<nettime> Please show some conscience

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

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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