might be slow, a botnet wouldn’t wait for us.

 

Auerbach provides plenty of examples: An Elon Musk tweet. Gamestonk. FarmVille. FaceBook. Those are some that I’d heard of. I learned more about the underbelly of the meganet, things previously unknown to me. And one thing stands out: the meganet essentially takes a life of its own. The original person who started the cascade has very little control of what happens next. Hiring an army of content moderators can’t stop evolution at such speed. You could shut the system down entirely. But then you simply have nothing. Auerbach delves into the insidious integrated relationship between meganet-gaming and money, from Farmville gold-mining operations to the “Corrupted Blood” phenomenon in World of Warcraft. I found his chapter on cryptocurrency and forced forks was particularly eye-opening.

 

We’re awash in fake news, fake pictures, fake videos. Or should that be AI-generated news, pictures, videos? Is it just the same difference? The problem, Auerbach argues in three pithy statements, is that:

·      “It is far easier to put information into the meganet than to remove information from it.”

·      “It is far easier for information to spread across meganets than for it to be contained.”

·      “It is far easier for information to be wrong than to be right.”

 

And it’s unclear if there are good solutions. Auerbach suggests a few in his final chapter on “taming the meganet”. But it’s unclear if they will work or if there is the will to even implement them. Perhaps the meganet is alive. Life finds a way. Living systems have evolved to be remarkably robust. But it is possible to kill them to extinction. Maybe that’s what happened on Mars. Or maybe if we dig deep enough we’ll find some microbes hanging out, waiting for us to provide them a flourishing environment. Could we pull the plug to kill the meganet? I don’t think there’s any going backward at this point. Will AI terminator-bots evolve? I think this less likely unless we’re remarkably stupid. But as we rely more and more on the meganet, it will reduce us humans to simpler modes of processing information. The curtain for humanity is when the machines reduce us down to its level.