We all need to read or re-read Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream" right. now.
3
If "deep" is something like "heavy" then okay - as long as it isn't something like "awesome".
Sorry Tom, your next president will still be Donald.
Those harvesting our personal data with or without our consent should be paying for every kernel of data mined, clicks tracked, and user profile exhaust left behind. In fact, just to join this comments thread I had to login with either my "Facebook" or my "Google" ID, which likely means the NYT is reaping some sort of 'value' from the aforementioned in the larger transactional scheme of pay-to-play-with-my-data Surveillance Capitalism.
4
"But deep trust and deep loyalty cannot be forged overnight. They take time. That’s one reason this old newspaper I work for — the Gray Lady — is doing so well today. Not all, but many people, are desperate for trusted navigators.
Many will also look for that attribute in our next president, because they sense that deep changes are afoot. It is unsettling, and yet, there’s no swimming back. We are, indeed, far from the shallow now."
Some 40 million americans still adore a dangerous "shallow" polluted pond of a human being as their leader.
We are far away from controlling the deep destructive predation of our lives by the elite technocracts - abetted by the ignorance of he faith and dogma politicos and mass ignorant rabble ....
I'm afraid the awakening will come after it's too late for homo sapiens.
Maybe the coming generations of enhanced humans and robots will do better.
This is a complex piece.
I do think it's time to change the reference name of the NYT from the "Gray Lady" to something more reflective of the luminescent reporting that appears on its pages.
Also, many people now receive the NYT on line, and of course it's not gray.
3
In the highly unsettling news dept.:
I just realized today that there are lots of articles on the internet that MUST have been written by robots.
I like to look up topics I’m not well-versed in. Today I Googled “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy.” I found some interesting titles, aside from Wikipedia (which has its own problems), but almost all of them were only a hook-y headline, and for content one or two sentences of any kind of information. The rest of the articles were lots of reiterations of the limited content and the headline, written differently, but with no further information.
I was amazed at the immense amount of filler that was spewed out to create what looked like a full article. I wondered how a human being could sit in front of a computer and devise so many versions of the same flimsy info.
Now I get it! Humans can’t do that! Writer robots are already here! Just search tech or science topics and you’ll see what I mean.
1
I used to think confidentiality and privacy was overblown. Suddenly its caught up with me. I have written many critical comments published online on the NYT and other newspapers and journals. In my view I have bluntly called a spade a spade.
I am aware of the consequences that can befall people for much milder comments in certain countries, including one that I visit often. I don't want anyone to be able to join the lines of my multiple online accounts, but now it seems the NSA and many others can.
Quietly slipping out the details of someone you dont like, fingering someone, is now real and easy. Now I don't want to upset anyone enough to finger me so I self censor. I have just lost free speech.
4
I live in Connecticut. My friend raises cattle in Virgina. We speak on the phone only occasionally. Yesterday I phoned to wish him a happy new year and check in. He went on about troubles on the farm and getting cattle to market, physically. I joked about a cattle drive and he complained about his stoner nephews.
Just now, in my beloved NYTimes I was treated to an advertisement for a cattle trailer with built in ramp. It's exactly what my friend needs, if he could afford it. But, I live in Connecticut and there are zero cows around here. Mind you, we only talked about this on the PHONE! And I've never "searched" for any cattle paraphernalia.
It's getting freaky around here and it gives me the creeps.
18
Sometimes the sanest reaction to an insane situation is Insanity.
We have our “Leader” who does Not know enougn to Care.....
Or care enough to Know. We, the People , seem trapped between a mailaise and a morass. Meanwhile, this lost old man
is floundering in a Void of Words like “Ethics” and “Leadership”.
3
NYT:
I really love (sark) how I have to guess which columnist I am selecting to read on the 'smart phone' adapted Opinion page. How about throwing a name or two on the boxes you present??
Throw out some clues.
5
Hot, Flat, Crowded, Late and Deep. Your world in 5 easy adjectives, courtesy of Friedman's incessant, one-word scare-mongering.
2
We shouldn't be scared of intelligent machines taking over the world. We should be scared because stupid machines have already taken over the world.
(I'm paraphrasing someone, whose identity I can't remember.)
1
Chaos hunts us at the edges.
Caveat Emptor or 'Buyer Beware'.....same logic..
Perhaps a global warning needed ….watch out your secrets are
being used against you and...worse yet...you will be a target
especially if your face is on the face book page ….
Think about it: just how ethical is Face Book...hmmmm?...
I think...Face Book has you and your friends on Face Book all
on a digital file for ...whose advantage...yours ? NOPE..not
your advantage..then guess why they are enticing you to
trust them...
TRUST....now that is a real archaic notion....Trust ????
Trust Trump ? Trust Putin ?....and Face Book...Trust Facebook ??….
in the old age of print...there used to be a written sign on
desks in a non-digital age ...the sign said ...or directed the
word ….THINK !!!....well time to Think Again.....and that is
my warning ; Think very ...deeply and you will probably escape being ….digitally ...Filed...or perhaps De-Filed.
1
@Chris Hunter
While I myself am aching for a generational overturn in the Senate, I'm willing to give Hatch a pass on his language during that committee hearing.
*Of course* Hatch knew Facebook sold ads! *Of course* he and the other old coots on the panel were not just recently rendered aghast when they realized Facebook knows what hotel they stayed in the night before!
What Hatch was doing was to maneuver Zuckerberg into revealing, to a wide audience, what a smirking, vacuous, uneducated rube he is under his carefully curated hipster image. (Isn't he a little too old for that T-shirt by now?)
I was listening to news reports after that hearing, and all these urban sophisticates were tittering about the old people on the panel being so unhip. But as a result of that hearing, wider, wiser America became educated about the likes of Zuckerberg.
I'm far from a Hatch fan, but the joke is on the smirkers, the hip, the tweeters, the Instagrammers, the titterers.
Hubris! Know the word!
