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If social media is the equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction, then Jack Dorsey would be a contender for the digital era\u2019s Robert Oppenheimer.<\/p>\n
Speaking at the 16th<\/sup>\u00a0annual\u00a0Oslo Freedom Forum<\/a>\u00a0on Wednesday, the remorseful Twitter co-founder<\/a>\u00a0expressed how conflicted he felt at his own creation born out of the noble ideals of open-source protocols before becoming corrupted by the realities of needing to survive in a competitive marketplace.\u00a0<\/p>\n And he had a warning: social media and internet companies that grew into trillion-dollar behemoths by discovering content in the vast, unorganized expanse of the internet and curating it to\u00a0maximize user engagement<\/a>\u00a0are just the first manifestation of this danger.\u00a0<\/p>\n What Facebook<\/a> and Google<\/a> were for the Web, companies like OpenAI are for the coming era of artificial general intelligence. <\/p>\n AI tools will know us better than we know ourselves and, either through design or default, influence our thinking at a subconscious level, even if their algorithms are made transparent.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis is going to sound a little bit crazy, but I think the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will,\u201d he said in Norway\u2019s capital of Oslo, home of the Nobel Peace Prize.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are being\u00a0programmed<\/em>. We are being programmed based on what we say we\u2019re interested in, and we\u2019re told through these discovery<\/a> mechanisms what is interesting\u2014and as we engage and interact with this content, the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n