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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