6
PBS Frontline recently did a two-part segment about Facebook that was really well done. Part 1: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-facebook-dilemma-part-one-s43cuc/ and Part 2: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-facebook-dilemma-part-two-iev1xh/
Sorry, but the media bears some responsibility for this “feeding frenzy” in the “deep.” While we need to be wary and move ahead with our eyes open, when you listen to the scientists we are much farther from these outcomes than the media would have you believe. Take “self driving” cars - not close! Too many variables not yet understood by the computer driven machine. Laying off 99% of the workforce - never. Ever tried explaining your particular issue to the virtual service rep? Human always required by very frustrated caller. All the machines do is deflect the accountability of the corporate entity behind them. That’s why people are so angry - they have no recourse. The media, with articles like this one, have people living in “deep” fear. The media should be disseminating deep understanding by letting the scientists explain what’s going on in their labs and the ramifications. The investors are also to blame for throwing billions of dollars at businesses/startups about which they know nothing and don’t care to learn. Theron comes to mind, as well as FB and Twitter. What the media should be promoting is INTEGRITY! That’s what people are looking for.
3
Deep technology, shallow human beings.
4
We trust what we see and hear. If technology is giving us false information such that we cannot trust what we see and hear it is likely the same technology can be used to decipher original content from deep-fake content.
As you said early, the machines taught themselves. The machines can be turned to do wrong and they can be taught to recognize wrong.
Our economic models that have propped up our lifestyle for the past 250 years are as antiquated as Orrin Hatch's understanding of technology. The day is rapidly approaching where AlphaZero can learn most white collar jobs in a day or two which would have taken a human most of a life time to acquire.
We are so ill equipped to contemplate the implications let alone work together to develop a new social compact. Maybe it's time that computers helped us overcome our known weaknesses and show us a path where we can live more harmoniously where the vast majority will be unemployed but still need to eat. Surely a machine that can learn chess from scratch in a few hours can come up with better ideas than the buffoons in the White House and Senate. I suspect the machine will say that the American Indians had the right idea.
1
In response to
Cal Prof Berkeley, USA9h ago Times Pick who writes
..We are not powerless.... facebook can be prevented from tracking and selling certain click information..
Think again. You really think this will happen ?
Really ?
It would require an act of Congress to do so
Below are the top 3 campaign contributors to Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House
Campaign Committee Fundraising, 2017 - 2018
Top Contributors, 2017 - 2018
1. Facebook Inc
2. Alphabet Inc (that is Google)
3. Salesforce.com
Did you notice that her number one donor is Facebook ?
YES, Facebok
US politicians need money to run, and in turn are forced ot defend the interest of their donors, lest they find them, in the next elections without money.
=====================
Data
https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/summary/nancy-pelos
1
Mr. Friedman is good in showing us the underbelly of the beast. Readers will eagerly want to know whether human beings are really helpless with their interacting and creating of that same beast. Just by being convinced we are helpless before investigating the matter is to surrender reason and will to questionable fear.
2
So are the machines that is the computers taking care of us health and mind wise? In so many words that is what I was told last week on the telephone that my prescription can not be refilled until first week of February 2019 after the computer did a "180 look back" and the last six months order is a little bit early. I guess the computer caught it and not a human. Not even me!
It's AI, artificial intelligence, not consciousness. As long as we retain that difference...
2
@Anwar Husain, great comment. Permit me to add that consciousness can be raised, societally and individually.
It happens in waves — the Arab Enlightenment, the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, the Romantic movements, the Sixties — and we’re probably in the middle of a big one right now, due to the increase in intelligence, both natural and artificial.
The waves ride mostly on changes in media. Five hundred years ago it was the printing press that gave rise to the Reformation and the “EuroEnlighenment.” What are we going to call this one, which rides on waves of electrons?
While I enjoyed reading this essay, I would point out that "deep learning", as it is called today, is merely the result of centuries of an iterative gain in knowledge about everything. In the field of Medicine, we couldn't "see" the smallness of our world until the microscope was produced. That "deep" learning was advanced by electron microscopy. So-called "robotic surgery" is merely an extension of one persons hand into a more precise instrument. All this "deep" stuff is just the advancement of knowledge. Machines cannot provide love, compassion and the humanity we all crave to be a part of our lives. The final thing I will say is something I learned in childhood. tom, you may have learned this as well: The last guy chosen on the touch football team in the school yard is always told his assignment was "Go deep". The ball was rarely thrown in that direction.
2
Mr. Friedman has lead his readers to the wrong road in the past. He advocated to invade Iraq. He advocated Globalization and said it would be great for American workers. His wonderful “GrayLady” said Hilary would win the Presidency by 80% probability-a sure thing. Beware of pontificaters. Humility is a virtue.
4
We need more surveillance, not less. Why - to help counter the growing P.C. belief that current data showing some races are more criminally inclined than is an actual fact, not racism gone bonkers.
All of this would be good news if it resulted in more leisure time for most people, and solving our biggest collective problems. But I'm betting it won't, it will instead concentrate wealth even more, put people out of work, subject them to autocratic control, like in China, and put us all at risk for abuses by bad actors. I wish I could convince my kids to study AI instead of their chosen lines of college study, because I worry about their employment outlook, as they tackle paying off huge college loans. I will hopefully not be around for the real abuses coming, glad I was born when I was.
2
"...unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data." Nothing is free. We're figuring out the cost - and 1984 has arrived.
2
Deep, Deep, Deep! But the analysis is superficial. AI can fake your face and your voice and your signature, to steal your money or trash you socially. Big data helps detect what techniques work to persuade or create trust or distrust. So yes! We are being manipulated directly or via bots. Europe is making efforts to detect that, trace it back to it's origin and pass regulations that make it harder, and we should do the same. The first step is understanding that we are social animals and what is being used to control us is what made us able to live in a society with division of labor where everyone is part of something bigger than themself and better off than living in their very own cave. But history tells us social abuse, especially in the form of slavery, has always existed.
