Mega corporations greatly influence the world. The advent of social media monopolies brings even greater influence to those seats of power. Facebook has already shaped much of our modern interactions. And the future they are setting out towards looks bleak and dark.
Source
Facebook has filed two patents of concern this year. One is for emotion recognition technology. It's supposed to recognize a human emotional state from facial expressions, determining if a person if happy or anxious at a given time. All it takes is a webcam or phone camera. Artificial intelligence drives the analyses through complex algorithms which then decipher facial expressions. The duration and intensity of an expression corresponds to an emotion.
For example, contempt can be measured from a range of 0 to 100. An expression of contempt can be discerned through a smirking smile, frowned brow and wrinkled nose. The facial data leads to an emotional conclusion and can be linked to certain dominant personality types, like the Big 5 of extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
AI Advancement
Matching a facial expression to an emotion may not be perfect. But as AI get better and self-learning improves, the gap to match human intelligence is being shortened. AI can already calculate quicker than humans.
A competition from Columbia University shows how could they are getting at competing with human thinking. Lawyers and AI opponents has to read non-disclosure agreements with loopholes in them. Humans found 88% of the loopholes, but the AI found 95%. Also, human lawyers took 90 minutes to find those 88%, yet AI only took 22 seconds to find the 95%.
Just last year Google’s self-learning AlphaZero beat the open-sourced chess engine Stockfish 8 which had centuries of human chess experience programmed into it. AphaZero taught itself through machine learning principles, without any human instruction. It only took 4 hours for it to teach itself how to play chess, and won 28 games and drawing the other 72 of 100 games.
Dark Results
AI deep "neural" learning is being developed mostly for benign or positive application, but what of dark purposes for it's use? AI could become another tool in the arsenal of the elite to consolidate their power and control in society. Advances in technology, in the hands of a few mega corporations or governments, is a serious concern.
Algorithms can learn and pattern human psychology. They can filter data, predict what will come based on a pattern, and learn through feedback loops. They can also manipulate a target. We're already manipulated into accepting or rejecting certain information by managing perception and manufacturing consent through the media and governments. Companies are also doing it to get our money, and AI will play an even greater role as the years go by.
The Guardian has written about an internal report Facebook had done for deteting teenagers' moods. Apparently, "the company has a database of its young users – 1.9 million high schoolers, 1.5 million tertiary students and 3 million young workers".
A Boston company called Affectiva also claims to be able to use emotion recognition technology (ECT) to detect "complex emotional and cognitive data from your face, voice and physiological state" from 12 billion "emotion data points". They claim to even be able to detect your heart rate from a camera alone. Their goals are ultimately to "enable media creators to optimize their content". That is to say, to make money by decoding our emotional states.
Ads could be targeted to us based on our current state of mind. With all the data Facebook collects, a new era of psychological targeting for commercial gain can be brought forth.
Dystopian Attention-Seeking Wormhole
The second patent from Facebook, US20180167677, is pretty dystopian, called Broadcast Content View Analysis Based on Ambient Audio Recording. Secret messaged called "ambient audio fingerprints" are added to TV ads and trigger smart technology to record you while the add plays in an effort to gauge your reaction. The recording would then be sent "to an online system for determining whether there was an impression of the content by the individual." This "impression" of the content is then stored online.
Content providers would like to know who has viewed their content and how it's affected them. Emotional states would be monitored to make money, tracking our moods like digital lab rats. This would amplify the already huge economic and cultural power that mega corps have with their "manipulation engines", "emotional engineers", "choice architects" and "product philosophers".
Not only ads for goods or services, but whole ideas and beliefs could be targeted and sold to people, further eroding our individual freedom of agency based on our own thoughts. We would more easily buy into the ideas being sold to channel us into predetermined avenues and conditioned ways of thinking and behaving. Attention equals profit in the attention economy. Energy and actions flows where attention goes.
Companies like Verint already sell "intrusive mass surveillance systems worldwide including to authoritarian governments". China loves it mass surveillance of society to exert greater control. They are already developing a surveillance network to roll out by 2020 called Xueliang or Sharp Eyes. Instead of neighbors watching each other to report to the government, technology will be able to do it all, and much better as we've seen with AI development. Socially approved validation is growing across the planet, not just in China with their social credit system.
Source
We are headed towards "an attention seeking gravitational wormhole" to suck us into a profit-seeking universe. How many times are you summoned to pay attention to your phone each day? Most people average at 150, and most of it is social media based. The future is an attention arms race, and the big tech giants are trying to capitalize on it. The information war is getting harder to combat.
