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Is social media becoming the sorcerer's apprentice?

Published : Thursday, 20 February, 2025 at 12:00 AM  Count : 777
Major Tanvir Hossain, psc
In my childhood my mother told me the story of Sorcerer's Apprentice. This was actually a fourteen-stanza poem written by German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1797. This poem was later featured in Disney's animated film "Fantasia". This fictional story was told and re-told many times to the kids through animated movies and cartoons. In the story an old sorcerer was living in a German village. A young boy came to him and expressed his desire to learn magic spell from the old sorcerer. So, the old sorcerer accepted him as an apprentice. One day the old sorcerer was planning to go to the market. Before leaving the house, the sorcerer told his young apprentice to fetch water for him. When the old sorcerer departed then the apprentice started fetching water with a bucket. For making his task easy he enchanted a magic spell into a broom. The broom started fetching water for the young apprentice. Soon the young apprentice realized that he did not learn how to stop that magic broom. By that time the broom already fetched so much water that he needed to stop the broom from fetching more water. Seeing no other option, the young apprentice took an axe and chopped the broom into two pieces. Then he saw each half of the broom turned into full broom and fetched double amount of water. The house was about to be inundated but suddenly the old magician returned home and understood what went wrong. He cast a spell to the broom and stopped those. The young apprentice then understood that only a master magician should invoke the powerful spirits.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice story demonstrates the wisdom that experts should perform the specialist job not the novice. However, we see more often than not the opposite is happening in our society. Let me give an example of social media to demonstrate my argument. When Facebook was first publicly used in 2006, then instantly it became very popular for its easy reach. Moreover, Facebook was very popular amongst young people specially university students. Some critics voiced their concerns about Facebook but young people welcomed the software warm heartedly. Facebook's owner Mark Zuckerberg became instant millionaire. Seeing the success of Facebook many more software like Instagram, Tik-Tok, Uber, Twitter, Telegram etcetera popped-up and a competition in the start-up world commenced. The world witnessed a typical explosion of ideas and inventions. The scene in scientific research and exploration saw unprecedented rise in new technological advancements. So, most of the tech enthusiasts were affirmative that these all start-ups and soft wares were going to change the world and creation of a digital Utopia might be underway.

But soon the data scientists and the computer scientists realized that whatever progress has been achieved so far, it was creating new tech-savvy millionaire's group only. Previously world had a problem of wealth gap issue between rich and poor. But in twenty first Century a new problem aroused i.e tech savvy-millionaires versus marginalized people. Tech Mughals built big-tech companies like Google, Facebook, You Tube, Instagram, Uber, Amazon, Ali Baba, Ten-Cents, Baidu etcetera to solidify their tech hegemony. They also adopted all kinds of business techniques be it good or bad, to earn supremacy in tech industry. Sometimes the big tech giants adopted various nefarious business model to gain success and popularity.

For them business ethics, customers privacy, information security and philanthropy became secondary. As an example, I can site a recent example of Facebook. In 2017, Facebook's algorithm incited Myanmar's Rohingya pogrom by Buddhist majority. This is not a blame to Facebook rather Facebook authority accepted this incident and its role during Myanmar's Rohingya pogrom. Before that Facebook was blamed for "Cambridge Analytica" incident for selling its user's data without their prior permission to a third party. The list goes on and on. But the point here is that all these business malpractices is done for maximizing profit at the expense of user's data safety.

Now let us see the business model of You Tube. Initially this video streaming platform became very popular for its well renowned features. But soon we realized that You Tube is also using its algorithms to manipulate its users to maximize its profit margin. In 2010 You Tube's target was to gain 100 million views per day but the You Tube authority was not satisfied with this profit margin. They rather set an impossible target of achieving one billion views per day in 2020. It might seem impossible at first glance but You Tube has achieved this target by manipulating its audience. Many of the children, young adults, women and marginalized people have reported to suffer from mental health issues after watching many hours of You Tube videos. Same goes with Tik-Tok. Its sudden rise in hi-tech industry surprised many experts. But when it was launched in 2016 in China, its audience retention became highest in the world. After somedays TikTok also faced criticism as it was also a profit monger platform which uses user's sensitivity in creating contents which seemed socially, ethnically, religiously and politically insensitive to many. But even after seeing the repercussion when TikTok authority continued its malicious operations worldwide, then USA banned TikTok in USA for its users. Witnessing this development many other countries followed the footsteps of USA.

Last one is the example of education-based tech business model named "Baiju". Baiju was an Indian tech entrepreneur who developed a business model where his company sold education as a product. He and his wife developed the platform named "Baiju" where they taught millions of students following distance learning (DL) method. And all users had to pay a handsome amount of money before logging in. As years progressed Baiju became more business focused and less student centric, so its hype ultimately faltered after 15 years. Baiju's business model bubble burst in just a decade after its launch. It showed that all these short-sighted tech entrepreneurs knew how to start their business but did not know how to control those for the betterment of humanity. Just like the Sorcerer's Apprentice they could not visualize the potential danger lurking beneath the surface.

So, as of 2024 we can see startups are being controlled by algorithm to Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Generative Intelligence (GI) and Super Intelligence (SI) etc. Most of the scientific progress has been made on the basis of trial-and-error methods. If everything goes right then as users of those great marvels, we don't have any problem. But if those platforms are creating more rifts in the society and creating wealth gap, then who will solve those issues. Sometimes governments are also becoming helpless in front of those tech giants. In that case a digital dystopia instead of a digital Utopia will be more obvious outcome. Therefore, we all should be very cautious about these startups and free soft-wares.

The writer is an Army Officer



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