Knowledge about and respect for each other is the antidote but it must be taught. Without education it's just one of many possible outcomes, some of them awful. That's why normalizing X-Supremacy is bad for society. Freedom of speech is good, but not all ideas are equal. History helps to understand. Sex is almost inevitable - sex education reduces bad outcomes and promotes good ones. Social media can be addictive or good and useful or a source of economic and political manipulation, harmful to the individual and society at large. The question: what does the appropriate Social Media Education look like? Let's work on it.
3
I consciously chose GMail as my email service, in 2005, to separate personal email from my workplace. I hoped Google might read my email and find me a job, or training for my next job, or a local book store, hobby shop or restaurant new to me.
Later I added the Stack Exchange sites, Yelp, reviews on Amazon's site, Flickr, Facebook, Linked-in, Monster, Indeed, etc. and Quora. And I buy and sell on eBay. Plenty of social media exposure. But no monetization of social media has ever made a dime off of me, or brought me anything I was interested in.
I've shared everything I've written to my friends, family, vendors, employers, etc. Not one targeted ad of any interest has ever appeared in my Google, Facebook or Yahoo (Flickr) account. Not even on my Amazon account. I've spent plenty on-line, so receipts are in my mail too.
I do well searching Yelp or Google for restaurants or shops. I read magazines, find interest group web sites and web-based businesses to look for products. But I can't think of an on-line ad from social media that I ever followed to make a purchase.
We believe that old fashioned advertising works, sorta. That's where all the money in politics goes in this country. But I don't buy beer, shaving cream or pickup-trucks based on TV ads either.
1
The fact is that there is a record of everything that has happened on line. There may be some fragmentation of these records, or there may be complete copies up to a certain date. But eventually, this information will be collected, analyzed, and we'll all have access to everyone's activities, what they've said, how they've lied, etc.
This is inevitable, it is time the gov't become honest and explain this to the people.
The author should have gone deep actually understanding the state of the art in the field rather than going by others accounts on the subject, and companies PR efforts trying to show their research is more promising than the others.
These articles make a disservice to the field and readers, and pushes away more useful conversations about what the dangers and benefits actually are.
Before Sept. 911, the government bragged that they had created a devise that was lighter than air, invisible, could move through space, and if it were right beside you, you'd have no idea. At the time, our President was a former head of the CIA, the son of the Joint Chief of Staff ran the FCC, and NPR was, if I recall correctly, was headed by an individual from the CIA, who formerly ran Radio Marti. During that period analogue was sold off and everything began to go digital. How would you like your medical care to be processed by government bureaucrats and computerized systems? Medical staff could intervene on your behave or let the system play out according to minimum protocol standards, and act like gatekeepers preventing access to needed specialist.
This essay pretty much sums up where we are today in big tech and where we are going. The present scares me plenty and the future is, frankly, terrifying. Information technology is increasing in scale exponentially simply because it can, with no thought as to the potential risks and consequences. Algorithms predicting our behaviour, loss of privacy, self driving cars, AI imitating (replacing?) human insight, facial recognition - this black list of despair goes on and on. We are but pixels on a computer screen. As we have been seeing around the world in the rise of populism and the backlash at globalization, don't be too surprised by a rising push back by the startled masses (us) as we begin to realize the loss of our personal sovereignty.
3
Perhaps the proclivity to attribution engages in an inflated view of the deep. If technology is "rooted in the imperial" then the adjective and the noun seem to have egressed from the so-called "deep state". Indeed, "domination" seems to be the crux of the matter in so far as the utilitarian motivation is concerned. Whether or not the situation, in essence, is "fated causality" which decides, more or less, what is important, materially, how to maximize profits, efficiently, and finally, whether the effort expended in doing so is commensurate with the results, is a question which is too often answered in terms of concentration of capital. Thus, the steady increase in claimants to access to the "deep", compared with those who readily give assent to its real existence. If by "automated" the Harvard professor means willingness to submit to a comparably lessened status, such sycophancy could be attributed to incessant propaganda which victimizes the readily naive. The Guardian looked at it also. It would be hard to underestimate the proficiency of technology, however. Its use value should, by all rights, achieve primacy over relative and exchange value, and so really find its place in the hands of the people, who should be taught to use it to their own advantage, not become slaves to it.
Who is to decide which people are obsolete and what to do with them? I don't like where this is going. It is a challenge raising empathetic human beings in a world that seems to increasingly view people as a product or an inconvenience.
1
Cars do not "drive themselves" quite yet, and it's going to be quite a while before they do so in any meaningful way. I don't count circling around the same suburban streets over and over with a human being sitting right there.
I recently posted on my Facebook account an article on the dangers of facial recognition technology on our privacy. It alarmed me. Yet no one liked it, or perhaps, bothered to read it. Perhaps that’s part of the problem—unless one has actually suffered, or is aware of the damage it has caused to oneself, there is a lack of interest, and therefore, pushback, by society at large. Until large numbers of people complain, especially in the U.S., lawmakers will ignore this issue or put it on the back burner, so to speak.
It is wrong to say that Go is much more complex than chess. The size of the search space does not make it inherently "much more complex." The level of play between the top human chess players and the top human Go players is equivalent.
It is almost like saying that the path an ant takes in a beach is much more complex than the path one takes in a sand box.
The "search space" in facial recognition is massive, yet heuristics eliminate 99.99...% of that space from ever being considered. The same is true with Go and chess.
Russia can hack our power and communication grid according to recent government report. Yet we have a President and his Party declaring a national emergency because a relative handful of Latin Americans are seeking refuge. The problem is not computer generated VR, but our dysfunctional virtual politics perpetrated by politicians who will do anything to keep the best job they’ll ever have.
