From b6c0ffcaf707ee1968a7f29021d20357692a84d0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Silvio Rhatto Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2018 10:05:58 -0300 Subject: Reorganization --- books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future.md | 673 --------------------------------- 1 file changed, 673 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future.md (limited to 'books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future.md') diff --git a/books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future.md b/books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future.md deleted file mode 100644 index e53d275..0000000 --- a/books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,673 +0,0 @@ -[[!meta title="Who owns the future?"]] - -* Author: Jaron Lanier -* Year: 2013 -* Publisher: Simon & Schuster - -## Index - -* Star system versus the bell curve as network designs. -* Siren Servers: narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry. -* Siren Servers and Maxwell’s Demon. -* Disruptive innovation as the tedious scheme to shrink markets. -* Science isn't automatic. -* Nine dismal humors of futurism, and a hopeful one. -* Marx as one of the first technology writers (when discussing Luddites). -* Human obsolescence is avoidable. -* Keynes Considered as a Big Data Pioneer. -* Amazon's Mechanical Turk. -* Humanistic information economics. -* What is experience? If personal experience were missing from the universe, how would things be different? -* Gurus and New Age at the Sillicon Valley: Gurdjieff, Steve Jobs. - -## Prelude - - Instagram isn’t worth a billion dollars just because those thirteen employees - are extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who - contribute to the network without being paid for it. Networks need a great - number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when - they have them, only a small number of people get paid. That has the net effect - of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth. - - [...] - - By “digital networking” I mean not only the Internet and the Web, but also - other networks operated by outfits like financial institutions and intelligence - agencies. In all these cases, we see the phenomenon of power and money becoming - concentrated around the people who operate the most central computers in a - network, undervaluing everyone else. That is the pattern we have come to - expect, but it is not the only way things can go. - -## The Price of Heaven - - Utopians presume the advent of abundance not because it will be affordable, but - because it will be free, provided we accept surveillance. - - Starting back in the early 1980s, an initially tiny stratum of gifted - technologists conceived new interpretations of concepts like privacy, liberty, - and power. I was an early participant in the process and helped to formulate - many of the ideas I am criticizing in this book. What was once a tiny - subculture has blossomed into the dominant interpretation of computation and - software-mediated society. - - One strain of what might be called “hacker culture” held that liberty means - absolute privacy through the use of cryptography. I remember the thrill of - using military-grade stealth just to argue about who should pay for a pizza at - MIT in 1983 or so. - - On the other hand, some of my friends from that era, who consumed that pizza, - eventually became very rich building giant cross-referenced dossiers on masses - of people, which were put to use by financiers, advertisers, insurers, or other - concerns nurturing fantasies of operating the world by remote control. - - It is typical of human nature to ignore hypocrisy. The greater a hypocrisy, the - more invisible it typically becomes, but we technical folk are inclined to seek - an airtight whole of ideas. Here is one such synthesis—of cryptography for - techies and massive spying on others—which I continue to hear fairly often: - Privacy for ordinary people can be forfeited in the near term because it will - become moot anyway. - - Surveillance by the technical few on the less technical many can be tolerated - for now because of hopes for an endgame in which everything will become - transparent to everyone. Network entrepreneurs and cyber-activists alike seem - to imagine that today’s elite network servers in positions of information - supremacy will eventually become eternally benign, or just dissolve. - - Bizarrely, the endgame utopias of even the most ardent high-tech libertarians - always seem to take socialist turns. The joys of life will be too cheap to - meter, we imagine. So abundance will go ambient. - - This is what diverse cyber-enlightened business concerns and political groups - all share in common, from Facebook to WikiLeaks. Eventually, they imagine, - there will be no more secrets, no more barriers to access; all the world will - be opened up as if the planet were transformed into a crystal ball. In the - meantime, those true believers encrypt their servers even as they seek to - gather the rest of the world’s information and find the best way to leverage - it. - - It is all too easy to forget that “free” inevitably means that someone else - will be deciding how you live. - -## Just Blurt