I recently watched The Social Dilemma, a documentary that dissects the darker aspects of social media platforms and similar tech mega-services like Google and YouTube. There’s loads to be written about this film, but I want to focus on how the algorithms that go into these apps seek to keep you scrolling, refreshing, or otherwise exploring posts rather than putting down your device or looking at another app.
The film explains how social media companies do this so that you can also look at ads regularly placed between recommended content – it is the advertisers, not the users, who are paying these companies after all. But there are horrifying statistics on the effects of these algorithms.
Rates of teen and young-adult depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide have increased considerably since social media apps were introduced on mobile phones. Authoritarian regimes have used social media to dictate what content the users of their country see, as well as content foreign users see, to sow division or even try to determine election outcomes abroad. Conspiracy theories have gone viral, often leading to violent outbursts by their believers, as algorithms found out that such content makes people use the social media apps more.
Math is behind all these algorithms. Computers, supercomputers, AI, would all not be possible without the laws of mathematics, and it is for this reason that I think mathematicians should take films like The Social Dilemma very seriously. Mathematicians are a notoriously poorly-understood bunch — we conjecture and prove theorems about abstract concepts, and often struggle to either argue for their relevance or warn other users (scientists, engineers, financial analysts, tech companies) of their power.
Even though it is a struggle, it’s one that I believe all mathematicians should engage in daily. In a world more driven by data than ever before in human history, to strive for an understanding of the numbers, equations, and dynamics at play is vital for our survival. Mathematicians, and the mathematically minded, should do as much as possible to assert their perspectives on the future of their field and how it should be used in other fields.
There have been some positive steps in this direction. A few big AI companies and developers have agreed to pause advancements on this technology and more deeply research the inner-workings of large-language models – they will need a deep understanding of mathematics to do this. And throughout modern history, scientific labs have hired many mathematicians to lead theoretical departments when studying new and powerful technology – many of us saw this in another recent film, Oppenheimer.
But climate change and destabilizing forces on democratic nations (to name a few existential threats) require mathematicians to take more drastic measures than ever. More mathematicians should be involved in efforts to protect democracy and present effective strategies for combating social problems. We should also, in tandem, enhance our knowledge of ethics and increase participation in mathematics by historically underrepresented groups (both of which are still lacking in almost every mathematics Ph.D. program).
In short, my Tweet (or X-post?) is that mathematicians should seek to become more involved in the social arena, providing our knowledge in thoughtful, inclusive, and humanist ways. This dilemma should be on our minds as much as the next steps in our proofs.