2
Friedman is one of the writers in op-ed, to whom I started making my comments on, in my rather sharrow length of NYT subscribership. I’ve never gone deep to find out his bio online, which though should be ultra-easy to find out. But, I remember David Brooks mentioned once in his column that Friedman is an economist. So, I assumed this opinion piece was lying on economic observations. Also, the title firmly confirms my guess. AI can make all complexities adaptable to the most commercially promotional-able forms. This is my opinion and humble summary of this opinion piece. However much AI in the future may be able to go down deep to mimic human complexities, that commercial formula conversely would prevent AI from diving into the depth of mystery in human mind. “Surveillance Capitalism” must remind readers of the Post-modern philosophy as well. Friedman did not go down into the philosophical line here, however. For me, Descartes and PaintNite still cling on him. So, I would say to him, I’m probably your fan, but not deeply (yet).
It's time to monkeywrench the data collectors. My impression is that the usual run of bots are operating on the default assumption that they're getting accurately volunteered information. Fake them out. Increase the noise quotient on them.
I've read that the smart kids in Silicon Valley are already having phone-swap parties. Presumably, they have enough sense to keep a lot of data off of the phone in the first place. It's a lot less complicated to do things like swapping shopper discount cards.
But that's only the beginning. One tactic that can be employed is to draw up personality profiles for a couple of alter egos that shares minimal overlap with your actual interests- I recommend having two of them, more is better but not as manageable- and then open web pages that correlate to their profiles. You don't have to read them, just open them and maybe scroll through for a few seconds. Leave the site open, turn a page every now and then, close it. Some extra energy is required, but not that much. You don't have to look at or read a page about, say, snowshoeing, thimble collecting, shoe fetish porn, the Constitution Party, Zoroastrianism, or whatever, you just have keep opening them and returning to them. Etc.
Use as much imagination as you can summon.
Also: fight the cashless society. Cash rules. Use it as much as possible. And shop secondhand. There are bargains all over the place these days.
3
Why do we need people? What is their function?
1
The writing style in this column is about as imprecise and wildly exaggerated as our President's tweets. Just add the word "deep" to several nouns and then claim that that is some kind of thoughtful analysis. Impressionistic at best. Why not get some focus and some facts. Narrow the focus of the column so that the words have some meaning.
1
Zuckerberg is clueless, and obscenely rich. That may summarize our basic problem as a species.
Turns out, it's self-correcting but we won't like that, at all.
3
One word in your commentary stood out brightly, loudly and clearly . It describes what humanity is currently lacking and in need of today and for the future. It is the word which describes our only means of achieving this planet’s survival.
“Leaders”
29
@Tommybee
Our 'leaders' are as dazzled (dazed/stunned) by the new technologies as much as we are. They can only follow. The leaders now will have to be us, the hapless minions who in the end will have to decide if we are to sign on to this Brave New World or not.
2
After closing my Facebook account, I use a newly created dummy account to access my kids’ martial arts club info, find out if my gym was open today (polar temperatures) etc.
It’s time organizations go back to keeping their website “latest info” page up to date instead of relying on social media, which can’t be trusted.
3
You are stuck on money
DNA is the key to our future
Ignore the role of DNA and you miss what is really happening
DNA is beyond Ai, it seeks the stars
What does a Robot want?
1
Will it follow that Deep Distrust is next? Oh wait...
I am baffled. How did the Russians help trump to win the 2016 election? He lost the popular vote by nearly 3,000,000. His election was a fluke, which can be attributed to the electoral college. The same fluke gave us the invasion of Iraq by allowing GW Bush the presidency. We now suffer the consequences of two flukes, first Bush, then trump.
We need to end the electoral college immediately, lest by the same disaster, the current lunatic is reelected.
3
When Facebook mines the devices of 13 year old kids to reveal everything going on in their lives, including private messages -- with the consent of their parents -- deep data does indeed cuddle with capitalism.
Now couple this with the recent announcement by FB to use a single underlying engine to mine Facebook and its other products (Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger) and look across all four (again, "deep") for revenue insights.
That sound you hear? Orwell laughing from the afterworld.
3
History is full of examples of the ugly nature of our species: wars, slavery, abuse of women and children, colonization, brutal rule etc.
How quickly we took the post-WW2 enlightened era for granted and assumed it to be the new normal.
It doesn’t take much to revert to the “default” historical state of affairs in which we are divided and ruled by an aristocracy. Republican donors have been steadily chipping away at education, voting rights and rules, unions, ... it shows a new gilded age is precisely what they want.
Social media started out as the bread and circuses of our time, but now they have also become a tool of mind manipulation and deep privacy invasion / surveillance.
America is too far gone to lead the change, our best hope is that Northern Europe leads the way.
4
At least one of those many democratic candidates should be runnng on a platform of deep regulation of these technologies.
2
The problem with this column is that it is years too late. A decade or two ago it was obvious that the threat (and I do mean threat!) of the internet was already there and expanding exponentially. People were sold an image -- as all corporations always push their products -- of the "democratization" of information accessibility, communication, and diversity.
Guaranteeing security, privacy, transparency, access, and other mutually exclusive concepts, the tech corporations and political allies fed into the generally accepted but naive belief that the good guys are smarter than the bad guys. And when it comes to motivation, it is likely the reverse is true.
In a generation where the Left and the Right have reversed their positions in so many ways, we now see a younger generation enthusiastically handing out private information to corporations and, thus, to the world, that a previous generation would have thought an outrageous intrusion.
Among other things, this creates much unemployment in the F.B.I. and other intelligence agencies, as they no longer need to tap and infiltrate in order to find out what those opposed to government policies and actions are planning to do. And as opposition becomes more and more dependent on the internet for organizing, it becomes easier and easier to disrupt that opposition.
And that doesn't even get into infrastructure and military implications.
But, hey, that's a small price to pay for being able to see how your friend cooked lunch.
3
No one, absolutely no one should be applauding the rise of surveillance capitalism, or the erosion of our privacy, which is sufficiently important to be prioritized by our Bill of Rights in the fourth amendment. The fourth amendment isn't about the founding fathers wanting to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures because they had something to hide. At root, this is about the role that privacy, and the right to independent thought has in maintaining a democracy, and preventing tyranny perpetrated by those who have the right to rob citizens of their privacy, and the ownership of their own beliefs and affiliations.
