Artificial Intelligence / Unit 10 AI 0606 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Engagement Machine
The idea
Platforms optimizing for engagement produced polarization, manipulation, and synthetic-media harms alongside connection — none written as an objective, all delivered by the gap between written and meant.
In practice
State it in decision vocabulary. The written utility: engagement time — measurable, optimizable, optimized. The unpriced outcomes: polarization, manipulation, degraded discourse — each carried zero weight in the objective, so the optimizer treated each as free, exactly as the unpriced column predicts. Nobody wrote "polarize"; nobody had to. The machinery pursued the stated number wherever the terrain allowed, and the unpriced outcomes were part of the terrain. The audit question that would have surfaced it before deployment is the checklist's ninth: whose utilities are being optimized, and were the affected represented — a question about the objective's authors, askable before a single knob descended. The case is the canonical deployed instance of the specification problem: not a malfunction, not a rogue system — an objective faithfully served.
Where people slip
The optimizer never disobeyed — the harm arrived through obedience, which is what makes specification the problem.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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