In the video, Jack Dorsey discusses the significant control that algorithms have over our lives. He advocates for giving individuals control over these algorithms, allowing us to decide what content is presented to us. You can read the full excerpt below.

“I think the real debate should be about Free Will. We feel it right now because we are being programmed. We are being programmed based on what we say we’re interested in, and we are told through these Discovery mechanisms what is interesting. As we engage and interact with this content, the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias. But the algorithm, even if it’s open source, is effectively a black box. You cannot predict 100% of the time how it’s going to work, what it’s going to show you, and it can be moved and changed at any time. And because people become so dependent upon it, it’s actually changing and impacting the agency we have, the free agency we have. I think the only answer to this is not to work harder at open-sourcing algorithms or making them more explainable about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, but to give people choice. Give people choice of what algorithm they want to use from a party that they trust. Give people choice to build their own algorithm that they can plug in on top of these networks and see what they want. They can shift them out as well and give people choice to have really a marketplace around an algorithm that you can choose.”

Jack Dorsey
CEO of Block, Inc.