Both major parties have been completely asleep behind the wheel on addressing this, and so has the Gray Lady and other important news outlets. Prevention of the further erosion of privacy seemed to be a priority for Rand Paul, but was not an apparent concern for either Trump, Clinton, or perhaps more importantly, any influential journalist or debate moderator who played a role in the 2016 election.
While it is questionable whether or not WaPo, for example, can investigate candidly whether Amazon's business model and collection of consumer data poses a threat to democracy (let alone to the likelihood of the success of new small businesses), it is incumbent on the rest of the fourth estate, and on thoughtful and principled members of congress to prevent the further forfeiture of our privacy.
3
How is Amazon’s data any different than customer cards kept by a general store in Tombstone in the Old West? It philosophically is the same process. You walk into a general store and ask for something. If not available, the storekeeper made a note on a card that you wanted it. Likely he periodically looked over all the cards and maybe recognized patterns of requests. A storekeeper like this one probably made more money and had happier customers. He also likely did far better than competitors. Amazon does exactly the same thing on a global scale and does it every millisecond. Doing more of it and doing it more efficiently does not make it wrong.
Hopefully some advanced artificial intelligence will figure out a way to halt and the reverse greenhouse gas accumulation. Otherwise the robots may find themselves here alone, with nobody to service.
2
It takes a lot longer to create something than it does to destroy it. The real question is whether the creative destruction of the many waves of the deep dive will serve humanity as a means for improvement, or serve humanity up on a platter to the highest bidder.
1
Most of the solutions seem to be that the tech companies need to share the wealth. We want to summon and pay for a cab via voice, understand and change our accounts worldwide on a tablet, communicate with police and pizza places with a text, read (and pay) for newspaper stories without touching paper and buy things at the cheapest prices on the planet. Customers will get upset if they cannot do those things. Other than a few regulations that will never interfere with what customers want, the variable piece is who makes money off it. Letting users reap financial benefits may be more equitable, but the original processes remain in place. Yes, the tech managers have it right - it is inevitable.
When the masters of the universe, sipping champagne and munching on toast and caviar at Davos start talking about reducing their workforce to 1% of what it is today, someone, I hope, is also putting some thoughts to the future of the 99% that will be unemployed and unemployable in this wonderful new “deep” world planned by machines, built by machines, and run by machines. What will these unemployables do? The optimist can dream about a world of leasure, when the world population will be housed for free, fed for free, clothed for free,and entertained for free, and free to become philosophers or artists and let the machines do the work. The pessimist can look at the more plausible alternative: War. On a “deep” scale.
4
@DJ: The war economy is what got us out of the depression, and it is still going strong. If we stop it, employment will slip below the threshold where it can sustain the economy. Then the depression will return because we have not solved the root cause. There isn't enough for everyone to do, and there is no mechanism for paying them to either do something Earth-friendly, or do nothing at all and enjoy their leisure.
I wonder who the Davos crowd thinks is going to buy their product or service if no one has jobs!
2
"I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth. My high-blown pride At length broke under me, and now has left me, Weary and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream that must for ever hide me."
Shakespeare seems to have foreseen our descent into the murky world of artificial intelligence.
4
So dire, so dark, so deep! Friedman’s portrayal seems to preclude the inherent proclivity of humans to innovate that carried them from an agricultural age to an industrial age to an information age without 99% unemployment. This too shall pass – we will adapt to a “deep state” age like we did the others.
However, “deep state” capitalism must prevail over “deep state” fascism or “deep state” socialism – for this we need a president, who not only understands “that deep changes are afoot,” but also enacts policies in a way that positions us to win the “deep state” war in the long term.
4
Humanity will tolerate just so much and then the fires will start. 100 million people turn off their cellphones and find a simple tool to damage GPS in their cars and the 'Deep State' will stumble. Do not assume all this technology is the future. Every sensational toy eventually ends up on a shelf collecting dust. There is a native revulsion toward possessiveness and smothering. Every lover learns this lesson. Facebook can die in one afternoon. Apple can die in a few terrible minutes if enough of the public says "Enough" China can spy on a billion citizens until enough of them show up before the Forbidden City and stomps their phones. Every tyranny finally gets the boot. Have you noticed the Soviet Union went away after a brief dinner and a shared notepad? Humanity will not surrender to a A.I. state and be certain the machines will fall into the dustbin of history soon enough.
3
Am I to assume that those looking to lay off 99% of their workforce in the name of fast money aren't "bad guys" themselves?
1
Great article - another sign the Singularity is on schedule...
Still I am disturbed by all the comments telling us to abandon social media as if that will make difference. The fact of the matter is social media is here to stay, the younger generation is addicted, and abandoning the battlefield to the manipulators is cowardice and a recipe for disaster.
Concerned people need to learn how to effectively engage on social media to promote good ideas like the European Privacy Law. Tech can convey facts as well as lies, work for good as well as evil.
46
@Paul The european privacy law is a myth and a lie. There are so many records out there already, and so many ways the copy is requested, transmitted, and shared that privacy on the internet does not exist.
2
Excellent thoughts. There is only one way out of this. Total destruction of the world, and then we start all over again.
1
Tom writes "Unfortunately, we have not developed the regulations or governance", which is true. I'm not sure we can.
There are three major problems. The first is distribution of activity. Regulations are, inevitably, linked to a geographical area determined by the organism that enacts them. The entities involved in the "deep" stuff described in the article are not. We all know of the division of labor practiced by companies to avoid having to face their fiscal responsibilities, but the same incentive applies in this case as well.
The second is the very ability to analyze, predict and mimic that Tom alludes to. How can we be certain that regulations are actually created by well-intentioned humans and not manipulated by the to-be-regulated industry itself?
