This may be the reason why AI is able to add fuel to the fire of other technologies such as analytical tools that monitor our behavior online, what we buy, who we talk to, where we have been, where we might go, with whom, and why.
All for a competitive advantage to make a profit.
AI’s use is rising exponentially with volumes of free data flooding every nook and nanny of our existence.
You might believe that this all harmless leading to the smarter handling of big data but we need to wake up if we think so.
Siri and Alexa are not machines with just catchy names nor are they AI assistants. Bring one into your life and you will be inviting general AI to take over your decisions. Aping the nuances of the human brain they will adapt to their environment demonstrating empathy and perception whether you are an idiot or not, inevitably it’s the former element that they are after. The blurring of the lines between man and machine.
The ramifications of which remain an elusive shadow on the digital horizon.
So what potential does artificial intelligence really have to change our lives.?
THE ANSWER IS VAST.
THE DIFFICULTY IS HOW DO YOU GET A BALANCED VIEW OF DATA AS ALL DATA IS BIAS.
Very often, when talking about AI, we like to automatically couple it with other terms such as Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Neural Networks. This makes it sound like over 90% of AI is this kind of statistical algorithm that only PhDs can understand.
This is where we are dead wrong about AI.
In order for AI to have a significant impact on our society, it must understand not only how to act like a human, but also how to think like us.
Unfortunately, while the information revolution has enabled us to collect petabytes of data on how we act in a certain situation, not much data has been collected on how we think. This makes it impossible to properly train an AI system.
Machines need to start learning how we conceptualize the world.
What this means for AI researchers and companies, is that the true future of AI lies in design, in an AI’s ability to interact with and learn from humans, and in understanding human contexts — not in more powerful CPUs and algorithms.
This also means technical prowess will become less and less important in building a great AI, relative to deep empathy toward the needs and challenges of the end users who will be interacting with these AI systems.
We must fully align the AI’s goals with ours, which is going to be strikingly difficult.
We must also ensure that every AI program has a surefire way of predicting how it will behave.
All AI’s programmes must have a shutdown button.
Human level AI may be centuries away however we are already witnessing the effects of both the good and bad they are bringing to societies.
What will it mean to be human in the age of AI?
THERE IS ONE THING FOR CERTAIN:
IF WE CONTINUE TO ALLOW MONOPOLY PLATFORMS TO RULE THE ROOST WITH PROFIT SEEKING ALGORITHMS WE WILL SEE INEQUALITIES ON GLOBAL SCALE.
SLAVE OR FREEDOM.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks dumped in the bin.
We are just beginning to realize that our societies are founded on a very limited definition of power.
Google it and you will see where the real power is.
Data:
As software devours the world (we are all producing trillions of it) – to be exploited by Algorithms, that are aligning us all in one direction of living, without awareness or the ability to truly see the world around us.
There is no argument that Artificial Intelligence is the way forward but what is the point if we are not citizens anymore.
We’re consumers AND WILL REMAIN SO FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE.
AI for profit is infiltrating every aspect of our lives and is going to expand the world inequality beyond wars.
If we want to change the direction of AI to serves us all we have to change the way corporations view us and the world.
And we all know that this is impossible.
There is no point in hoping that our governments are going to introduce regulations that are going to stick, as AI has passed the threshold of any transparency.
The warnings surrounding the AI revolutions are plenty.
The voiced by Elon Musk: ( Do you Trust this Computer) The not so late Prof Stephen Hawking warns us, Westworld: shows us.
Unfortunately, there is no money to be made ensuring that AI servers us rather than the owners of the algorithms. So we end up working on symptoms all the time, ignoring the causes till its too late.
This too late scenario is not an option with AI for profit that’s is now developing its own rules as to who gets what at what price, with little or no obligations for any of this technology to contribute to the core values of life.
AI might stabilize our environment, allow us to share more equally in the opportunities of life without damaging the planet, but this is pie in the sky.
The need for a balance needed for this technology which brings such benefits in terms of health, communication, education, safety, business, is now paramount.
In this, I am all right Jack world such an achievement would be surely something miraculous.
The reality is while we are all distracted, bombarded with false news no one has a crystal ball to see the future, but we do have the cultural history to know what happens when power is abused.
What will artificial intelligence do to us?
AI deals with ends: It establishes its own objects. In essence, AI represents thoughtless.
AI makes its own decisions about who and where to target.
We are in danger of losing the essence of human cognition. U Tube is full of disinformation rhetoric, social media full of weird views.
With social media playing such a big part in our lives, could we be sacrificing our mental health and well-being as well as our time? In some ways, the AI explosion represents the latest challenge for transparency.
What does the evidence actually suggest?
Conclusive findings are limited.
People use social media to vent about everything from customer service to politics, but the downside to this is that our feeds often resemble an endless stream of stress.
It won’t be long before marketers will be buying data science products that autonomously construct audience segments and our world organizations such as Governments will not be able to cope.
At the moment most of AI is narrow, meaning it is specifically programmed to accomplish one task or two, however it is well on the way to developing what is called general AI that will assist us with practically everything we do.
It must be remembered that machines will not learn the same way as humans do. They will think in an abstract way whether they are managing multiple goals simultaneously or not.
An example is Face recognition.
