olia lialina on Fri, 23 Mar 2018 15:56:24 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Please show some conscience


what really strikes me (not only in this text but in so many of the last three years) is arbitrary, inconsistent and just meaningless use of the term AI. And this from people who are actually doing it!

On 22.03.2018 18:37, Morlock Elloi wrote:
Twitter thread from GOOGL ML employee:


François Chollet

The world is being shaped in large part by two long-time trends: first, our lives are increasingly dematerialized, consisting of consuming and generating information online, both at work and at home. Second, AI is getting ever smarter.
These two trends overlap at the level of the algorithms that shape our 
digital content consumption. Opaque social media algorithms get to 
decide, to an ever-increasing extent, which articles we read, who we 
keep in touch with, whose opinions we read, whose feedback we get.
Integrated over many years of exposure, the algorithmic curation of 
the information we consume gives the systems in charge considerable 
power over our lives, over who we become. By moving our lives to the 
digital realm, we become vulnerable to that which rules it -- AI 
algorithms.
If Facebook gets to decide, over the span of many years, which news 
you will see (real or fake), whose political status updates you’ll 
see, and who will see yours, then Facebook is in effect in control of 
your political beliefs and your worldview
This is not quite news, as Facebook has been known to run since at 
least 2013 a series of experiments in which they were able to 
successfully control the moods and decisions of unwitting users by 
tuning their newsfeeds’ contents, as well as prediction user's future 
decisions.
In short, Facebook can simultaneously measure everything about us, and 
control the information we consume. When you have access to both 
perception and action, you’re looking at an AI problem. You can start 
establishing an optimization loop for human behavior. A RL loop.
A loop in which you observe the current state of your targets and keep 
tuning what information you feed them, until you start observing the 
opinions and behaviors you wanted to see.
A good chunk of the field of AI research (especially the bits that 
Facebook has been investing in) is about developing algorithms to 
solve such optimization problems as efficiently as possible, to close 
the loop and achieve full control of the phenomenon at hand. In this 
case, us.
This is made all the easier by the fact that the human mind is highly 
vulnerable to simple patterns of social manipulation. While thinking 
about these issues, I have compiled a short list of psychological 
attack patterns that would be devastatingly effective
Some of them have been used for a long time in advertising (e.g. 
positive/negative social reinforcement), but in a very weak, 
un-targeted form. From an information security perspective, you would 
call these "vulnerabilities": known exploits that can be used to take 
over a system.
In the case of the human mind, these vulnerabilities never get 
patched, they are just the way we work. They’re in our DNA. They're 
our psychology. On a personal level, we have no practical way to 
defend ourselves against them.
The human mind is a static, vulnerable system that will come 
increasingly under attack from ever-smarter AI algorithms that will 
simultaneously have a complete view of everything we do and believe, 
and complete control of the information we consume.
Importantly, mass population control -- in particular political 
control -- arising from placing AI algorithms in charge of our 
information diet does not necessarily require very advanced AI. You 
don’t need self-aware, superintelligent AI for this to be a dire threat.
So, if mass population control is already possible today -- in theory 
-- why hasn’t the world ended yet? In short, I think it’s because 
we’re really bad at AI. But that may be about to change. You see, our 
technical capabilities are the bottleneck here.
Until 2015, all ad targeting algorithms across the industry were 
running on mere logistic regression. In fact, that’s still true to a 
large extent today -- only the biggest players have switched to more 
advanced models.
It is the reason why so many of the ads you see online seem 
desperately irrelevant. They aren't that sophisticated. Likewise, the 
social media bots used by hostile state actors to sway public opinion 
have little to no AI in them. They’re all extremely primitive. For now.
AI has been making fast progress in recent years, and that progress is 
only beginning to get deployed in targeting algorithms and social 
media bots. Deep learning has only started to make its way into 
newsfeeds and ad networks around 2016. Facebook has invested massively 
in it.
Who knows what will be next. It is quite striking that Facebook has 
been investing enormous amounts in AI research and development, with 
the explicit goal of becoming a leader in the field. What does that 
tell you? What do you use AI/RL for when your product is a newsfeed?
We’re looking at a powerful entity that builds fine-grained 
psychological profiles of over two billion humans, that runs 
large-scale behavior manipulation experiments, and that aims at 
developing the best AI technology the world has ever seen. Personally, 
it really scares me.
If you work in AI, please don't help them. Don't play their game. 
Don't participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some 
conscience.
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