Algorithms and the Brain, Netflix in Our Heads

Seeing that I have run out of historic articles to inform you with, it as timely that I came across a story in the Australian Broadcasting Corp website this morning explaining how algorithms work with relationship to government policy in that country. It seems that governments around the world are learning from corporations like Netflix, how to standardise their relationship with us through the digital world. While the article was about the way government immigration in the U.K. has used them to fast track the visa process, and the debacle in the last term of the former government in Australia to try and claw back money from welfare recipients, for me it went much further.

It seems that the problem is that algorithms double up on themselves creating bias, thus distorting the information that they were used to fast-track. In Britain it created a racial catastrophe, whilst  Australia sent debt collectors out to hassle people with no debt to claim, causing suicides. corrections are being made and Royal Commissions held but the damage is done.

You see algorithms, clever as they are, are incapable of checking themselves. This is easily seen in Netflix. If you choose a few romances to watch the algorithm goes into overdrive and the recommendations you then receive are full of more romances, even though it may have only been a fancy for a short while. If you have consistently watched a certain genre for years, like me,  trying to explain to it that that's not who you are any more is impossible. meanwhile the library of the rest of Netflix offerings is withheld.

The study I have been doing into the workings of the brain for some years fits in well with this.  So much so that my next book currently on my computer, called The Enculturalised Mind, explores the way the neuronets, formed in our brain through repetition in childhood,  create belief structures in our unconscious, that sit there waiting for something to trigger them, causing us to act in a certain way. We don't think about it because it has become a habit pattern, that can either be helpful of otherwise. These beliefs were formed mainly before the age of 7 years old, so they are essentially naive.However, because they have been working from the unconscious  since their inception, we rarely question them. All of my clients arrive after years of acting on inappropriate neuronets for years until crisis hits. At that point they have no idea how they got there or how it happened that way.

The problem is of course, just like the ones experienced by the governments of the world;  algorithms don't thing. They assume. They assume that's what has always been and will serve now, regardless of the fact that so much changes all the time. Especially since we were kids. The rarely get updated. They double down. If you once met a vicious dog, all dogs are therefore dangerous. If Mum and Dad didn't like coloured people, then you don't either (unless you are rebelling against your parents then you will develope the exact opposite. These are just a couple of random examples, but I can assure you that it is going on all the time inside all of us, creating biases all over the place. And we only become conscious of this process when disaster, one way or another, its. Another common example is the reoccurring issue of people who were brought up in alcoholic families, marrying a drinker or becoming one, even though the repetitive process ruins their lives for so many years. We throw around the concept of 'learned behavior', but we haven't understood how it happens. The more we repeat it the more it happens. We assume that our beliefs are the right ones regardless.

So algorithms, whether digital or physical work the same way. We can change them but it takes awareness of our feelings to take us out of the mental assumption mode, into questioning ourselves. We have associated feelings that sit alongside all our actions. The more we question where something is coming from, the easier it is to see our behavioral patterns and begin to choose do try another way. Some of our deeper beliefs are hard to get to. In which case you need a good therapist that works with patterns to assist. But even the most deep seated ones can be changed if a person is patient and willing to not take their life for granted. Never assume things are stuck the way they are. You know what they say : Assuming makes an ass out of you and me.