Big Data Terror

Few people are aware how fast the developments in Artificial Intelligence are going the last 5 to 10 years. I'll share a story with you and give some background information that will hopefully make you think hard on our immediate future as a species.

What am I ranting about here? Well, it's something I realized after watching an hour and a half worth of scientists at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence and A.I. Ethics development, discussing the impact this will, or can have on humanity. The main reason the developments have gone so fast these last years is the internet and the subsequent gathering of huge amounts of data. A.I. used to be so called "functional" A.I., driven by algorithms full of "if-then-else" statements. For every instance the algorithm traversed a decision-tree, following a path along branches representing subsequent true or false outcomes.

Nowadays A.I. is self-learning; the algorithm learns what the best decision is in any given circumstance, by evaluating the consequences of the decision afterwards, remembering it and taking that "experience" into the next decision-making event. This type of self-programming is only possible if the algorithm can be supplied with huge amounts of data to hone their skills on; and that's where the internet and all our personal data come into the very lucrative picture.

Old style A.I. is perfect at performing stuff for which millions of decisions have to be made to come to an optimal desired output; give it a database with millions of street-names and house-numbers, a map of the entire earth, photo's from individual streets in individual cities, and you've got all you need to make a globally functioning route-planner. Connect it to the internet and feed it up-to-date information about accidents and work in progress, and you have no excuse to ever get lost again, as long as you've got a mobile phone with Google Earth.

This is marvelous. But old style A.I. is very bad at some things we humans excel at. Like pattern- or facial recognition; it's extremely hard to design a decision-tree for an algorithm with the goal to distinguish between a picture of a dog and a picture of a cat. For us that's simple, because our brains have had a couple of millions of years to evolve that particular specialty. The flip side is that we tend to see faces everywhere and in anything: two dots and a line are enough to make us see a face.

But the internet has millions of dog-pictures and even more cat-pictures than there are grains of sand on every beach on the planet, so give the self learning A.I. Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram... And let it learn! After practicing on the dogs and cats of this nigh infinite database, this new style A.I. is now better at distinguishing cats and dogs, and also human faces than we are... On its own, this is a wonderful development; it's a testament to human intelligence that we're able to create intelligence that may be able to trump our own in time. But this gets scary, really scary when seen against a background of a humanity that's bound solely by a world economy based on greed, selfishness and the accumulation of wealth in very few hands.

During the discussion between the A.I. scientists the question came up if they weren't afraid of a backlash against A.I. from the general public, in the same way there's a public backlash against the current form of globalization. Their answers were fascinating and so indicative of the fact they are scientists, not economists or politicians...

What they said was essentially that it's a question of bringing the benefits of A.I. to the general population. One of them said that the fear is very understandable, seeing that at all A.I. conventions most people were badges from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Tesla... the large players that have been at the forefront of machine-learning (new style A.I.) for several years now. Key point is that they have the three components needed to make machine-learning work: the computational power, the money to buy the talent and the data.

Their algorithms are scary good. Online shops like Amazon suggest products you want even before you know you want them. When Netflix suggests a movie, it does so after learning about all your past views and any data they bought from other companies that could give them any clue as to what you would like to watch next. And if YouTube can suggest videos that actually match my interests, how difficult is it for that same algorithm to predict what political party I'll vote for come the next election? And how can they be used to shield me from information that might steer me toward a political or economical ideology that's not in the company's best interest?

This is alarming to say the least. The scientists, bless their hearts, go on to impress the abundance A.I. will bring, how it will surely cause humanity to lift up the poor and reduce the gaping gap between rich and poor. Self driving cars will cause the next wave of unemployment, and at the rate this stuff is developing, you can bet that more intelligent work will soon be taken over by A.I. in no time at all. Already in the medical professions a lot of diagnostics is left to A.I. capable of recognizing certain forms of cancer and other deceases. They even talk about the necessity for some sort of basic income for everyone because jobs as we know them will cease to exist.

Only one of these scientists warned about past experiences we've had with similar developments. At every stage that technology made possible more wealth, only a few reaped the benefits, as we saw in the agricultural revolutions and the industrial revolution. Each time technology provided humanity with more abundance, but the species as a whole remained at the same level: the overwhelming majority of us still have to fight every day for our daily bread, only the few that reaped the rewards that the technology brought are liberated. There's a name for that, it's called Capitalism. The video I saw with the scientists'discussion doesn't exist on YouTube anymore, or at least I can't find it. So I've linked another one below this post that also questions the power this type of A.I. and the collection of trillions of data-points concentrates in the hands of the modern tech-giants.

I promised you a story at the beginning, so here it comes. It's from 2012, when we weren't as familiar yet with these machine-learning A.I.'s... From Forbes.com, February 16th 2012:

An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:

"My daughter got this in the mail!" he said. "She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?"

The manager didn't have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man's daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again. (Nice customer service, Target.)

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. "I had a talk with my daughter," he said. "It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology."

What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

"If we send someone a catalog and say, 'Congratulations on your first child!' and they've never told us they're pregnant, that's going to make some people uncomfortable," Pole told me. "We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you're following the law, you can do things where people get queasy."

So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy scores books o' coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and the "Go the F*** to Sleep" book, they more subtly spread them about:

"Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

"And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works."
_{source: Forbes}

The technology isn't the problem here; as always we'll have to get a handle on that as we learn to use it to our advantage. The real problem here is the combination of this technology and an economic ideology that has proven to concentrate all power in a few hands. The morality, or better the lack thereof, of it all creeps me out, and that Target story should creep you all out: "...as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works." Everything goes for that extra sale. We can spy upon you as long as you don't feel that you're being spied upon. We can influence your buying behavior, so why not other behavior as well?

Thanks so much for visiting my blog and reading my posts dear reader, I appreciate that a lot :-) If you like my content, please consider leaving a comment, upvote or resteem. I'll be back here tomorrow and sincerely hope you'll join me. Until then, keep safe, keep healthy!