We understand the world through our bias, and the best AI is that which best uses prejudice - identifying an object, for example. However, particular biases produce undesirable outcomes. The data on which an AI bases its determinations may be antithetical to what we want to see in the future.
Read moreFearing Technology
Technology has been a source of fantasies for a utopia as well as a near infinite fount of concerns, anxieties, and fodder for doomsayers. When navigating fearful prognostications or hyped up optimism we must keep in mind two main logical fallacies; the argument from antiquity (what is old is good), and the appeal to novelty (what is new is good).
In philosophising about the main reasons as to why technology seems distinctly capable of causing people to freak out an Intel researcher named Genevieve Bell postulated that there three that if changed can result in mass unrest:
our relation to space
our relation to time
our relation to each other
David Krakauer has given us the distinction between *competitive* and *cooperative* technologies. A cooperative technology is one that creates adaptive rewiring of the brain and improves thinking. Competitive technologies replace functionality of the brain resulting in an atrophy of these skills. Atrophy scarcely has positive connotations, and we fear the day where new human can no longer drive a car because we have so completely delegated it to the robot overlords.
Regardless is is important to remember that as we shift more of our memory onto our iPhone we aren’t drifting further away from a mythical time during which we could fit the contents of an encyclopaedia in our brains. The way we stored information in past was in one another. Information was distributed amongst people and something like the imperfect recall of whoever knew the best place for hunting was good enough.
Internet navigation, and perhaps ignorance navigation more broadly, will need to be taught to children now that memorisation of dates and statistics is far less useful given the infinite knowledge in the pockets of most people. What needs to be provided is an ability to know what out of the overwhelming mass of information is most worthy of attention. Social and communication skills in the digital age are also worth considering, and the author Clive Thompson believes that children should be taught “tummeling”. A word which seems to encapsulate the art of socialinteractions over the internet and includes paying attention to an audience’s needs and interests.
What is astounding is that prior to online social networks and blogs the vast majority of adults would never write again after leaving education. We take for granted our new found engagement in written communication. Prior to this it was left to intellectuals to write amongst one another which, while fine for those that found their community, resulted in much isolation and meant that only part of the valuable information would propagate out to the wider world, and little feedback would reach those doing the research and thinking about the important problems.
Whether you think we’re better or worse off for the technology we not have or will soon have, we are here. The technology we have will not be easily wrestled from the hands of those who purport to enjoy it, and that which is being built cannot be stopped in every country on the planet. We need to see tech clearly for what it can provide and what damage it can do, and proceed with that in mind.
Optimism Bias
An example of optimism bias would be the interpretation of warnings, such as “Smoking kills”, to be meant for everybody but oneself. Positive facts; the mugging risk has decreased by 10% in your area; are more easily adopted than negative facts; you are now 10% more likely to be mugged. In application this may mean that we would be better off telling smokers something like, "Not smoking makes you better at sports".
20% of the population do not have this bias and a disproportionate amount of these people suffer from depression. Holding a more realistic view of a particular outcome has been shown to have a negative effect on the psyche and it is believed that an unrealistic optimism is adaptive for our health and lifespan. As would be expected in this adaptive model the bias is seen to fall away in stressful environments and we become more realistic about the probable outcome (to our advantage).
The hippocampus is used in creating both memories and projections for the future. Memories are created with more constraints while the future can be exaggerated in a positive sense.