13How should I use it?

The screen only you see

The AI you've met so far was all new to you today.

This one is different. It's the AI you use every day.

The more you pick, the more one kind fills the screen. The rest quietly slides off.

Once you've picked ten, press Show me all of them.

Lots of videos you've never seen, right? Those never made it onto your screen.

The machine shows you videos like the ones you chose. Choosing for you like that is called .

Your screen isn't the whole world. Now and then, press something you'd usually skip.

A little deeper

For grown-ups, and for children who want more.

This is a recommender system, and everyone ending up in a different world because of it is called a filter bubble.

The shape is a feedback loop. What you press raises a score, the score decides the next screen, and you press again from that screen. Each turn narrows things a little — and the narrowed-away side never appears, so you cannot see it. While it happens nothing seems wrong, and the screen stays fun.

The arithmetic here is very simple: one score per topic, and the six slots divided in proportion to those scores. At the start every score is equal, so all six topics get one slot each.

Worth saying plainly — recommendation is not a bad thing. It is a useful feature that finds what you want quickly. The single problem is that you cannot tell it has narrowed.

Try together — open the same app on a grown-up's screen and the child's, side by side. Same app, different contents. One question — "why are they different?" — collects this whole chapter.

What a child may ask — "can't we just turn recommendations off?" Mostly you cannot. So instead of switching it off, the workable move is pressing something you would normally skip, now and then.