the Idea Out - - So we begin with the simple question of how to design digital networks to - deliver more help than harm in aligning human intention to meet great - challenges. A starting point for an answer can be summarized: “Digital - information is really just people in disguise.” - -### Aristotle frets - - Aristotle directly addressed the role of people in a hypothetical high-tech - world: If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or - anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods - of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, of their own accord entered the assembly - of the Gods; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch - the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, - nor masters slaves.1 - - At this ancient date, a number of possibilities were at least slightly visible - to Aristotle’s imagination. One was that the human condition was in part a - function of what machines could not do. Another was that it was possible to - imagine, at least hypothetically, that machines could do more. The synthesis - was also conceived: Better machines could free and elevate people, even slaves. - - If we could show Aristotle the technology of our times, I wonder what he would - make of the problem of unemployment. Would he take Marx’s position that better - machines create an obligation (to be carried out by political bodies) to - provide care and dignity to people who no longer need to work? Or would - Aristotle say, “Kick the unneeded ones out of town. The polis is only for the - people who own the machines, or do what machines still cannot do.” Would he - stand by idly as Athens was eventually depopulated? - - I’d like to think the best of Aristotle, and assume he would realize that both - choices are bogus; machine autonomy is nothing but theater. Information needn’t - be thought of as a freestanding thing, but rather as a human product. It is - entirely legitimate to understand that people are still needed and valuable - even when the loom can run without human muscle power. It is still running on - human thought. - - [...] - - Note: How prescient that Aristotle chose musical instruments and looms as his - examples for machines that might one day operate automatically! These two types - of machines did indeed turn out to be central to the prehistory of computation. - The Jacquard programmable loom helped inspire calculating engines, while music - theory and notation helped further the concept of abstract computation, as when - Mozart wrote algorithmic, nondeterministic music incorporating dice throws. - Both developments occurred around the turn of the 19th century. - - [...] - - Aristotle seems to want to escape the burden of accommodating lesser people. - His quote about self-operating lutes and looms could be interpreted as a - daydream that better technology will free us to some degree from having to deal - with one another. - - It’s not as if everyone wanted to be closer to all of humanity when cities - first formed. Athens was a necessity first, and a luxury second. No one wants - to accommodate the diversity of strangers. People deal with each other - politically because the material advantages are compelling. We find relative - safety and sustenance in numbers. Agriculture and armies happened to work - better as those enterprises got bigger, and cities built walls. - - But in Aristotle’s words you get a taste of what a nuisance it can be to - accommodate others. Something was lost with the advent of the polis, and we - still dream of getting it back. - - [...] - - The reward for a Roman general, upon retiring after years of combat, was a plot - of land he could farm for himself. To be left alone, to be able to live off the - land with the illusion of no polis to bug you, that was the dream. The American - West offered that dream again, and still loathes giving it up. Justice Louis - Brandeis famously defined privacy as the “right to be left alone.” - - In every case, however, abundance without politics was an illusion that could - only be sustained in temporary bubbles, supported by armies. The ghosts of the - losers haunt every acre of easy abundance. The greatest beneficiaries of - civilization use all their power to create a temporary illusion of freedom from - politics. The rich live behind gates, not just to protect themselves, but to - pretend to not need anyone else, if only for a moment. In Aristotle’s quote, we - find the earliest glimmer of the hope that technological advancement could - replace territorial conquest as a way of implementing an insulating bubble - around a person. - - [...] - - People naturally seek the benefits of society, meaning the accommodation of - strangers, while avoiding direct vulnerabilities to specific others as much as - possible. This is a clichéd criticism of the online culture of the moment. - People have thousands of “friends” and yet stare at a little screen when in the - proximity of other people. As it was in Athens, so it is online. - -## Money - - Money might have begun as a mnemonic counter for assets you couldn’t keep under - direct observation, like wandering sheep. A stone per sheep, so the shepherd - would be confident all had been reunited after a day at pasture. In other - words, artifacts took on information storage duties. - - [...] - - Ancient money was information storage that represented events in the past. To - the ears of many a financier, at this early stage “money” had not been born - yet, only accounting. That kind of money can be called “past-oriented money.” - -## Noise and luck - - Consider the problem of noise, or what is known as luck in human affairs. - - [...] - - And yet the rewards of winning and losing are vastly different. While some - critics might have aesthetic or ethical objections to winner-take-all outcomes, - a mathematical problem with them is that noise is amplified. Therefore, if a - societal system depends too much on winner-take-all contests, then the acuity - of that system will suffer. It will become less reality-based. - - When a bell curve distribution is appreciated as a bell curve instead of as a - winner-take-all distribution, then noise, luck, and conceptual ambiguity aren’t - amplified. It makes statistical sense to talk about average intelligence or - high intelligence, but not to identify the single most intelligent person. - -## Letting Bell Curves Be Bell Curves - - In a star system, the top players are rewarded tremendously, while almost - everyone else—facing in our era an ever-larger, more global body of competitive - peers—is driven toward poverty (because of competition or perhaps automation). - -## Absolutism - - Being an absolutist is a certain way to become a failed technologist. - - Markets are an information technology. A technology is useless if it can’t be - tweaked. If market technology can’t be fully automatic and needs some - “buttons,” then there’s no use in trying to pretend otherwise. You don’t stay - attached to poorly performing quests for perfection. You fix bugs. - -## The Taste of Politics - - Despite my favorable regard for organized labor, for the purposes of this book - I have to focus somewhat on certain failings. The problems of interest to me - are not really with the labor movement, but with the nature of levees. What - might be called “upper-class levees,” like exclusive investment funds, have - been known to blur into Ponzi schemes or other criminal enterprises, and the - same pattern exists for levees at all levels. - - Levees are more human than algorithmic, and that is not an entirely good thing. - Whether for the rich or the middle class, levees are inevitably a little - conspiratorial, and conspiracy naturally attracts corruption. Criminals easily - exploited certain classic middle-class levees; the mob famously infiltrated - unions and repurposed music royalties as a money-laundering scheme. - - Levees are a rejection of unbridled algorithm and an insertion of human will - into the flow of capital. Inevitably, human oversight brings with it all the - flaws of humans. And yet despite their rough and troubled nature, antenimbosian - levees worked well enough to preserve middle classes despite the floods, - storms, twisters, and droughts of a world contoured by finance. Without our - system of levees, rising like a glimmering bell-curved mountain of rice - paddies, capitalism would probably have decayed into Marx’s “attractor - nightmare” in which markets decay into plutocracy. - -## A First Pass at a Definition - - A Siren Server, as I will refer to such a thing, is an elite computer, - or coordinated collection of computers, on a network. It is - characterized by narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme - information asymmetry. It is the winner of an all-or-nothing contest, - and it inflicts smaller all-or-nothing contests on those who interact - with it. - - Siren Servers gather data from the network, often without having to pay - for it. The data is analyzed using the most powerful available - computers, run by the very best available technical people. The results - of the analysis are kept secret, but are used to manipulate the rest of - the world to advantage. - - That plan will always eventually backfire, because the rest of the world - cannot indefinitely absorb the increased risk, cost, and waste dispersed - by a Siren Server. Homer sternly warned sailors to not succumb to the - call of the sirens, and yet was entirely complacent about Hephaestus’s - golden female robots. But Sirens might be even more dangerous in - inorganic form, because it is then that we are really most looking at - ourselves in disguise. It is not the siren who harms the sailor, but the - sailor’s inability to think straight. So it is with us and our machines. - - Siren Servers are fated by their nature to sow illusions. They are - cousins to another seductive literary creature, star of the famous - thought experiment known as Maxwell’s Demon, after the great 19th - century physicist James Clerk Maxwell. The demon is an imaginary - creature that, if it could only exist, would be able to implement a - perpetual motion machine and perform other supernatural tricks. - - Maxwell’s Demon might be stationed at a tiny door separating two - chambers filled with water or air. It would only allow hot molecules to - pass one way, and cold molecules to pass in the opposite direction. - After a while, one side would be hot and the other cold, and you could - let them mix again, rushing together so