Hacking probably came up with Harari, who wrote the book Sapiens. There's this view that in a post-enlightenment culture the customer is always right, the voter knows best or that you should trust your heart and your feelings because they are truly your own. We're increasingly living in an age where we have people on one side of the screen and supercomputer AIs on the other side of the screen who know more about us than we know about ourselves. If you think about that situation, if you enter a room and you know more about the other person's mind than they know about their own mind, who wins?
Why does magic work? It works because there's an asymmetry where the magician knows something about the limits of your mind. They can hack your mind, because they know something that you don't know about your own mind. Any time that's true, in that asymmetric situation, the party that knows more will—quote, unquote—“win”.
We're enabling new forms of automated psychological influence—again, the fact that YouTube calculates what has caused two billion people to watch that next video—and we're just throwing that at new human beings every day. We say that if it works at getting you to watch the next video, then it must be good, because the customer is always right and the voter knows best. But, that's not true. We're really wiring in the lizard brain and calculating what works on lizard brains, and then showing that back to people and creating a loop.
Artificial intelligence turns correlation into causation. It used to be correlated that people who watch this now watch this, but then AI can drive that into a causative loop. The problem is that we're creating a chaos loop, because if you take feedback loops and you feed them into themselves, you get chaos as a result. That's what's happening across our social fabric by hacking humans and feeding them back into the loop.