Social media, vaccine hesitency and AI
At this pace, artificial intelligence (AI) won’t just want to replace us, we’ll need it to. If primitive Russian bots were able to dupe millions over the last couple of election cycles, what happens when the troll farms get their hands on tools like Chat GPT?
“It is already writing better than most of my students write … college freshmen,” says author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff.
Social media can spread misinformation and conspiracy theories faster than the truth can respond. And that’s just with human troll farms liking, sharing, and retweeting, or with bots with crude handles and bios like @JoeBlow6363088. What might advanced AI do when set loose in the already toxic social media sandbox?
What stone-knives-and-bearskins level trolling has bequeathed us is resurgent epidemics of childhood diseases like measles in middle-American towns like Columbus, Ohio (Washington Post):
Most of the 81 children infected so far are old enough to get the shots, but their parents chose not to do so, officials said, resulting in the country’s largest outbreak of the highly infectious pathogen this year.
“That is what is causing this outbreak to spread like wildfire,” said Mysheika Roberts, director of the Columbus health department.
The Ohio outbreak, which began in November, comes at a time of heightened worry about the public health consequences of anti-vaccine sentiment, a long-standing problem that has led to drops in child immunization rates in pockets across the United States. The pandemic has magnified those concerns because of controversies and politicization around coronavirus vaccines and school vaccine mandates.
More than a third of parents with children under 18 — and 28 percent of all adults — now say parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their children for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR)to attend public schools, even if remaining unvaccinated may create health risks for others, according to new polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health-care research nonprofit.
A recent study estimates that COVID-19 vaccines saved over 3 million lives in this country. The authors concluded, “Without vaccination the U.S. would have experienced 1.5 times more infections, 3.8 times more hospitalizations, and 4.1 times more deaths.” Yet the breakdown in trust in government and in science killed unknown millions suspicious of politicians and expertise.
“We’re living in a progressively anti-science era, and that’s a very dangerous thing when you’re dealing with a very deadly pandemic that has already killed more than a million people in this country,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told the L.A. Times.
Much of the conspiracy-mongering has a partisan bias, but much of that accelerated through social media-spread misinformation. The “politically polarized nature of COVID-19 information, and misinformation, on social media has given rise to anxiety, sadness, anger and hostility that feed incivility,” researchers from the University of California, Davis found.
The problem has a feedback-loop aspect. Biotechnology helps reduce COVID infections and deaths while computer technology helps fuel both backlash against it and the political valence of opposition to government and science.
The Post again:
The growing opposition stems largely from shifts among people who identify as or lean Republican, the Kaiser survey found, with 44 percent saying parents should be able to opt out of those childhood vaccines — more than double the 20 percent who felt that way in 2019.
They’re all about freedom, but not about their fellow man.
Anne Zink, chief medical officer for Alaska’s health department, saw her first case of chicken pox recently in an unvaccinated young woman covered in painful sores. The patient thought the disease no longer existed.
“I was like, ‘Well, it really doesn’t when all of us choose to get vaccinated, but you aren’t vaccinated, your family’s not vaccinated, and the people you hang out with are not vaccinated. Chickenpox has been spreading in your community, and now you’re really sick,’” Zink recalled.
What’s also at work here is that when science and government work as intended people take them for granted. We take for granted that people are not killed by smallpox, paralyzed by polio, or disfigured by Hansen’s Disease. As Joni sang, you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?
The bomb cyclone dropped temperatures here 40 degrees in a few hours Friday morning. In another time there would be no warning save for Uncle Charlie’s trick knee. But I spent Thursday applying Armor All to the door gaskets on our vehicles (and leaving the doors unlocked) so they would open at 0° F. I charged phone, laptop and flashlight batteries. How did I know to do that? The National Weather Service, NOAA weather satellites, and the government-created internet.
People are mighty selective about what parts of the government and science they trust and what parts they don’t. Ironically, the same science that saves their lives teaches them to distrust both to the point of removing them from the gene pool. It will be even more ironic when AI replaces us all. How’s that for freedom?
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