told The Atlantic<\/a>, contemplating the implications it had for his free will.<\/p>\nLike many a man, he then had something of an existential crisis while going to a bar with his friends. \u201cThe new hip bar is exactly where a computer would expect me to go,\u201d he remembered thinking, recalling all the apps and platforms that sent him to the same spots perfectly optimized for his interests, without ever challenging him to try something meaningfully new and different.<\/p>\n
Being a programmer, Max came up with a programmer\u2019s solution. He made an app to summon an Uber that would take him to a surprise location in the city. Only the driver knew his destination. \u201cHis experiments were like uncertainty exposure therapy,\u201d The Atlantic wrote. He visited a leather bar, a planetarium, and a bowling alley he never knew about on the other side of town. Soon, he became addicted to algorithm-ordained chaos, randomizing decisions like where he ate, the tattoos he got, and what music he listened to.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn choosing randomly,\u201d Max told the magazine, \u201cI found freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Max even quit his cushy Google job in 2015 and surrendered himself to another algorithm he designed to choose where he should live around the world. For over two years, he moved from city every month or so, from Ho Chi Minh City to Berlin. No one could doubt his commitment to the bit.<\/p>\n
But was this truly freedom? Certainly Max no longer had to deal with the agony of making\u00a0decisions, but in relinquishing his choices to a randomizer, where did his own autonomy stand? Michel Dugas, a psychology professor at the Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec, told The Atlantic that he saw random decision making as a way of avoiding responsibility, rather than truly embracing uncertainty.<\/p>\n
This didn\u2019t seem to bother Max \u2014 until he ended up at one particularly dispiriting destination. During a cross country roadtrip back in the US with his future wife, the algorithm brought him to Williamston, a rural town in the middle of North Carolina\u2019s swamps \u2014 or in other words, nowhere. \u201cWhat are we even doing here?\u201d he asked himself.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then Max had another \u201cMatrix\u201d style revelation. \u201cWhen you live randomly, you create lots of noise, but that noise doesn\u2019t really move in any particular direction,\u201d he told The Atlantic. \u201cI realized I was seeing all this newness but wasn\u2019t building toward anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Max is settled down with a wife now, and plans to start a family. But he still enjoys chaos in small doses, like randomizing what food to order from the menu. Max, in the opinion of The Atlantic reporter who eventually sat down to get dinner with him at a \u2014 yes, randomized \u2014 restaurant, wasn\u2019t performative but \u201cgenuinely passionate about getting outside his bubble.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cWhen you have a fixed plan, a fixed identity, a fixed routine,\u201d Max told the reporter, \u201cit\u2019s easy to become trapped in a prison of your preferences.\u201d<\/p>\n
Max\u2019s total embrace of randomness was perhaps a little overboard, but it\u2019s a fascinating case study in how we deal with that powerful itch to break out of our molds. Futility is often the path we choose, and we recede pack into our rigidly structured lives. But even if leaving everything up to a randomizer isn\u2019t truly the ultimate expression of free will, lying somewhere between the red pill and blue pill, if it helps you get over that paralysis you feel about your life, then why not?<\/p>\n
Of course, this can take a grimmer bent in our age of ever more powerful algorithms and AI models, which are designed to keep you engaged by constantly serving up more of the stuff you\u2019ve liked before. Many people now use chatbots for recommendations on what music to listen to and movies to see, to plan trips, and seek advice. The danger becomes that you end up trapped deeper in your comfort zone, never daring to hazard anything that AI figures isn\u2019t a safe bet.<\/p>\n
More on algorithms: Watchdog Issues Grim Warning About Letting AI Run Your Life<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up to see the future, today Can\u2019t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Stop…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676492,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":["post-676491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}