Bruce Bisset: Open access to your mind app

Bruce Bisset, Hawke's Bay Today columnist.

As if there weren't enough to worry about, now we have to worry about technology controlling our minds. Literally.

See, for those who aren't aware, major platform hosts such as Apple, Google, Facebook et al are now using (or at best tacitly allowing) tech companies employing neuro-physicists and psychologists to not only analyse and profile users by their browsing and response habits, but to write programmes aimed at manipulating your use of technology.

They do this via purpose-built apps and predictive algorithms designed to identify an individual user's state of mind, and then manipulate it by introducing "rewards" subtly incorporated into that user's browsing or gaming so as to elicit an emotional and/or physical response.

A common aim of most such programmes is to keep the user using whatever browser or app or platform or game they are currently logged in to, because the more users are "on" something, for the longest time, the more "content-related" advertising dollars the platform can generate from its paying sponsors.

For example, an app may reward you for posting something by suddenly showing you a bunch of "likes" for your post - likes it has held back and accumulated until such time as it judges you are most susceptible to receiving them. (Yes, these programmes are that subtle.)

Your emotional response to this sudden flood of popularity causes your body to give you a "hit" of the chemical dopamine, which makes you feel briefly euphoric; you've just been "rewarded" for your loyalty to the app.

Naturally, your response is to stay on and keep using it - because it really does make you feel good.

You may not be paying their bills directly, but your body and mind have just been used to generate more click-through dollars for the company, while you find yourself spending more time than you otherwise would - or perhaps should - using a particular platform or programme.

And yes, they can do this, automatically, by tailoring the programme to interact with your individual real-time habits.

Diabolic? Well, that's one word for it.

So all you folk out there who worry about the possibility of Big Brother controlling you through your television or phone or computer screen can stop worrying. Because they're already doing it.

Apart from the ethics and morality of companies using your body against your unsuspecting mind to generate money for them via your online choices, this raises some really big questions for the future.

Or perhaps, the now.

For instance, politics. Let's say you decide to do an ostensibly-anonymous online survey on various political topics. The survey feeds back feel-good responses as appropriate, telling you you're in the "top 10 per cent" or "in line with the majority" with your opinion - which encourages you to go into greater detail.

A day or two later you receive an email from the XYZ Party outlining how they plan to do some of the exact same things you said you wanted. They invite feedback - and their programme also "rewards" you for speaking your mind.

Now you're starting to feel this party is one you could support. Before you know it, on account of the individually-tailored responses you receive on the topics on which you and the party agree - and only those, note - you're a card-carrying member.

That they also support some other things you wouldn't dream of backing escapes your attention - or should I say, is simply never put clearly in front of you. You help vote them in, regardless.

Far-fetched? Not at all. Variations on this theme are already happening - yes, even here in little old NZ.

You've just been techno-trumped. Bigly.

* Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.