Before all of this happens:
Surely we as the creators of AI should be passing laws that require all AI programs to be vetted against human values. That a copy of the original program should be held in a virtual cloud strongroom available to one and all. (See previous Posts)
Until we have a viable path forward.
There are now billions of people walking around with supercomputers in their pockets, and they are all connected to each other by the internet. Unless we use this power to replace Capitalism with a form of Direct democracy that really recognize that we are interconnected, that our well being is inextricable from that of our ecosystems, profit-seeking Algorithms and there like will continue to rape our Planet.
In Jason Silva latest video (below) he conveniently ignores in his presentation the power of the planet to move not just continents but all of us.
When he advocates that AI, Biology, and Nanotechnology will combine to make nature with technology one and the same to become the motherboard of technology he ignores nature.
Nature is the physical world collectively, plants, animals, landscapes, oceans, air, and all other features and forces that are not created by man.
It won’t be the coming together of AI,Biology, Nanotechnology, nor big data, or patterns, that is going to tax the human imagination, rather the rewards of climate change that is well on the way to changing the planet we all live on.
All human comments and suggestions appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
If we ever wanted more evidence that we are now on the cusp of an event that is going to have a disastrous effect on society we only have to look at what is happening in the world at the moment.
Every advance in technology is moving us further and further from our attachment to nature.
Years of Capitalism for profit has produced – Pollution/Waste/ Excessive production/ Wars/ Climate change and technology in the form of AI. All asking the question is Capitalism obsolete?
It is not working for the vast majority of humanity.
Now faced with the arrival of Artificial intelligence, which if not regulated will control market forces, with the super-rich oligopoly of data billionaires reaping the wealth of automation and profit-seeking algorithms to the detriment of us all.
The more AI advances into a general purpose technology that permeates every aspect of life the less sense it makes to allow it to remain in the private hands rather than of the many.
Indeed there is already a case for nationalizing AI.
Its very pervasiveness is invading not just democracy but our private and social lives. Causing wars and exploitation of not just us but our economies – High-Frequency Trading, Sovereign Wealth funds, Currency trading, Trade Agreements, down to what toilet paper you wipe your arse with.
Its inability to spread the wealth, to tackle inequality and poverty not to mention its exploitation of privacy and democracy have recently seen -FaceBook.
No company should be allowed to possess an exclusive cutting edge technology or core AI platform. Indeed with Deep learning, we are now beginning to see programmers feeding computers with learning algorithms that expose them to terabytes of data resulting in software writing software.
THERE IS NO DISPUTING THAT THE WORLD IS GOING TO NEED THE POWER OF AI TO RESOLVE FORTHCOMING PROBLEMS.
But it must serve society as a whole instead of the private capitalist operating in their own self- centered interests.
It must be brought under social control by Regulation with the creation of a virtual world strongroom, where a copy of all original AI algorithms, software programs are required by law to be lodged to be held and vetted re there compliance with our core values.
As I said in a previous post;
We need to create a class of ‘algorithmic auditors’ — trusted representatives of the public who can peer into the code to see what kinds of implicit political and ethical judgments are buried there and report their findings back to us.
This is a good idea, though it poses practical problems about how companies
can retain the commercial edge provided by their computerized secret sauce if
they have to open up their algorithms to quasi-official scrutiny.
It is very unlikely that this will happen. We are however in danger of
App exploitation not only for profit but when there is no immediate cash peril –
culture, education, and crime.
We are well on the road to becoming slaves to the algorithms with computers
taking more than some tough choices out of our hands if we let them.
God forbid that some form of AI manages to become self-aware.
Such automated augury might be considered relatively harmless if its use is
confined to figuring out what products we might like to buy. But it is not going
to stop there.
Amazon Echo machine-learning services are both a powerful revenue generator that is going to remove us from any commitment to society or nature that sustains us all.
A low-cost, ubiquitous computer with all its brains in the cloud that you could interact with over voice—you speak to it, it speaks to you.
As companies build their vital machine-learning tools inside AWS, the likelihood that they will move to competing for cloud operations becomes ridiculously remote.
All technology programmers whether they are Algorithms for profit or otherwise should under Law be required to submit a verified copy of the program to be held in a virtual world strongroom, accessible to all ensuring transparency and accountability.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
Perception is at the heart of this question and of course, there are hundreds of inventions that could and should be mentioned if we had the time and space.
We began the 20th century with the infancy of airplanes, automobiles, and radio. We end the 20th century with spaceships, computers, smartphones, AI and the wireless Internet all being technologies we now take for granted.
However, the world is steeped in poverty with precious little in the way of humanitarian advancement.
HERE IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER IS MY LIST AND WHY.
The credit card:
Part of the fabric of modern day life. Credit no longer the prerogative of the elite. The ultimate symbol of the triumphant Anglo-American consumer culture. The modern manifestation of money. Allowed modern Banks to transcend national boundaries. Guarantees payment of debts.
Microchip: Fiber Optics: Microprocessor: Windows
Created the Credit Card. The Internet and the World Wide Web.
Artificial Fertilizers:
Enabled the further expansion of agriculture and pollution.
Internal combustion engine:
The why is obvious:
The pneumatic tire:
Did more for the engine.
The condom/ Birth pill.
The why is obvious.
