Nature, Nurture & Probability

Perhaps those devices have been relatively benign up to now, but increasingly, the devices and their applications are intruding more and more into the everyday lives of humans all over the globe. For longer than we have realised they have been driving human behaviour, rather than augmenting it. Social media has not actually been social, since ten minutes after its inception. And I wonder if that is a cause for anguish for the likes of Mark Zuckerberg - who probably started with genuine intentions. 

What actually is the net benefit of social media now? AI has been bleeding into apps for longer than we realise. Fundamentally, it works by merely guessing the most likely response for a given prompt. When this isn't balanced by intelligence, experience and empathy then how can it be trusted to look after beings that do possess these things? 

Would any parent really choose to entrust the care of their child to a total stranger in an unknown location? Clearly yes, because that's many do when they allow their child to stare in a trance at a device for hour upon hour and converse with who knows who..? Apps are inherently addictive, but as with casinos, the house always wins as the chips are always stacked against the player. Even the die here is flawed, in the same way that bookie's odds never add up to 1.