quickly that the stream could - run a generator. In that way, the tiny act of discriminating between hot - and cold would produce infinite energy, because you could repeat the - process forever. - - The reason Maxwell’s Demon cannot exist is that it does take resources - to perform an act of discrimination. We imagine computation is free, but - it never is. The very act of choosing which particle is cold or hot - itself becomes an energy drain and a source of waste heat. The principle - is also known as “no free lunch.” - - We do our best to implement Maxwell’s Demon whenever we manipulate - reality with our technologies, but we can never do so perfectly; we - certainly can’t get ahead of the game, which is known as entropy. All - the air conditioners in a city emit heat that makes the city hotter - overall. While you can implement what seems to be a Maxwell’s Demon if - you don’t look too far or too closely, in the big picture you always - lose more than you gain. - - Every bit in a computer is a wannabe Maxwell’s Demon, separating the - state of “one” from the state of “zero” for a while, at a cost. A - computer on a network can also act like a wannabe demon if it tries to - sort data from networked people into one or the other side of some - imaginary door, while pretending there is no cost or risk involved. For - instance, a Siren Server might allow only those who would be cheap to - insure through a doorway (to become insured) in order to make a - supernaturally ideal, low-risk insurance company. Such a scheme would - let high-risk people pass one way, and low-risk ones pass the other way, - in order to implement a phony perpetual motion machine out of a human - society. However, the uninsured would not cease to exist; rather, they - would instead add to the cost of the whole system, which includes the - people who run the Siren Server. A short-term illusion of risk reduction - would actually lead to increased risk in the longer term. - -## Candy - - The primary business of digital networking has come to be the creation of - ultrasecret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this - information to concentrate money and power. It doesn’t matter whether the - concentration is called a social network, an insurance company, a derivatives - fund, a search engine, or an online store. It’s all fundamentally the same. - Whatever the intent might have been, the result is a wielding of digital - technology against the future of the middle class. - - [...] - - We loved the crazy cheap easy mortgages, motivated by crazed overleveraging. We - love the free music, enabled by crazed copying. We love cheap online prices, - offered by what would have once seemed like national intelligence agencies. - These newer spy services do not struggle on behalf of our security, but instead - figure out just how little payment everyone in the chain can be made to accept. - We are not benefiting from the benevolence of some artificial intelligence - superbeing. We are exploiting each other off the books while those - concentrating our information remain on the books. We love our treats but will - eventually discover we are depleting our own value. - - That’s how we can have economic troubles despite there being so much wealth in - the system, and during a period of increasing efficiencies. Great fortunes are - being made on shrinking the economy instead of growing it. It’s not a result of - some evil scheme, but a side effect of an idiotic elevation of the fantasy that - technology is getting smart and standing on its own, without people. - -## From Autocollate to Autocollude - - It seems as though online services are bringing bargains to everyone, and yet - wealth disparity is increasing while social mobility is decreasing. If everyone - were getting better options, wouldn’t everyone be doing better as well? - -## From the Customer’s Point of View - - Wal-Mart confronted the ordinary shopper with two interesting pieces of news. - One was that stuff they wanted to buy got cheaper, which of course was great. - This news was delivered first, and caused cheering. - - But there was another piece of news that emerged more gradually. It has often - been claimed that Wal-Mart plays a role in the reduction of employment - prospects for the very people who tend to be its customers.1 Wal-Mart has - certainly made the world more efficient in a certain sense. It moved - manufacturing to any spot in the world that could accomplish it at the very - lowest cost; it rewarded vendors willing to cut corners to the maximum degree. - - [...] - - All Siren Servers deliver dual messages similar to the pair pioneered by - Wal-Mart. On the one hand, “Good news! Treats await! Information systems have - made the world more efficient for you.” - - On the other hand, a little later: “It turns out you, your needs, and your - expectations are not maximally efficient from the lofty point of view of our - server. Therefore, we are reshaping the world so that in the long term, your - prospects are being reduced.” - - The initial benefits don’t remotely balance the long-term degradations. - Initially you made some money day trading or getting an insanely easy loan, or - saved some money couch-surfing or by using coupons from an Internet site, but - then came the pink slip, the eviction notice, and the halving of your savings - when the market drooped. Or you loved getting music for free, but then realized - that you couldn’t pursue a music career yourself because there were hardly any - middle-class, secure jobs left in what was once the music industry. Maybe you - loved the supercheap prices at your favorite store, but then noticed that the - factory you might have worked for closed up for good. - -## Financial Siren Servers - - The schemes were remarkably similar to Silicon Valley designs. A few of them - took as input everything they possibly could scrape from the Internet as well - as other, proprietary networks. As in Google’s data centers, stupendous - correlative algorithms would crunch on the whole ’net’s data overnight, looking - for correlations. Maybe a sudden increase in comments about mosquito bites - would cause an automatic, instant investment in a company that sold lotions. - Actually, that’s an artificially sensible example. The real examples made no - sense to humans. But money was made, and fairly reliably. - - Note: It should be pointed out that if only one Siren Server is milking a - particular fluctuation in this way, a reasonable argument could be made that a - service is being performed, in that the fluctuation reveals inefficiency, and - the Siren is canceling it out. However, when many Sirens milk the same - fluctuation, they lock into a feedback system with each other and inadvertently - conspire to milk the rest of the world to no purpose. - - [...] - - What is absolutely essential to a financial Siren Server, however, is a - superior information position. If everyone else knew what you were doing, they - could securitize you. If anyone could buy stock in a mathematical “sure thing” - scheme, then the benefits of it would be copied like a shared music file, and - spread out until it was nullified. So, in today’s world your mortgage can be - securitized in someone else’s secretive bunker, but you can’t know about the - bunker and securitize it. If it weren’t for that differential, the new kind of - sure thing wouldn’t exist. - -## If Life Gives You EULAs, Make Lemonade - - The information economy that we are currently building doesn’t really embrace - capitalism, but rather a new form of feudalism. - -## Your Lack of Privacy Is Someone Else’s Wealth - - Occasionally the rich embrace a new token and drive up its value. The fine art - market is a great example. Expensive art is essentially a private form of - currency traded among the very rich. The better an artist is at making art that - can function this way, the more valuable the art will become. Andy Warhol is - often associated with this trick, though Pablo Picasso and others were - certainly playing the same game earlier. The art has to be stylistically - distinct and available in suitable small runs. It becomes a private form of - money, as instantly recognizable as a hundred-dollar bill. - - A related trend of our times is that troves of dossiers on the private lives - and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are - packaged into a new private form of elite money. The actual data in these - troves need not be valid. In fact, it might be better that it is not valid, for - actual knowledge brings liabilities. - -## The Nature of Our Confusion - - Our core illusion is that we imagine big data as a substance, like a natural - resource waiting to be mined. We use terms like data-mining routinely to - reinforce that illusion. Indeed some data is like that. Scientific big data, - like data about galaxy formation, weather, or flu outbreaks, can be gathered - and mined, just like gold, provided you put in the hard work. - - But big data about people is different. It doesn’t sit there; it plays against - you. It isn’t like a view through a microscope, but more like a view of a - chessboard. - -## The Most Elite Naïveté - - As technology advances, Siren Servers will be ever more the objects of the - struggle for wealth and power, because they are the only links in the chain - that will not be commoditized. If present trends continue, you’ll always be - able to seek information supremacy, just as old-fashioned barons could struggle - for supremacy over land or natural resources. A new energy cycle will someday - make oil much less central to geopolitics, but the information system that - manages that new kind of energy could easily become an impregnable castle. The - illusory golden vase becomes more and more valuable. - -### Mapping out where the conversation can go - - An endgame for civilization has been foreseen since Aristotle. As technology - reaches heights of efficiency, civilization will have to find a way to resolve - a peculiar puzzle: What should the role of “extra” humans be if not everyone is - still strictly needed? Do the extra people—the ones whose roles have - withered—starve? Or get easy lives? Who decides? How? - - The same core questions, stated in a multitude of ways, have elicited only a - small number of answers, because only a few are possible. - - What will people be when technology becomes much more advanced? With each - passing year our abilities to act on our ideas are increased by technological - progress. Ideas matter