By Cory Massaro 

Some claim the tech world wants you stupid and addicted.

This is not hyperbole. People are saying it plainly.

Tully et al.’s 2024 study, “Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity” encourages AI-related organizations to keep people stupid. Having established a statistical link between lower AI literacy and greater receptivity to AI, the authors “argue that people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical. Magic often relies on people not understanding or paying attention to how a magic trick works”. “Not understanding,” not “paying attention,” having “lower […] literacy”: the authors are talking about forms of ignorance.

The authors conclude “that companies may benefit from shifting their marketing efforts and product development toward consumers with lower AI literacy. In addition, efforts to demystify AI may inadvertently reduce its appeal.”

The cacoethical appeal

This kind of cacoethical appeal is not new in tech. A decade ago, there was a sort of Bible that sat on the desks of programmers at Silicon Valley start-ups. This was Nir Eyal’s Hooked, a manifesto on how to weaponize psychological research into addiction with the goal of creating “habit-forming products.”

Eyal begins with an observation: “The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions”. And beyond results or utility, this addictiveness has become – at least for some tech companies – their very reason for being: “...for many products, forming habits is an imperative for survival”. “Today, amassing millions of users is no longer good enough. Companies increasingly find that their economic value is a function of the strength of the habits they create”.

Having studied addiction, Eyal presents psychological affliction as a tool: “Hooked seeks to unleash the tremendous new powers innovators and entrepreneurs have to influence the everyday lives of billions of people ... My goal is to provide you with a deeper understanding of how certain products change what we do, and by extension, who we are”. But what if I don't want a product to change who I am?

Eyal’s ethical solution to this problem is simply to leave it in the hands of organizations themselves to behave properly: “For the first time, […] companies have access to data that could be used to flag which users are using their products too much. Whether companies choose to act on that data in a way that aids their users is, of course, a question of corporate responsibility”.

If you cut through the oratory, the shape of Eyal’s argument is this: you should trust the people who want you addicted to have your best interests in mind.

‘Soundness’

In logic, there is the notion of soundness: if you take a set of assumptions, then proceed (through valid reasoning) to a flawed conclusion, then your argument is unsound: something is wrong with at least one of your assumptions. Eyal’s manifesto reaches the conclusion, “Get people addicted.” Tully et al. recommend, “Keep people ignorant.” There are very few ethical frameworks under which addiction or ignorance is a good thing. These afflictions should not be cultivated, either in ourselves or in others.

The flawed assumption

So what’s the flawed assumption? In both cases, there is an underlying mandate that certain kinds of organizations should exist – and succeed. Eyal is addressing the general start-up founder audience; Tully et al. are talking to organizations that want to adopt or promote AI. But if the flourishing of a start-up demands mass addiction, then that start-up is likely a bad thing. And if an organization requires an ignorant populace in order to survive, then what does it say about that organization?

Cory Massaro is a writer, programmer, and computational linguist. He is an Ohio native, likely to wander, currently at home in Quito, Ecuador. He has given talks on responsible technology, language sovereignty, and artificial intelligence, issues which he also addresses in his writing.

Cory is currently producing the We Can Be Luddites essay series and supporting community-driven language generation as part of the Abstract Wikipedia project.

Views expressed on CIOL Voices are those of the writer and may not represent those of the wider membership or CIOL.