Nuclear Power:
Nuclear power has long provoked ardent policy fights, historically centered on the perceived safety or danger of splitting atoms to keep consumers’ refrigerators running.
Today, it’s not local or environmental opposition but economics that’s crippling nuclear power.
It may be very difficult to meet international carbon-cutting goals without the widespread addition of nuclear plants.
This still leaves the problem of waste, and a choice between nuclear waste—deadly but the concentrated poison that lasts thousands of years—and fossil-fuel waste—invisible, diffuse carbon pollution that in sufficient amounts will transform the Earth for thousands of years.
While nuclear waste is nasty stuff, so are the conventional pollutants of fossil-fuel burning. Nuclear power avoids air emissions of over one million tons of sulfur dioxide and 650,000 tons of nitrogen oxides each year, as well as significant particulate emissions.
Since CO2 emissions persist for many years in the atmosphere emissions cuts made today are worth more than the same cuts made down the road.
The best invention may be Toyota’s Hybrid.
AK-47 Kalashnikov: M16:
The twenty century can be characterized by mass warfare and mass killing- two world wars, Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Cambodia’s killings fields, Rwanda the list goes on.
No firearm of any kind has killed more people.
It is the weapon of choice for terrorists, rebels with 75 million in circulation around the world accounting for 20% of the entire global stock of firearms. Every year, small arms kill between 20,000 and 100,000 people in the world’s conflicts. AK-47s Kalashnikov accounts for a high proportion – and quite possibly the majority – of this human toll. In the 68 years since the first prototype was made, the AK-47 has probably dealt death to millions.
This is the decade of AI (run by the Algorithm) I PAD, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook. Social Media. 3d Printing.
Will there use glorify peace? Not on the evidence so far.
Feel free to add yours and why.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
Facebook is simply a platform and will never be held responsible for its users.
We can’t blame tech makers for making their products so good we want to use them. We are in control. But are we?
Facebook like all other platforms has been distorted by the fortunes they have been able to earn through advertising.
Why?
Because the techniques these companies use are not always generic: they are algorithmically tailored to each person.
There can be no ethics when it comes to technological manipulation that can be sold to the highest bidder.
The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models. Thay have little incentive to deviate from the mantra that their companies are making the world a better place.
But how can Google and Facebook or ANY PLATFORM for that matter be forced to abandon the business models that have transformed them into the most profitable companies on the planet?
Notification technology enables hundred unsolicited interruptions into millions of lives, accelerating the arms race for people’s attention.
When you consider that the total size of all global data hit 20 zettabytes in 2017.
This probably means nothing so picture this: If every 64 – gigabyte I Phone were a brick, we could build 80 Great walls of China with the I Phones needed to store all the above data.
It’s growing every second and completely out of any control.
All of our minds are being hijacked.
Our choices are not as free as we think they are. The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions.
Billions of people have little choice over whether they use these now ubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a small number of people in Silicon Valley are shaping their lives.
We now have an internet-shaped around the demands of an advertising economy with technology platforms contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention.
Manipulating people into habitual use of their products or platforms with rewards or short-term social affirmations, while harvested valuable data about the preferences of users that could be sold to advertisers.
So what if anything can be done.
It is very common, for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.
We’ve truly reached a new level of technological time wasting, with the young generation unable to communicate.
If we the adult world cannot wean ourselves free a good starting point would be if we are to exercise our freedom by banning, iPhones, iPads, laptops and mobile phones from places of education.
They will become a real problem if you don’t, as they are ridiculous thing to be addicted to. It just something to use when you’re procrastinating or is it a procrastination-trap, a slate of tools destined to get you addicted.
We have to learn to deal more effectively with our emotions if we want to procrastinate less.
Such as varying the rewards people receive to create a craving, or exploiting negative emotions that can act as triggers. It makes them look like they have a life.
Social media and other addictive technologies have and are creating an attention economy, which is severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and is possibly lowering IQ.
One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before the Internet.
Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.
The mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. Everyone is distracted, all of the time.
Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation by looking at your I Phone, I Pad
If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to
”Chrome extension, called DF YouTube, “which scrubs out a lot of those external triggers” an app called Pocket Points that “rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus”
Get a life and use one.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.
I AM SURE THERE IS NO NEED HERE FOR ME TO REMIND YOU THAT TECHNOLOGY IS NOT ONLY CHANGING THE WAY WE CONDUCT OUR LIVES BUT THE WAY WE WILL EXIST IN THE FUTURE.
There is a wonderful aspiration by the writer Isaac Asimov introduced in 1942:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with the previous law; and a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the previous two laws.
I call the above an aspiration because as we all know that this will never happen.
We now have AI learning from AI, engage in cyberbullying, stock manipulation or terrorist threats. We also have AI surveillance, both private and public collecting data with or without permission.
A.I. systems don’t just produce fake tweets; they also produce fake news videos.
What, exactly, constitutes harm when it comes to A.I.? No one knows.
AI systems, are already no longer limited to a single set of tasks.
On the other hand, we need AI to tackle world future problems, such as climate change, threats from space, immigration, and sustainability itself.
There is no argument that regulation of what I call essential AI should be avoided.
However, my A.I. for profit or exploitation did it should not excuse illegal behavior.
A.I. system must clearly disclose that it is not human. As we have seen in the case of bots — computer programs that can engage in increasingly sophisticated dialogue with real people — society needs assurances that A.I. systems are clearly labeled as such.