more and more. The ancient conversations about where - human purpose is headed continue today, with rising implications. - - Suppose that machines eventually gain sufficient functionality that one will be - able to say that a lot of people have become extraneous. This might take place - in nursing, pharmaceuticals, transportation, manufacturing, or in any other - imaginable field of employment. - - The right question to then ask isn’t really about what should be done with the - people who used to perform the tasks now colonized by machines. By the time one - gets to that question, a conceptual mistake has already been made. - - Instead, it has to be pointed out that outside of the spell of bad philosophy - human obsolescence wouldn’t in fact happen. The data that drives “automation” - has to ultimately come from people, in the form of “big data.” Automation can - always be understood as elaborate puppetry. - - The most crucial quality of our response to very high-functioning machines, - artificial intelligences and the like, is how we conceive of the things that - the machines can’t do, and whether those tasks are considered real jobs for - people or not. We used to imagine that elite engineers would be automation’s - only puppeteers. It turns out instead that big data coming from vast numbers of - people is needed to make machines appear to be “automated.” Do the puppeteers - still get paid once the whole audience has joined their ranks? - -## The Technology of Ambient Cheating - - Siren Servers do what comes naturally due to the very idea of computation. - Computation is the demarcation of a little part of the universe, called a - computer, which is engineered to be very well understood and controllable, so - that it closely approximates a deterministic, non-entropic process. But in - order for a computer to run, the surrounding parts of the universe must take on - the waste heat, the randomness. You can create a local shield against entropy, - but your neighbors will always pay for it. - - Note: A rare experimental machine called a “reversible” computer never forgets, - so that any computation can be run backward as well as forward. Such devices - run cool! This is an example of how thermodynamics and computation interact. - Reversible computers don’t radiate as much heat; forgetting radiates - randomness, which is the same thing as heating up the neighborhood. - -## The Insanity of the Local/Global Flip - - A Siren Server can become so successful—sometimes in the blink of an eye—that - it optimizes its environment—changes it—instead of changing in order to adapt - to the environment. A successful Siren Server no longer acts only as a player - within a larger system. Instead it becomes a central planner. This makes it - stupid, like a central planner in a communist regime. - -## The Conservation of Free Will - - A story must have actors, not automatons. Different people become more or less - like automatons in our Sirenic era. - - Sirenic entrepreneurs intuitively cast free will—so long as it is their own—as - an ever more magical, elite, and “meta” quality of personhood. The entrepreneur - hopes to “dent the universe”* or achieve some other heroic, Nietzschean - validation. Ordinary people, however, who will be attached to the nodes of the - network created by the hero, will become more effectively mechanical. - - [...] - - We’re setting up barriers between cases where we choose to give over some - judgment to cloud software, as if we were predictable machines, and those where - we elevate our judgments to pious, absolute standards. - - Making choices of where to place the barrier between ego and algorithm is - unavoidable in the age of cloud software. Drawing the line between what we - forfeit to calculation and what we reserve for the heroics of free will is the - story of our time. - -## Rewarding and Punishing Network Effects - - To understand how Siren Servers work, it’s useful to divide network effects - into those that are “rewarding” and those that are “punishing.” Siren Servers - gain dominance through rewarding network effects, but keep dominance through - punishing network effects. - -## The Closing Act - - Competition becomes mostly about who can out-meta who, and only secondarily - about specialization. - - [...] - - Individual Siren Servers can die and yet the Siren Server pattern perseveres, - and it is that pattern that is the real problem. The systematic decoupling of - risk from reward in the rising information economy is the problem, not any - particular server. - -## The limits of emergence as an explanation - - But the problem with freestanding concentrations of power is that you never - know who will inherit them. If social networking has the power to synchronize - great crowds to dethrone a pharaoh, why might it not also coordinate lynchings - or pogroms? - - [...] - - The core ideal of the Internet is that one trusts people, and that given an - opportunity, people will find their way to be reasonably decent. I happily - restate my loyalty to that ideal. It’s all we have. - - But the demonstrated capability of Facebook to effortlessly engage in mass - social engineering proves that the Internet as it exists today is not a - purists’ emergent system, as is so often