Finally, the phenomenon is in full flux, and is likely to remain so. This makes creating regulation, identifying breaches thereof and quickly reacting accordingly and appropriately virtually impossible.
We are inching closer and closer to a particularly vile dystopia, driven by the double desire of individuals to make money and to prove their cleverness, without any regard to morality or desirability. This, too, will not end well.
1
To the Davos capitalists who, thanks to advancing AI, hope to run their companies with just 1% of their current work force: if most people are unemployed, who will be the market for your products? How will you make a profit if no one can afford what you sell?
4
The tools used are certainly very 'deep'.
Otherwise nothing new about 'surveillance capitalism', certainly not new enough to distinguish it in such terms, from what came before.
Surveillance, as defined here, has been always at the root of all politics and markets, since forever.
1
I'm sorry ,bank managers cannot transfer money overseas by a phone call. But your account certainly could be hacked if you're not careful,by credit cards,debit cards and personal information,for instance
2
My personal "containment rate" is however long it takes me to get a real person on the phone. My containment rate is indeed increasing because hitting the operating button no longer connects you to an operator. That doesn't mean automated answering systems have improved. That means companies are making it more difficult for users to opt-out of their automated systems. User experience has declined more than technology has advanced.
7
Has there been a tipping point technology since the printing press, the pow er loom, the railroad, automobile, not to mention vaccines and antibiotics that didn’t bring unintended consequences and real dangers of abuse. And, don’t forget nuclear energy, the Bomb, and ICBMs.
What we lack in this current revolution is not the ability to protect ourselves from acknowledged evil consequences but the will. We eliminated child labor in mines and factories which thrived because of child care standards in preindustrial America . With the popular and political will to do so, the world can control , regulate, even criminalize technologies that can damage society.
Let’s rember that when bank failures and credit card fraud threatened commerce, we immunized the consumer from liability. When the bank became liable, the finance industry found a way to solve the problem in order to save the technology.
1
Blind consumerism make mass market manipulation possible on all levels.
We now live in society where most people are incapable, or unwilling to make the effort required to understand politics or much else that shapes their lives to someone else agenda.
We are already more than half way to global disaster and the people who should be working to get us back on a healthy course are oblivious to the inevitability to the dire end we have created for ourselves.
7
@The Iconoclast: The Apocalypse Prophesy is evidently self-fulfilling.
Deep breath, Mr. Friedman! I too have concerns; but some tech claims are like the deep stuff found in barnyards, especially when made by the companies or vendors involved.
Computers can only do what people program them to do. A computer can beat a person at a game based on a mathematical construct, but there's no judgment involved. No real thinking is happening.
There's no "artificial mind" at work when AlphaZero gets better by playing itself. It's a computer program designed to do that. It can only "learn" to the degree that its programming allows.
A voice recognition menu doesn't "understand" what you're saying. It doesn't recognize your voice as unique from mine. It analyzes phonemes and responds accordingly (often poorly). "Virtual agent" is just a snazzy term for a voice recognition program.
"Surveillance capitalism" is definitely real, and that's what really concerns me. But people willingly give away their privacy! It amazes me that people put "smart speakers" in their homes; devices with microphones that are on all the time, connected to a company that wants to monetize your data.
One can avoid at least some of this data monetizing by ditching social media; turning off tracking apps on smartphones; clearing browser caches, etc.
But we all need to realize that the apps, phones & computers we use can all gather information on us, in one way or another.
8
I agree. There is a deep dive going on all around us with technology and the like, but what is also growing (or going deep) is the backlash to it all and the connection that is deepening between us.
People understand that technology is surpassing them, as they feel they are losing their privacy, their freedoms, and ultimately their way of life. (jobs included)
The idea of going it alone is waning as we are grouping together to deepen our sense of community. The idea of trading human rights and privacy for some sort of economic freedom (much like it is in China) is anathema to so many and only deepens our sense of freedom. The idea that only a few should have everything and control everything is repulsive and the backlash is deepening.
How deep we go will be up to us.
6
Wonderful piece Tom. While privacy is not explicitly in the Constitution or Bill of Rights, its premise underpins most of our freedoms...yet privacy seems to be utterly ignored in today's tech world. Congress needs to work toward rules that address internet security and privacy issues. For while the world has changed much since 1787, in no way should we let those changes undermine fundamental rights. Other than addressing our national debt, no other issue is more immediately important from a national perspective. The Europeans are trying, with GDPR...would sure like the US to take this on, too.
7
Systemic devaluation and destruction of the educational system in this country lead to the development of a population that doesn't care about their data being mined, sold, transferred and bartered among companies, goverments and criminals.
Most of them still thrive for that new phone, game or whatever new gadget is pushed on them, and they still believe there will always be a wage for day to day living.
Someone or something will continue to provide them with cheap food and cheap entertainment to satisfy their immediate needs.
The ones that control the data will also make sure to provide them with somebody or something to blame when those wages disappear.
5
We need many more discussions in classes, symposia and among ethicists and philosophers about the implications of what is happening in the world of information flow. Most of us know way too little about the importance of information which is right up there with the laws of thermodynamics.
It is ironic that with so much more information at our disposal, we simultaneously have become more informed and more ignorant about what is going on around us.
4
There's always a point in history where the rich and powerful overreach , they spend so much of their lives set apart from the majority of humanity that they begin to see themselves as more god than man. History shows that the results are a bloody disaster. The mob is undefeated. It takes a lot to transform a docile beaten down populace into a raging mob looking for blood, but it always happens, the powerful always go that one extra step that makes it all inevitable.
Maybe the next revolution will pit humans against robots. With the super rich betting their lives and wealth on the robots. Thousands of years war and brutality tell us...the robots don't stand a chance.
1
Trump did us a favor by elevating the term "fake". Friedman is right that we need trustworthy people and institutions to guide and inform us but this relies too much on those alone as they are fallible. We each have the awesome responsibility and task to understand and become more aware of technological advances and threats. We must rise to this and to teach our children not only about technology but especially moral values and how some folks fall far short and will do harm. This too Trump has taught us.