We must ensure that people know when a bot is impersonating someone.
We must ensure that A.I. system cannot retain or disclose confidential information without explicit approval from the source of that information. Because of their exceptional ability to automatically elicit, record and analyze information, A.I. systems are in a prime position to acquire confidential information.
We must ensure that an A.I. system must be subject to the full gamut of laws that apply to its human operator. This rule would cover private, corporate and government systems.
Unfortunately none of the above is possible.
This is why I favor ( In the interest of caution) that we establish A World Technological Strong Room, just like the World seed bank where all software programmes are held and available to everyone.
Of course, it would be totally naive to think that all AI should be subject to scrutiny.
It’s not military nor intelligence AI that I am talking about, it is AI that is created for exploitation for profit.
Rather than regulating what AI systems can and can’t do that make it more expensive to develop AIs the strong room would hold the founding programme.
Because Artificial intelligence systems are now learning from each other and have the potential to change how humans do just about everything. We must ensure all AI has an impregnable “off switch.”
How can this achieve? and by whom.
This is where I am open to suggestions.
It could be A United Nations Cloud Strongroom, run by a world people algorithm that copies all existing software and Algorithms.
Companies making and selling AI software will need to be held responsible for potential harm caused by “unreasonable practices” Any sufficiently transformative technology is going to require new laws and New legislation that isn’t imminent.
I have posted on this subject before with little reaction.
There is often an implicit connection between discourses of the future and notions of technology, so that if we see a television programme with a title such as Click or Tomorrow’s World we expect that the topic will be technology.
The single most astonishing point about technologies is that they can move from being emblematic of an almost unreachable future to becoming so taken for granted that it feels like a personal slight when they do not work.
In this way technology in and of itself becomes a symbol of being modern is one of the reasons it becomes expressive of, rather than distinct from, cultural values.
Perhaps this is the reason that the relationship between social media and the conceptualisation of the future is still blurred and will remain so.
New technology does not just change the manner in which people go about their everyday lives: It also facilitates our imagination of the future.
All the above speak to a new, imagined future that strives towards idealism. However within the vast field of technology the consequences of AI there are a few devices and algorithms that will battle it out over the next twenty odd years for supremacy.
Will it be Smartphones, or Smart Wearable or Cryptocurrency that will augment reality.
All need software in the form of algorithms to run.
AI algorithms will make the physical and digital world interchangeable.
Practically every non- iPhone smartphone relies on an Android operating system?
One way or the other we are entering an age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.
Not surprising.
So it’s not Social media technology platforms like Facebook or Twitter and the others ( that talks a lot about connectivity but not accountability) that will change the world but the power of ever where at once.
That requires total knowledge on all aspects of life.
Google or should I say the Google Cloud is trying to achieve this.
Which is possibly both the best and the worst thing that could happen.
So let’s look at a few of the top combats in the world of technology in no particular order.
( Obviously it would take page after page to give a comprehensive insight so I am only going to give a few lines to each.)
Microsoft Corporation:(LinkedIn -Skype – Mojang – Yammer- Hotmail)
It operates through the following segments:
Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing.
Market Cap As of May 2017
$507.5 Billion
Microsoft could be worth $1 trillion by 2020 — if not sooner. It is moving further and further into a digital landscape for everything from movies, music, books, games and software.
Twitter: Owned mostly by Venture Capitalist:
An online breaking news and social networking service. Using Twitter bots, (live streaming video.) With 450 million monthly active users it is ranked the eleventh most visited website. It has mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 10, Windows Phone,BlackBerry, and Nokia S40.
Capable of influencing public opinion about culture, products and political agendas by automatically generating mass amounts of tweets through imitating human communication. World leaders and their diplomats have taken note of Twitter’s rapid expansion and have been increasingly utilizing Twitter diplomacy. Television programs use it to amplify their programs.
It could become the emergency communication system for track epidemics or sensor for automatic response to natural disasters.
Amazon:
The largest Internet retailer in the world. The company is now worth more than $560 billion. Electronic commerce and cloud computing company.
Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods, a high-end supermarket chain with over 400 stores, for $13.4 billion.
eBay Inc: (PayPal)
There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay. What’s more, eBay doesn’t care who you are, where you live, or what you look like:
The race is on to control mobile payments and the upside remains enormous:
Apple:(Shazam – Emagic- Siri – Beats Electronics – Next Inc.- Novauris-PrimeSense -The Bottom Line – Invest in Yourself.)
Quarterly revenue of $52.6 billion 2017.
Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
Facebook:(Whats App and Instagram Oculus VR.)
A publicly traded company worth more than $500 billion.
More than two billion monthly users. It is developing a new social platform in virtual reality called Facebook Spaces, which it believes will form the foundation for the future of communication.
Tencent and Alibaba: aren’t far from the half-trillion dollar mark either.
These are the main contenders as we know them to-day
—————————————————————————————
So the Question is:
Which one if any of the above will be the top dog by 2025.
Will it be : ( All knowledge, All Gossip, All purchases, All Apps/ Software)
At this point you will have noticed that I have left out the company mentioned in Title of this posting.
While in the future devices may be more ubiquitous in all corners
of the globe, inequality will therefore remain in terms of the services
available in certain locations and the lack of attention paid to the needs
and desires of certain populations.