References:
- With New Patents Facebook Brings Us One Step Close to a Dystopian Future
- Broadcast content view analysis based on ambient audio recording
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George Gilder, in his new book Life After Google, shows how there are real limits to this AI based approach that will hopefully save us from this Distopia. Also check out the class action against Facebook & Google. Www.jpbliberty.com
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I hope there are limits to keep us in check :P Thanks for the feedback.
Seeing the funding comes mostly from them, of course it has been developed for their interests in further solidifying their rule over us. From Dr. Fraud to his nephew Bernays to the CIA experimentation on perception they want a world of robot slaves. Based on my research into their experiments and cults, I suspect they have a pretty firm grasp on predicting/uncovering human emotion that most would think masked. Especially with the technology that we already know of. I suspect that AI is much further along than we suspect and intrudes in our lives constantly.
Freud had some interesting and accurate things, but a lot of it is wack I think too. Perception management is what the world is full of now, from governments to private companies, PR is a euphemism for it ;) A lot has been done to forward social engineering in the 20th century. I hope AI isn't further along :/
Ah man I see this in play sooo much here in China (where I’m currently working) I’d almost say this is worse than in the West, and they don’t even use Facebook - but no doubt are being programmed to becoming full time zombies. Everyone here actually needs their phones way more that we do in the West. For payments, keys, busses, bike rental, everything is linked to their phone. It’s what US and uk will be in 3-5 years.
I’m worried for the future, and how nobody gives a f**k or can look slightly outside of their narrow minded views
Yeah China is #2 just under Brazil, but ahead of the USA, so you are right ;) I worry too, it doesn't look so good for humanity's progress :/
Wow dude Brazil being a solid first had surprised me quite a bit ! I would like to see 2018/2019 added to this chart... I wonder how much more it would be!
I don't know if AI actually exists, or if it's simply machine learning. To me, the line where they cross might be irrelevant depending upon one's perceptions. When you've got complex machine learning algorithms stacked upon machine learning algorithms it's symbiosis might create the impression of AI which can be equally if not more dangerous than AI itself, which may or may not be a fictional concept at this point. I've only got questions and conspiracy theories when it comes to this field of technology. I may not know up from down in this regard, what I do know is that it's the future and it's coming whether we like it or not. So in that sense, we should be paying very close attention and guard our data to a certain extent.
True AGI, artificial general intelligence, no not strong like that, but weak AI yes through feedback loops and deep learning is getting better and better at doing things. Yes, it's coming, and I don't like it :/
Agreed, machine learning is not intelligence. I believe there much intentional and unintentional confusion of the two to sell the "product".
The false assumption everybody makes about AI is that is heading towards omnipotence. It can not, it will not. AI has no self awareness, it has no self purpose, it is we who guide it. AI is only as good as the initial framework it is built upon and the learning data it is fed. Just like us, (because it is built by us), it has blind spots.
https://hackernoon.com/dogs-wolves-data-science-and-why-machines-must-learn-like-humans-do-41c43bc7f982
Awareness is limited by the senses, the data it receives and the framework used to process, organise and then act upon that data.
Yes, AI does pose a huge potential threat to us all, but we are being sold a lie that it will be perfect. And therein lies the greatest danger, when AI connected to our networks makes mistakes and has the power to change things.
Weaponised AI against weaponised AI might be pointless as both "machines" will be stuck in a logical stalemate.
Yes, humans can be predictable, but not completely because of our imperfection. Perhaps this is what may save us in the end against AI.
as i read, the problem is the current hardware to allow those IA to growth.
The growth of AI is based upon our models of cognition, which are incomplete. So until an accurate model of cognition exists, the supporting hardware limits the implementation. One could argue that our own biological hardware is limits our cognition. Since we are the architects of AI, this then creates a feedback loop of limitations.
At some point it could be that they have non-linear thinking that allows for imagination and unpredictable thinking. It's a long way from there, but that's the goal of many. I hope it's never done.
It is a vainglorious attempt to replicate or improve upon something that we don't understand, our own consciousness. Thus by default, what they build will be flawed.
I blew the circuits when they used me for a reference..lol
Seriously? How depressing. I knew it was smart to not get a stupid phone.
Once I' away from the comp, I refuse to let tech intrude.
(and if anyone is on a stupid phone, when I'm chatting, the conversation stops and I walk away. And they call me rude , for doing so. ffs.)
People need to disconnect, and quickly..Use tech , but don't let tech use us.
Yes, it's quite depressing. Yes, calling someone rude while they use a smartphone and ignore them is such projection :P
AI is definitely a threat to our own existence. We have limits. We cannot work for hours without getting tired or bore but AI never get tired and can work for months without getting bored. It can also calculate more fast and accurately. So the dystopian future is inevitable.
Yes, it does seem so... I hope not but hope doesn't make things change. Words are acts that can influence us to avert such a future.
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