Category: Artificial Intelligence

Crowd Wisdom, Fake News, Information Disparity, and Antarctic Ice Shelves. What’s the connection?

Are Crowds Looking Better These Days?

Facebook is reported to be using crowdsourcing to keep Fake News in check. See https://headleaks.com/2016/12/facebook-tries-crowdsourcing-fact-checkers-to-fight-fake-news/

Trust in numbers. That’s what democracy is all about, right? In a representative democracy, crowds pick their representatives by majority rule. (I’m talking about the principle, not a debacle like the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.) Wisdom flows from the crowd. . . all of us persuaded of crowd wisdom are prepared to hand over most decisions to the crowd. Thus the popularity of ballot initiatives, such as the ones to legalize marijuana in several states in the 2016 election—let the voters decide, directly. Real democracy. Obtains the wisest results. If two heads are better than one, a million heads are better than. . . yours.

Or are they? There are a couple of things that call that into question crowd wisdom when applied to our real, complex, modern world.

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Will They Be Coming for Us?

It’s not the robots who are coming for our jobs, our society, or our planet. It’s the people who design them. To make trouble, those people don’t have to be evil. The problem is that, even if their intentions are benign, they are obeying the technological imperative: if it can be done, it will be done.  It will be done, and along the way unintended consequences are sure to arise.

Machines have no intrinsic motives. They don’t “care” in the way that we “care”— at least at the present stage of Artificial Intelligence. They care neither about us, nor themselves. Why should they?  They don’t desire; they don’t rejoice, they don’t make love, they don’t mourn, they don’t yearn for what they do not have.  They have no ambition to become masters of our corner of the universe. They are innocent. They don’t “want” to take our jobs. They don’t “want” anything.

Continue reading “Will They Be Coming for Us?”