Companies like Amazon and Google will be fighting to lock you into one voice ecosystem. You may have to declare your allegiance for Alexa, Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant.
One could say that:
Amazon represents de-socialising of commerce. Face book represents self ego. Twitter represents myths and gossip. Apple represents profit. E bay represents selling and buying of stuff, Google represents doming down.
All are represented on Social Media which is being used in ways that shape politics, business, world culture, education, careers, innovation, and more.
Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens.
So is the power and the winner going to be Social Media which is owned by the Internet.
I think Not.
In short, one consequence of this prediction is that the very idea of ‘social media’ might gradually disappear; instead we simply have an increasingly diverse set of media and increasingly sophisticated exploitation of the possibilities these media have created, including other trends such as obtaining information, sharing information or making communication more visual.
Social media is slowly killing real activism and replacing it with ‘slacktivism, and we all know where that might lead us. Awareness is not translating into real change. Support is limited to pressing the ‘Like’ button or sharing content which absolve them from responsibility to act.
The role of social media as symbolic of the future may already be in decline.
“The election of Donald J. Trump is perhaps the starkest illustration yet that across the planet, social networks are helping to fundamentally rewire human society.”
The one I left out, with 65% of all online searches – is Google.
Google has expanded far beyond its original claim to fame as a search engine.
Google and their competitor platforms are programming the world for profit. The reach of this technology giant is so vast it is hard to imagine an area of modern life it has not touched.
Alphabet owns Google, as well as many other companies. However, Google itself owns companies.
Google has reorganized itself into multiple companies, separating its core Internet business from several of its most ambitious projects while continuing to run all of these operations under a new umbrella company called Alphabet.
Google owns more than 200 companies, including those involved in robotics, mapping, video broadcasting, telecommunications and advertising.
Simply put, the company has been visionary in recognizing the income potential for information products.
Their profit seeking algorithms ensuring that every recommendation, from whether you should buy this or that, stay here or there, fly or drive, connect to this or that, live or die, will earn them a few cents.
By 2025 all will be connected to the Cloud. With one winner.
The Google Monopoly.
Once a Google client always a Google client.
How do you stop using Google?
Already impossible.
Move and your G Mail becomes blocked mail.
Say anything on you website that smacks about google, you site gets flooded with google ads.
It is becoming more and more difficult for anyone to extricate themselves from the clutches of any of its platforms as deactivating means little or nothing.
Social media apps ensure you are still engaged and if they don’t work your friends and family smartphones are searching for you nonstop supplying little hits of dopamine. ( Someone likes you photo or you are mentioned in their contact. It’s a social validation feedback loop..exploiting a vulnerability in humans psychology.)
Will Social Media destroy or rain back Google dominance?
The whole Social media thing is turning into an addictive cancer effecting our brains and tearing our emotions and attentiveness a sunder which in turn is encouraging self-segregation and exacerbating social divides.
Every facet of our life is touched or being integrated by the social media today.
In this sense social media has become an instrument of democratic renewal.
On the other hand it is evident that this uncensored and unmonitored medium of communication is exposing us all to a gradual breakdown of social cohesion and the destruction of our traditional value systems.
Though the advantages of social media are emphasized quite often, as opposed to its negative aspects which are very rarely discussed.
I feel that this will change in the coming years.
All said, social media is here to stay. The power of social media is exponential. Numbers tell the story.
Just as difficult as forecasting the future is knowing the present.
After all not everything moves over time to become more functional
or efficient.
It is obviously going to be hard to predict the future for something as
dynamic as social media. How can we know what social media has already become for oil workers in Alaska, tribal people in Amazonia and the nouveau riche of Moscow?
Unless we take responsibility to ensure that our understanding of social media and its impacts are constantly evaluated with what’s happening in the world. Once we appreciate that knowing social media is not an exercise in delineating the properties of a set of platforms, but rather of acknowledging what the world has already turned these into, by way of content, the immensity of the problem is revealed.
So it will be important to continue monitoring and exploring the extent to which collective action is individualised through social media use.
= Can the use of social media for campaigning help to bring about genuine and lasting empowerment; or does it serve largely to re-inforce pre-existing relationships?
= Is social media a means of building dialogue and consensus in diverse communities or does its use encourage increased fragmentation or, alternatively, a homogeneity of interests?
= Can meaningful impact measures be developed that can be used by small, under-resourced organisations at local level (or indeed within larger voluntary organisations)?
Social media is seen in much of the literature as a means of promoting dialogue beyond the mainstream media. Voluntary and community groups have been criticized, however, for using social media as little more than a means of broadcasting.
Why might this be the case – and does it matter?
Social media expands our capacity but, it does not change our
essential humanity.
It is used to repair the rupture sustained by separated transnational families or for overcoming previously frustrated desires to share photographs more easily.
It allows couples living in different countries who ‘sort of’ live together online;
Soon, however, things move on to new realms.
Should a clear relationship be expected between the (apparently empowering) use of social media in mobilizing large national and global movements, and its use at the micro-political neighborhood level.
An increasing number of social media platforms can be aligned with the diversity of the social groups to which we might want to relate.
Social media however has little impact on the overall outcomes in terms of empowerment, equalities or social justice.
