With A.I., the private and public landscapes are changing. The interaction between user and tool might be the same, but what the tool does, has changed.
Google’s search is getting really good. Netflix’s recommender is good. Alone, they provide recommendations of content for exactly what you can like. This is huge and it is huge for the concepts of private and public.
Through the act of searching, we get to see from what general selection we make a decision. The items we pass by are options available to everyone. The selection becomes personal. In the instance of a public library, the library has many, many books. By seeing all available books, you get to create a knowledge base of books available to everyone. You see various categories with various skill-levels. They vary from fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and elementary school reading levels to college-level reading levels. By searching through the library, we are granted a well-rounded knowledge base from which to make our selection. There is value in knowing from what options you make a choice.
Services like Google Search, YouTube Recommenders, and Netflix improved upon picking a book out of the library. In the 2000’s to 2016, they were good at recommending items you were looking for. It was better than searching through a large catalogue in a library, and there were many more articles and books to choose from. This part is key: during that time, the search was just bad enough that you got to sift through articles you didn’t want to see. You might find what you’re looking for on page 4.
It is that knowledge base, that observation of the variety of choices, that enforce a “public” mind. The skipped items show what strangers might want, but you do not. Even though they serve no immediate purpose, you are still aware of their existence and potential value to someone else. An author wrote it for an audience; it’s just not you.
What A.I. has done, what the recommender systems have accomplished, is eliminating that awareness of public choice. It is so good at knowing what you want, when you scroll through the options, you see a customized library built just for you. When you make a choice in Netflix, YouTube, Google, you no longer scroll through a well-balanced knowledge base of items. You do not get that reinforcement of what the stranger might watch, but you won’t. Instead, you scroll through a world of information curated especially for you. You have your own private Google product. Any time you search now, you choose from a select knowledge-base as if it were your own private collection of movies and books. There is little chance you may stumble upon something randomly outside your interests because that’s not the way the scrolling works anymore.
Given this new scenario with making selections from a recommender system, if you still maintain the belief that you are scrolling through a public, well-balanced knowledge base to find what you are looking for, you will falsely believe that everyone thinks and has similar interests to your own. If you believe this, your world becomes narrow, and then, when confronted with someone else’s actual beliefs, it increases the surprise factor when it is discovered they are different than you. And, finally, the little exposure you did have to their beliefs, simply by coming across it through one of your searches, runs through a library, perusing a magazine at a doctor’s office, is gone. That benefit from an imperfect search evaporates and their behaviors now appear other-worldly.
The very good, A.I.-based recommenders that are the new machinery underlying search products have changed the tool. They create a private viewing experience, that makes a selection from a very narrow, imbalanced knowledge base. Their goal has been to provide what you are searching for, and as a side-effect, they’ve eliminated some of that static that helps round out an individual’s concept of other people and public.
So…
You must look elsewhere to get the sense of what “public” is. Turn and talk to the person next to you on the bus. Subscribe to magazines you have zero interest in. Ask a stranger what they are reading.