claimed, but largely a top-down, - directed one. - - [...] - - We pretend that an emergent meta-human being is appearing in the computing - clouds—an artificial intelligence—but actually it is humans, the operators of - Siren Servers, pulling the levers. - - [...] - - The nuts and bolts of artificial-intelligence research can often be more - usefully interpreted without the concept of AI at all. For example, in 2011, - IBM scientists unveiled a “question answering” machine that is designed to play - the TV quiz show Jeopardy. Suppose IBM had dispensed with the theatrics, and - declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new phrase-based - search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology would have gained - IBM’s team as much (deserved) recognition as the claim of an artificial - intelligence, but it would also have educated the public about how such a - technology might actually be used most effectively. - - AI technologies typically operate on a variation of the process described - earlier that accomplishes translations between languages. While innovation in - algorithms is vital, it is just as vital to feed algorithms with “big data” - gathered from ordinary people. The supposedly artificially intelligent result - can be understood as a mash-up of what real people did before. People have - answered a lot of questions before, and a multitude of these answers are - gathered up by the algorithms and regurgitated by the program. This in no way - denigrates it or proposes it isn’t useful. It is not, however, supernatural. - The real people from whom the initial answers were gathered deserve to be paid - for each new answer given by the machine. - - [...] - - What all this comes down to is that the very idea of artificial intelligence - gives us the cover to avoid accountability by pretending that machines can take - on more and more human responsibility. This holds for things that we don’t even - think of as artificial intelligence, like the recommendations made by Netflix - and Pandora. Seeing movies and listening to music suggested to us by algorithms - is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once in a while the users of - those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn’t be - hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes - accurately. These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only - statistics and correlations. - - What makes this doubly confounding is that while Silicon Valley might sell - artificial intelligence to consumers, our industry certainly wouldn’t apply the - same automated techniques to some of its own work. Choosing design features in - a new smartphone, say, is considered too consequential a game. Engineers don’t - seem quite ready to believe in their smart algorithms enough to put them up - against Apple’s late chief executive, Steve Jobs, or some other person with a - real design sensibility. - - But the rest of us, lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent AIs, are - expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a - student, the credit risk of a homeowner or an institution. In doing so, we only - end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own - capabilities as human beings. We must instead take responsibility for every - task undertaken by a machine and double-check every conclusion offered by an - algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even - though the signal has been given to walk. - - When we think of computers as inert, passive tools instead of people, we are - rewarded with a clearer, less ideological view of what is going on—with the - machines and with ourselves. So, why, aside from the theatrical appeal to - consumers and reporters, must engineering results so often be presented in - Frankensteinian light? - - The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified - by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way - of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain - the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon - Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: One day in the - not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a - superintelligent AI, infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of - us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the - world before humans even realize what’s happening. - - Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others - think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old - books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, - this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty - when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon - Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most - influential technologists. - - It should go without saying that we can’t count on the appearance of a - soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person’s consciousness has been - virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today - to confirm metaphysical ideas about people. All thoughts about consciousness, - souls, and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something - remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an - engineering culture. -- cgit v1.2.3