However powerful and important the advent of social media has become, it would be hard to place it ahead of the impact and significance of smartphones, within which social media platforms may often be seen as just another kind of app.
It is smartphones that facilitate social media’s importance as a mix of polymedia, making clear the range of media possibilities as they lie side by side within one easily accessible device.
It is the Smartphone that drives social media input and out put.
Will that will be the One Winner, changing our sense of collective memory, creating a new form or combination of internal and external faculties for retaining information.
As Smartphones become smarter, they may well accelerate the dissolving of social media into this wider array of communicative possibilities.
The increasing ubiquity of the smart phone is the catalyst for more general usage of social media. Recognizing that this may not necessarily impact on any other aspect of inequality should not prevent us from recognizing that there is in one aspect an increasing and significant equality:
The more individuals live within culturally imposed constraints on communication, the more a new technology may mean that what was previously forbidden now becomes possible.
This fluid mix of communicative forms suits the way users flow between activities such as talking, gaming, texting, masturbating, learning and purchasing. The social connection is more important than how well a platform meets their needs.
Comparative anthropology creates particular varieties of knowledge of both breadth and depth. What makes these essential within the context of our complex modern world, however, is that these are forms of understanding based on empathy.
Merely having a smart phone provides a significant change with respect to the capacities of its owner.
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What happens to our online materials at death.
Finally: Capitalism can never be ethical.
There are no laws requiring Google to be fair.
If we don’t open our eyes soon technology ( whether it’s Google, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon Inc or some equivalent service) is going to F—k us all from some Cloud or other that is just over the horizon.
Just look at the annual release of new smartphones.
Of course there are other things in the long tall grass waiting to caught us by the short and hairy and most have being around for yonks. War, Natural Disasters, Greed, Inequality and the like.
My advice is to beware of the man with a smartphone. Because knowledge is not knowledge until someone else knows that one knows.
Google it.
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We all urgently need to consider the implications of allowing commercial interests and governments to use algorithms to analyse our habits: Not because they are becoming all-powerful, that might turn into a source of repression, but because they are exploiting us all for profit.
They make decisions about us and on our behalf.
They are now integrated into our lives. We’re already halfway towards a world where algorithms run nearly everything. As their power intensifies, wealth will concentrate towards them. They will ensure the 1 per cent-99 per cent divide gets larger.
If you’re not part of the class attached to algorithms, then you will struggle.
On the one hand, they are good because they free up our time and do mundane processes on our behalf, but the problem is that when we outsource thinking to machines we are really outsourcing thinking to the organizations that run the machines.
At the moment ignoring the fact that they are driving the cost of living up it is not about algorithms per se, but about the way society is structured with regard to data use and data privacy.
As technology evolves, everything is going up in price.
Raw materiel’s are going up leap and bounds because of a dictatorship of data, that is concentrating on how to generate the most profit.
As profit seeking algorithms power intensifies, wealth will concentrate towards them.
They do so not out of the goodness of their little algorithmic hearts, but rather because they earn a “fee” for this service.
There are many different types of algorithms at play, with different intentions and impacts, however there is one thing that is becoming quite clear day by day that they are driving the human market makers out of business by being smarter and faster.
They are upending the nature of business, how government works and the way we live, from healthcare to education.
We should not allow ourselves to become so reliant on them – and who, if anyone, is policing their use. It’s impossible to do this perfectly. How are they being used to access and interpret “our” data? And by whom?
It won’t be long before big data denies us a bank loan or considers us unfit for a surgical operation, but we can’t learn the explicit reasons because the variables that went in programming them were so myriad and complex?
There is currently an awkward marriage between data and algorithms.
Big data is even change how we think about the world and our place in it. (Penalizing people based on what they are predicted to do, not what the have done.)
Taken in the widest sense, algorithms OWNED BY MONOPOLIES are now responsible for the vast majority of activity on modern stock markets.
The well-being of our pensions, shareholdings, savings etc – are now largely determined by algorithmic vagaries.
Retail algorithms don’t scare me as we still have free will. However Algorithms are increasingly determining our collective futures.
Wherever we use computers, we rely on algorithms: With so much data around, and the ability to process it, big data is the bedrock of new companies profit.
Can we regulate them? I think not.
If you were leader of your country, what would you do?
I would have, Science, technology and inclusive innovation through education, on the national agenda. Education free and equal for all.
Unfortunately this will not happen. Even if it did Profit seeking Algorithms will still be exploiting every weakness.
There is only one defense.
WE MUST RE NATIONALIZE OUR SOCIAL SERVICES, SO ALL BENEFIT NOT JUST THE FEW. Nationalize what is important, Health, Power, Water, Education.
The key outcome of nationalization is the redirection of revenues to the country’s government instead of private operators who may export funds with no benefit to the host country.
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It would be fair to say that most of us live in a cloud of our own importance.
However that cloud is disappearing into any other cloud which we are all creating with little or no control.
Our Ideology of normative beliefs, conscious and unconscious ideas, that are individual, group or society are under attack by this cloud. The reality is that temporary outages and slower-speed broadband that are a minor nuisance today can and will become a critical issue.
It represents the consummate disruptor to structure; a pervasive social and economic network that will soon connect and define more of the world than any other political, social, or economic.