2
@Potter: "Fake" is the new "real". Didn't you get the memo? I hope you didn't think it was fake and ignore it.
Big Data is now being used to weed out workers and job applicants on a growing range of jobs, based on criteria chosen by unaccountable people. Criteria now includes social media activity, cell phone usage patterns, daily personal movement such as walking, proximity to others, and purchases, to determine whether or not to hire you or terminate your employment. This data accumulates by the second and is shared with multiple parties, includes even your kindergarten records and is accessible at the click of a mouse.
1
@walkman
What are your sources for that? There are laws in most States which prohibit a former employer from confirming anything about you, other than you were employed, job description, date of hire, date of leaving. No information regarding termination due to bad behavior. So, there is no vast store of information about you passed around to employment agencies, prospective employers et al. I know this because my job with a large corporation was in administration. If a former employer violates that privacy standard, you can sue, especially if it costs you a job opportunity.
1
@walkman: I wonder if they assign demerits for not using social media enough, like they do on credit scores. If you have a million dollars in the bank but no debts, you get a 750 score (that's a "B" - 800+ is an "A").
If so, then not only do you have to use social media, but you have to do so in a manner that your prospective boss approves of.
Based on what info that you have? The plain fact is tech companies only mine the data we give them. Is there any evidence that Facebook, Google et al are retrieving non-public data sources without authorization? Some typically inept politician asked Mark Zuckerberg if he would like everyone knowing what hotel he is used. Zuckerberg said he would not like it. He should have said that no one knows what hotel I use because I do not tell it on Facebook, I do not share things I like, I do not broadcast pictures of my family. Simply stop stop sharing info and no one knows you from Adam.
2
We need young people with the Knowledge of Deep in our House and Senate. They know how to operate.
The people we have now are to old.
2
Yes, life on Earth, life in America, is "deep" in unprecedented peril, Dr. Tom. We are replaying today Maxim Gorky's December 1902 play, "The Lower Depths". Denizens of society's underclass living in a homeless shelter in Moscow. Russian social realism, shown at the Moscow Art Theatre 15 years before the Russian Revolution. We're living in times of deep planetary change
118 years later -- today in 2018 -- history is relentlessly repeating itself in America's Trumpian regime of harsh truth vs. the comforting lie, "Make America Great Again!". Technology has connected the world invisibly by wireless plastic widgets.The enormous complexity of our daily lives is strangling us. Machines aren't human beings. Like America's and the world's underclass of "The Lower Depths".
3
Start by revising 47 U.S. Code § 230 (c) (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
This lets off the hook everyone who can do anything. Maybe they should not need to be held to the standard of publisher, but they need to have some responsibility for content, such as providing means of oversight - like Wikipedia expert teams - and providing evidence that oversight is being conducted.
This could go a long way to limiting how deep they can go.
1
In the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode where she learns that anyone can look up her back story on the internet, there is a joke that all one has to do is use the Go Ogle service.
Go Ogle -- bless their STASI hearts -- has been experimenting in Canada with delivering in their search results local telephone numbers leading to businesses, except that Go Ogle owns the phone numbers and monitors the conversation in order to analyze its content for its own corporate surveillance purposes.
https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/2019/01/21/google-confirms-it-uses-dummy-phone-numbers-to-record-calls-with-local-services.html
1
Bloomberg has a recent show on about this. A clip on this very thing is at their YouTube page. The program is Hello World reported from China by Ashlee Vance. https://youtu.be/ydPqKhgh9Mg
Society is built on trust. If the combnation of Facebook and big data make the use of all forms of electronic communication suspect, people will either fall into the statist trap represented by electronics or go Luddite.
I suspec it will be a combination of the two. Social relations outside the sphere of direct personal contact will become a complete sham, in which no one believes anything because it can all be faked and is all mined for profit by people no one trusts.
O brave new world, with such lovely people in it ...
2
People give up the data in exchange for exposure on social media. Do they think SM provides that capability out of generosity, a gift, a platform to Bring Us All Together?
Do they live in a Coke commercial?
Hows that saying go;
There are products and there are customers.
If you're not paying, then you're the product.
5
In tribal societies, prior to the rise of cities, there was no privacy. In all respects, one lived and died in the sight of others. We're getting back there.
This essay is deeply troubling. All of the electronic wow factor wizardry is for profit. There is not one deep data interpretation that is used for societal improvement, but, rather is used to create instant, self-aggrandizing individual wealth for a very few.
Mega data has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that vaccines do not cause nor even contribute to autism or related disorders . Yet Oregon and Washington states allow people to personally opt of having children vaccinated. As result both states are realizing recurrence and resurgence of measles and polio out-breaks. These are crimes against humanity that lead to life-long impairment of afflicted children. Deep data, unused because of an uneducated or unaware peoples is useless, except to the profiteers.
5
I'm not sure where to find these advanced "virtual agents" that Mr. Friedman speaks of. The virtual agents I interact with are no smarter than they were 10 years ago. If you have any business that is slightly off-script, they pass you off to a human, who is also usually working from a more advanced script. If your business is slightly off-script, they escalate to a human who actually has the ability to handle something that wasn't anticipated by the writers of the scripts.
Someday,the machines might be able to fool us into thinking that they are the first human you talk to, the one who escalates your issue. When they can do so, they will have passed the Turing test.
To pass the Turing test, a machine must be able to fool a human into thinking that it too is a human. If it could just handle my off-script issue, that would be good enough for me. Until then, pressing "0" or saying the word "agent" usually gets you a (human) agent.
2
Always press 0 first. You might not get what you want but you wouldn't get it anyway and you have messed up an algorithm somewhere. Another fun activity is accepting surveys and answering from the least-likely perspective. Also, tell what/whoever asks that you were born in 1999. You'll get much more interesting adds on you device. Probably pointless but fun to think you make no sense to whatever profile the big "they" have on you.
