Questões de Inglês

The Illusion of Free Choice in the Age of Augmented Decisions

 

The age of digitalization has created new opportunities for individuals, organizations, local governments, and countries to cooperate and mutually benefit from each other. Technologies such as smartphones and mobile Internet have enabled global networks and extended opportunities for individual and collective engagement and cooperation. Further, tasks that formerly meant tedious, long-lasting work or that could not be accomplished at all have become possible and even trivial with the extensive use of constantly improving technologies. However, more convenience has led to a growing reliance on these types of Technologies in human decisions. In the augmented world in which we live, a growing number of decisions are designed by smart technologies – with unforeseen consequences for individuals and societies. Augmented decision-making undermines the freedom of choice. This is the price we pay for convenience.

The dark side of digital convenience: There is a darker and often invisible side of the coin as well.

Loss of freedom of choice: Augmented intelligence frees us from many chores, but it also limits free choice. We rely on our technologies, often unaware that we do no longer get the full picture but instead a reality that might be curated for a specific purpose. In such cases, freedom of choice becomes an illusion. Humans have become accustomed to “doing everything” on their smartphones, and this tendency is reinforced by the apps and services of organizations such as Facebook, Google, and Netflix. Tech companies use technology as a vehicle to construct individual subjective reality, the internal space that frames our decision-making. Most of the information that humans base their decision on is filtered and presorted by algorithms, which use huge amounts of user data to produce highly individualized recommendations to nudge us towards certain options. While such algorithms make our lives more convenient, they also fulfill various organizational objectives that users may not be aware of, and that may not be in their best interest. We do not know whether algorithms augmenting human decisions truly optimize the benefit to their users or rather the return on investment for a company. In other words, producing a positive user experience is often a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Polarization of beliefs: A potential cause of harm to societies and democracies is the emergence of information bubbles, enabling and strengthening the polarization of beliefs. Biased outcomes shape our identities, our view of the world, our social relationships, and most importantly, the decisions we make. For instance, YouTube alone accumulates in total more than one billion hours of watchtime a day, and 70% of this time comes from watching recommended videos. Smart algorithms instantaneously and simultaneously recommend millions of videos to its users. At the same time, they test how to best retain user attention. Once a user continues to view another video, the recommendation was successful, and the algorithm has controlled the user’s decisionmaking process. Under these carefully designed circumstances, humans may lose the ability to consciously choose between freely exploring or stopping to explore the content on the platform. Free choice is competing against smart algorithms that track and use individual preferences, while the user cannot control or does not fully understand the purpose and functionality of these algorithms. If such an algorithm learns that conspiracy videos are optimizing user attention, it may continue to recommend such videos until even radical conspiracy theories become a kind of shared reality for users. What they consume affects how the users think and behave. Even though users decide what they watch, YouTube’s algorithms, and also Facebook’s and Twitter’s, have a large influence on what content – and what ideas and opinions – get amplified or silenced.

https://www.nim.org/en/dokument/2021mirdarksidesarticle freechoiceeng

No texto de Fabian Buder, Koen Pauwels, and Kairun Daikoku, os autores afirmam o seguinte: “A potential cause of harm to societies and democracies is the emergence of information bubbles, enabling and strengthening the polarization of beliefs. Biased outcomes shape our identities, our view of the world, our social relationships, and most importantly, the decisions we make.”

 

O termo em negrito, biased, pode ser substituído, sem alteração de significado, por qual das alternativas a seguir?

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

    A study conducted by researchers in the US found that losing just one hour of rest could kill people's desire to help others, even relatives and close friends. The team noted that a bad night appeared to dampen activity in the part of the brain that encouraged social behaviour. "We discovered that sleep loss acts as a trigger of asocial behaviour, reducing the innate desire of humans to help one another," said Prof Matthew Walker, co-author of the study at the University of California. "In a way, the less sleep you get, the less social and more selfish you become."
    The researchers suggest that a chronic sleep deficit could harm social bonds and compromise the altruistic instincts that shape society. "Considering the essentiality of humans helping in maintaining cooperative, civilised societies, together with the robust erosion of sleep time over the last 50 years, the ramifications of these discoveries are highly relevant to how we shape the societies we wish to live in," said Walker.
    The team examined the willingness of 160 participants to help others with a "self-reported altruism questionnaire", which they completed after a night's sleep. Participants responded to different social scenarios on a scale from "I would stop to help" to "I would ignore them". In one experiment involving 24 participants, the researchers compared answers from the same person after a restful night and after 24 hours without sleep. The results revealed a 78% decline in self-reported eagerness to help others when tired.