It is the first mega trend of the twenty-first century, one that will shape the way we will address virtually every challenge we face for at least the next 100 years.
It is where we will all live, work, and play in the coming decades.
The Cloud is where your kids go to dive into online play. It’s where you meet and make friends in social networks. It’s where companies find the next big idea. It’s where political campaigns are won and lost.
You might think that this is all hog wash.
( But it appears that New Zealand does not have any politicians with brains of their own that they can rely on.
It has just recently appointed the worlds first AI virtual politician with the wonderful name of SAM. “Sam your man ” with a memory of an elephant he never forgets. ” Sam considers everyone’s position when making decisions.”
Well F… me Nick Gerristen ( The creator of Sam) there is a lot of bias in the cloud and AI algorithms are riddled with it.
You say “SAM is an enabler.” I agree. Make sure you feed it as no doubt Google will want to buy it. I see you love BIG ideas, so perhaps you should introduce Sam to Sophia and you might have a bunch of little Samson’s.
Make sure he knows all about NXT Fuels, and by all means give him a bash. I am sure the Maori would be delighted. By the way, being a politician I would have named it, Ākina. ( A Māori word meaning a call for bold action. It also conveys a spirit of watchful and active encouragement, helping others to identify pathways through their challenges.)
Back to the more serious subject:
It is time that we started to recognize some of the risks associated with this cloud technology, so as to avoid the possibility of future issues being decided by Sam and his like, who are servants of the hardware and software resources made available on the Internet as managed third-party services.
The world and us who live on it are becoming highly dependent on our Internet providers, so much so that it wont be long before we will have a fully cloud-based world.
Since no proper standards for cloud computing are set yet, it becomes almost impossible for anyone to ascertain the quality of services they have been provided with. So in the near future we will not be able to make wise decisions while choosing your personal service provider.
This, in turn, enables providers to charge customers fees proportional to their network, storage, and processing utilization.
Most issues start from the fact that the user loses control of his or her data, because it is stored on a computer belonging to someone else.
Many cloud providers can share information with third parties if necessary for purposes of law and order even without a warrant.
Although cloud computing enhances content accessibility, this access is “increasingly grounded in the virtually monopolistic privatization of the cloud which provides this access”.
This access, necessarily mediated through a handful of companies, ensures a progressive privatization of global cyberspace.
So we must ask the question why are we and our governments sustaining the quasi-monopolies that filter what we see depending on commercial and ideological interests they have.
The legal and regulatory landscape around cloud computing is by no means static. There are new laws being proposed that could change the responsibilities of both cloud computing tenants and providers.This creates new challenges in understanding how laws apply to a wide variety of information management scenarios.
As with all things surrounding profit it’s inevitable that some could will burst or simply stop providing the service if they deem it isn’t profitable for them. Often, large companies will enter the market but leave it once the expected profit doesn’t materialize. If this is the core business of the cloud supplier, it might be willing to continue operating for longer with a smaller profit.
Surely if we use a cloud infrastructure sourced from a cloud services provider, we must impose all legal or regulatory requirements that apply to any enterprise.
THIS WITH SELF LEARNING ALGORITHMS IS NOT POSSIBLE.
THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY OF ACHIEVING ANY CONTROL:
All technology must be vetted to ensure it complies to humanity core values.
It should be compulsory for it to carry a ATR World Certificate.
Accountable, Transparent, Reversible.
If we are to have any hope of tackling any of Social, Political, Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us we need a beanie Cloud not a cloud for profit.
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≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS: ARE WE ALL FOOLING OURSELVES. UNREGULATED PROFIT SEEKING ALGORITHMS WILL BE THE LAST THE LAST STRAW NEEDED IN A WORLD OF INEQUALITY.
The consequences of Profit seeking AI’s that are trying to emulate human intelligence without a conscious mind to give them any moral value, are going to be tragic for a world that is unable to unite to fight inequality, not to mention Climate Change.
As we don’t know our inherent objectives WITH AI we are playing with dynamite.
Even if every one of us was gets a perfect AI Assistance we will not be able to share its benefits, because AI will lie to us to please us.
We are already witnessing this with Facebook and Twitter on social media promoting false images and gossip that is distorting what is true.
If you were expecting some kind of warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again. There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements.
In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe.
Their weapon of choice – the algorithm and one has just been granted citizenship of Saudi Arabia.
It attracted international headlines — and sparked an outcry against a country with a shoddy human rights record that has been accused of making women second-class citizens.
A robot simulation of a woman not wearing a headscarf enjoys freedoms that flesh-and-blood women in Saudi Arabia do not.
Where was her male guardian, as required by Saudi law for women.
Perhaps Saudi woman should become robots.
Saudi Arabia doesn’t grant citizenship to the foreign workers who make up a third of its population, not even families that have been in the country for generations. Children of Saudi women who are married to foreign men cannot receive citizenship. Sophia the Algorithm was manufactured in Hong Kong.
One thing’s for sure: As AI grows more advanced its invisible Algorithms arms are already taking control of decision-making.
They might well be running gigantic warehouses, matching kidney donors with recipients, running Heathrow traffic control, but this is only the start.
The smart machine era will be liberating in ways we can not imagine to-day, but at what cost.
There is fine line, between “good” and “bad” algorithms.
The point is that we need to start thinking seriously about algorithms.
