Development of Machine Learning… how is it impacting our daily life and how should we overcome?
Humanity achieved more significant technological advancement in the last few centuries than rest of the human history. Although it is still questionable whether technological advancement means better life for the humanity, no-one will ever doubt the fact that it significantly impacted humans’ everyday life style.
Yes, we are living in an era with the highest rate of change in our lifestyle which none of our ancestors have ever witnessed before.
Back in the early 2000s in South Korea where I was raised, there was this popular cartoon channel called “Tooniverse” which is very similar to Cartoon Network in the US. For most of my childhood days, I was just watching this channel without even knowing which cartoons will come up next. There was no choice for me to choose what I am going to watch, but I was just exposed to whichever ones this channel was going to provide. However, all the kids at this time period still loved this channel, and this was something they could not live without.
In less than 20 years, kids these days in South Korea are going through totally different life style. They do not even know what Tooniverse is anymore and have absolutely no interest about it. Rather, they have Youtube, Netflix, Instagram and TikTok etc. Through these platforms, they can watch whatever they wish to based on their area of interest. Furthermore, these smart platforms offer you variety of recommendations and for most of the times, they correctly match with the ones people are actually interested with.
There were variety of technological advancements which made all these possible such as faster internet speed, better processors, better displays etc. However in my understanding the core field of improvement which made all these possible was rapid growth in Machine Learning Algorithms.
In 2020, Netflix ironically though released a documentary film called the social dilemma. This documentary shows experience and confessions of engineers who have been working to build machine learning algorithms in tech giant companies in Silicon Valley. It clearly depicts examples of how easily people could fall to become biased through social network.
In this documentary, tech giants recommend exposure of medias done through machine learning techniques, and people just constantly watch the ones they wish to watch without sensing the other side of the world. In the end, each individual ends up being manipulated by the social media to become extremely stubborn and biased.
For these reasons, we should be aware and try to seek for balanced learnings between digital and analogue. From time to time, having an effort to actually go beyond digital recommendations would definitely make you becoming a more broad minded and well-rounded individual.
These efforts include following but not limited to:
- Try read more news on the actual news-papers without recommendations.
- Try visiting actual book stores to find a book that seems interesting.
- Go watch movies which your friends recommended.
- Have more conversations with variety of people around you.
- Go out and enjoy more outside activities such as hiking, running, rafting, etc.
I personally am a huge fan of technology and am really excited to witness upcoming changes throughout my lifetime. However, we should never forget that our mind and creativity is built up based on our unique ideas.