(Sascha Pare. www.theguardian.com 23.08.2022. Adaptado.)

No trecho do terceiro parágrafo "The results revealed a 78% decline in self-reported eagerness", o termo "eagerness" pode ser substituído, sem alteração de sentido, por

Leia um trecho do livro Animal Farm, de George Orwell, no qual o velho porco Major discursa para os demais animais da fazenda.

 

    “Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty. No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.

    But is this simply part of the order of nature? Is it because this land of ours is so poor that it cannot afford a decent life to those who dwell upon it? No, comrades, a thousand times no! The soil of England is fertile, its climate is good, it is capable of affording food in abundance to an enormously greater number of animals than now inhabit it.”

(www.marxists.org)

 

In the excerpt from the second paragraph “it cannot afford a decent life to those who dwell upon it?”, the underlined words refer to

Text

 

    “Books are not absolutely dead things”, wrote John Milton in 1644. A book is a physical object, yet it also signifies something abstract, the words and the meanings collected within 1t. Thus, a book 1s both less and more than its contents alone. A book 1s a metonym for the words that we read or for the thoughts that we have as we read them. At one level, like any domestic object, a book takes on the imprint of its producer and its users. Old books have further value as containing the presence of many other readers in the past. Yet, more than other objects, a book 1s felt to embody not only a physical memory but also a record of past thoughts. The book contains both its reader and its author. In Milton”s more poetic terms, books “contam a potency of life mn them”, because they “preserve the extraction of that living intellect that bred them”.

 

    The book thus achieves a further mystery, of transforming what appears to be purely immaterial and conceptual into something with a concrete form. I is therefore not entirely extravagant for Milton to claam that a book possesses “a life beyond life”. Destroying a book, then, 1s a crime worse than that of homicide, since a book encloses the life of more than one person and exists in more than one time. Paradoxically, regardless of the material survival of a physical copy or artefact, a book 1s something immortal and imperishable.

Brian Cummings. The book as symbol. /n: Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen. The Book: a global history. Oxford: Oxford Universit Press, 2014 (adapted).

The meaning of the passage “It is therefore not entirely extravagant for Milton to claim that a book possesses “a life beyond life” (second paragraph of text) would remain the same 1f the word “extravagant” were replaced by

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    Film enthusiasts may argue that human beings need visualization to understand a story, but I disagree. The bond a reader has with a book 1s one of the most transcendent relationships one could ever have. No matter how words and phrases are written and arranged, not everyone will interpret them the same way. Though the story 1s written the same, each reader 1s different and will be affected by that story im an unparalleled way. The author writes the sky 1s blue or that the valley was vast, but how a reader visualizes or connects with that small bit of context creates a world of its own. Understanding the thoughts of a character and the reasoning behind them creates a genuine bond — one that is responsible for bringing so many beloved characters to life.

    A book's limits go as far as the reader's imagination. No matter the genre, books awaken the bran in a way that pushes us to understand and imagine for ourselves. As the protagonist and characters grow, so does the reader.

Internet: scadscan.com (adapted)

In “The bond a reader has with a book is one of the most transcendent relationships one could ever have” (first paragraph of text), the second occurrence of the word “one”

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Olympics Delayed

   The Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and the International Olympic Committee
      President Thomas Bach agreed on a proposal to postpone the Olympics until 2021.
      They will happen no later than the summer of 2021.

      Abe said that they decided this to protect the health and safety of the athletes and
5.   everyone else in the event. Abe and Bach said that they wish that the Olympics can be “a
      beacon of hope” to the world. The Olympic flame will stay in Japan and the event name
      will remain the Olympic and Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020.

      In Japan, there are more than 1,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus, and worldwide,
      there are almost 400,000 confirmed cases, as reported by John Hopkins University as of
10. Tuesday morning.

Fonte: https://www.newsinlevels.com/products/olympics-delayed, accessed on March 30th, 2020.

Mark the correct alternative which shows the appropriate question tag for the sentences, fromthe text .