How To Stop Getting Played By Technology Pt.6

Ever notice how your phone seems to know what you're about to do before you do? Because most people think it's because the algorithm knows what you like. What if I told you? It's not only predicting your behavior but it's quietly deciding what you'll never get to see. Once you understand what UCLA professor Sophia Noble discovered, you'll never look at your feed the same way again. Because most people think social is showing them the world but in reality, it's only showing them a version of it. Every recommendation, every video, every article, every job posting, every creator you discovered didn't appear by accident. Won a competition against millions of pieces of content you'll never know existed. Professor Safia Noble spent years studying search engines and what she found was algorithms shape what becomes visible and what fades into the background. Here's the simple version. AI learns from historical data. But history isn't neutral. It's full of human decisions that hold blind spots and assumptions. So when we train algorithms on that data, they learn facts most times but they learn biases too. Which means the algorithm isn't asking what's true. It's asking what is the most likely to engage with and questions. Two very different questions. Now imagine that happening hundreds of times every day. Slowly influencing what you laugh at, what you admire, who you believe and what opportunities you notice. Without ever realizing someone created the menu. Because the greatest bias is you're seeing the whole picture when in reality, you're only seeing the version that was ranked for you. So the next time you your phone, ask yourself if the best idea, the opportunity that could changed your career, or the perspective that could changed your mind and ever reached you? Because the only reason was because the algorithm predicted you wouldn't click. Here's what most people realize. Part of the story. Altering behavior is one. Maybe we'll talk about that next. An Information System (IS) is an integrated set of components that collect, process, store, and distribute data to support organizational operations I have a master's degree in technology and business, focusing on how people use computing resources to achieve organizational goals. Information Systems and about topics like these don't have to