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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