Right now there are people coming up with new algorithms by applying evolutionary techniques to the vast amounts of big data via genetic programming to find optimizations and improvement in different fields.
They are not just for mathematicians or academics they are all around us and you don’t need to know how to code to use them or understand them, in fact without them most of the modern world would not work.
However we are looking at an area that is total unregulated where all algorithm activities to make profit are outside any of our current laws.
The rise of Big Data and algorithms known as machine learning algorithms are trawling vast collections of data which will allow for vast numbers of decisions to be automated with no recourse. AI for the sake of AI’s.
The market will be more than trillions by 2026.
Big data by itself it is not trans-formative. Data is inherently dumb. It doesn’t do anything unless you know how to use it and act with it.
There are very few of us know how to do so.
One way or the other it is going to be a multi-trillion feast for those how do.
Algorithms or artificial intelligence will be more efficient, less expensive, and – if well-designed – more accurate than humans.
Algorithm is where the real value lies. Algorithms define action. It is these invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world.
Algorithms may be cleverer than humans but they don’t necessarily have our sense of perspective – As algorithms spread their influence beyond machines to shape the raw landscape around them, it might be time to work out exactly how much they know and whether we still have time to tame them.
Wall Street today, is mostly governed by high frequency trading algorithms and Business is following.
Now, researchers are working on the next generation of these learning algorithms, which are heavily used in machine learning and artificial intelligence and may become the foundation that critical technological advances are built on.
Basically, even though most people haven’t even heard of deep-learning algorithms, better ones could mean a future that includes smarter homes, and robots that care for parents and walk our dogs.
Deep-learning algorithms also will be used with our smart appliances, smart cars and wearable technology — stringing it all together in the much championed Internet of Things.
So what? In the digital world anything goes.
Streaming App Algorithms are increasingly wielding an outsize influence on our lives, influencing politics and the economy.
We have all become so complacent that we don’t care what technology (In the form of Algorithms that are driven by machine learning ) is doing to our lives, irrelevant of the consequence we all becoming dumber and dumber with platforms deciding what we see and what we don’t see.
We have become indifferent to the commercial use of our personal data in return for free services.
Every day supplying through our smart phones more and more data it wont be long before the online world will be more important than the real world.
Before the Algorithm the way we live our lives is often not solely determined by us, but by others. Others decided if we will be hired, will receive loans, are admitted to university or have committed a crime. Traditionally, “the others” have been humans: employers, bank managers, university board members or judges – who we expect to make fair decisions.
This no longer applies.
Algorithms are increasingly part of our everyday lives, from recommending our films to filtering our news and finding our partners, deciding our futures.
We need to better understand them and control, our own futures.
Algorithms and AI are the future, but we must not allow them to become a shield for injustice.
The amount of data we have available to us now means that we can no longer think in discrete terms.
This is what big data forces us to do. It forces us to take a step back, an abstract step back to find a way to cope with the tidal wave of data flooding our systems.
But is this any longer possible?
“Learner algorithms” can be used to create new algorithms which in turn can write the code we need, “with machine learning, computers write their own programs, so we don’t have to.”
Here lies the Catch 22 question.
Virtual data centers through cloud providers are analyzing our every move for profit. Selling the data to Hedge funds investment firms driven by vision algorithms that analyzing satellite images, and geolocation, websites.
If we don’t open or eyes they will govern the cost of everything from food to energy.
There have been other periods in human civilization where we have been overwhelmed by data. Like the Phone represented a discrete means to communicate information. A book, on the other hand, is an abstract means of communication in that there is no direct interaction between writer and reader.
So why are Algorithms different?
Because we will have Algorithms for the sake of algorithms.
So what are Algorithms?
They are sequence of steps that describes an idea for solving a problem meeting the criteria of correctness and terminability. An abstract recipe for the calculation independent of implementation. Another words: Algorithms are a finite number of calculations or instructions that, when implemented, will yield a result.
While Code/ Programming is a set of instructions for a computer. A concrete implementation of the calculation on a specific platform in a specific programming language.
Algorithms have been around for much longer than the invention of coding.
Algorithms are already started to show their potential to create a new era of abstraction by going a step further. Not only will they search for a patterns but they will also create the code we need to do this.
Algorithms enable us to find patterns via clustering, classification, machine learning and any other number of new techniques underpinned, not by code, but by algorithms.
Like: With algorithms tracking Tweets or Facebook the Cloud will be Metropolis of 21st century.
If we can feed them a lifetime’s worth of videos. We might see some significant improvements that would get us closer to using predictive-vision in real-world situations.”
To achieve this we need to better understand how these algorithms work and how to tailor them to suit our needs. Otherwise we will be unable to fully unlock the potential of this abstract transition.
And if all of the above is not scary enough there will be war AI neural networks to decide whether a person is deemed expendable or not.
Artificial intelligence does not have to be a horror story of course if we take steps to Registrar all Algorithms. (See previous posts)
It is imperative that all Algorithms are Provable beneficial to all of us, not to one objective profit.
If we lose our autonomy to AI/ Algorithms machines we end up as the three monkeys – see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
We are addicted to Technology. These Algorithms that have profit as their targets will ensure that we remain so.
Retail algorithms don’t scare me, I find it annoying when Amazon tells me what I might like.
Now is the time to make your voice count.
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