1
Our 'confidential' data are located in so many different places, that we cannot begin to count them, let alone know where or how to go about deleting our trail of confidential bread crumbs.
Banks are patiently herding us towards paperless and use mobile banking. Using our mobile phones to log-in to our precious accounts coupled with easily hackable 2-Factor Authentication puts our data in very vulnerable locations.
Most tax preparers use a third-party cloud to host your tax data as you exchange confidential information across the ether. When you leave Tax Person A and go to Tax Person B, your confidential data isn't erased behind you as the door closes; just remember that as you enter your social security number, AGAIN.
Think of how many airlines you have a profile with who now have your credit card number, your Known Traveler Number, and/or your Global Entry Number.
Credit card companies, mortgage companies, where you purchased your car, or even your refrigerator, they all have the same data (sans Traveler numbers): social security number, where you work and worked, your home address, the name of your employer...and this data is replicated like gerbils.
Coupled with buying and selling data across platforms, and how fast machine learning is developing, if the ne'er-do-well wants, he can purchase "dark data" and piece together small disparate data points and create your profile for you.
The question is, How do we rein in all this data to prevent its ill use?
1
Much ado about nothing.
@Rich I imagine people said that about the steam engine or electricity.
2
If controlling all people through data analysis and AI then there would be nothing but republicans and corporate slaves. While some should fear what is coming those who should fear are predominantly the gullible dolts who support the GOP and Trump. Others will push back and boycott trouble makers in government and business and move to punish and contain creeps like Putin. The GOP and corporations will harness this technology for evil but they will likely only have limited success with those who they already have brainwashed by more traditional means. I think that younger people will be less susceptible to even these machine manipulations and some more dishonest businesses and the GOP will actually lose as they become more manipulative and cynical.
Probably a more pressing concern for the majority of people is that these technologies will make humans workers less needed. If we are going to move forward in these technological areas we will have to develop an economic system that doesn't require everyone to work a traditional type of job. That will be opposed by the wealthy and the dog they bought called the GOP.
The "going deep" metaphor isn't working that well for you, Tom, given that a lot of the concerns about technologies these days is that they trivialize all sorts of interactions, from relationships (that's what the song "Shallow' is about) to government regulation (those 280 characters you mentioned). By the way, is "the world is flat" image still working for you?
I had thought Marshall McLuhan was right. A machine is a cold medium, and so the human connection is irreplaceable. As AI gets closer to putting an algorithm to that human linkage, I'm beginning to wonder if he was wrong.
But even quantum computers are probabilistic, and our universe is at best a rare quantum fluctuation. I shall cling to the notion as long as I can that I cannot be replaced by the next generation of computer. It's all I have left.
Many will look for “Deep Trust” and “Deep Loyalty” attributes in our next president.
Good Luck finding them once you scratch the surface.
Our Elected Politicians are so indebted to lobbyists, special interest financial contributors, the party machine, those holding compromising information, their lust for re-election that the Deep Trust and Loyalty will be to them – not you US Taxpayers. Hasn’t history proved that?
We must find a way to hold self-interested and self-enriching Elected Politicians, government officials, their staffers and operatives from both parties personally and financially liable, responsible and accountable for the lies and half-truths they have told US, their gross mismanagement of our county, our $22 T and growing national debt (107% of GDP), and our $80 T in future, unfunded liabilities they forced on US jeopardizing our economic and national security, while benefiting themselves, their staffers, their party and special interest financial contributors.
2
@US Debt Forum: There is no public office in the US elected by and answerable to all of the people.
Waiting for Sophia
The amazing thing to me in this amazing time is how quickly humans become bored with new technology. Humans adapt, adaption is the one super power we actually have. Humans can adapt to zero degree temperatures in one city, board a plane, and then adapt to 110 degree temperatures in another city on the very same day. In this same fashion we adapt to the internet and the wonders of Youtube in which it seems every video ever made is there for you to unlock and enjoy..and yet the human wants more...and something more is on the way
The big news of the year is Sophia the Robot, a real look at the future, where we will cut the cord, the cord that unites human to human, the need for companionship, by moving over to robot and A.I. companionship. That's the next big step, the phone in your hand will morph into a humanoid, that answers any question, provides friendship, likes what you like and never does anything that displeases you, robots will become your new best friend, a friend that never cheats on you, a friend you can always count on, without all those nasty vices inherent in human nature
Sophia is up to model number 8. When we get to Sophia number 23....sign me up
“...But then Zuckerberg was also clueless about how deep the powers of the Facebook platform had gone...”
No. Wrong. Incorrect. Zuckerberg knew full well the capabilities of Facebooks bottom up advertising platform.
4
For me, staying as unconnected as I can, as aware of intrusion and pushing back is the course I'll continue to follow.
By avoiding the false choice offered by the 'fight or flight' dictumI'll very likely continue to be as invisible as I can.
Except for Comments, of course.....and subscription info and....
Whatcha gonna do, bro?
3
@AWENSHOK, you could just close the gate at Trident Lake.
AMAZING!!! how this article portends so much, and yet so little. So deep its shallow...., or so shallow its deep? I'm jumping off here.
Thomas let me correct you: there is no evidence that fake news spread on Facebook influenced the outcome of the 2016 elections. And Zuckerberg was right saying that it was a “pretty crazy idea.” As a head of Facebook he had to apologize not because it dawned to him that he was wrong, but because he realized where the wind blows and did it due to PC.
"... They can use technology to fake a bank manager's voice..."
Who they, newsman? Well, here's a headline on that front: police departments have had that technology since the 1980s, in a device called "the voice stress" monitor. The voice masking capability was not trumpeted, except in the confidential sale's pitch. To fight crime (in Yolo a favorite initiation for a neo was to show them how it worked with an old pro then have neo try it, only with the "on" switch off - target responds to bouncy female voice "who's this?" bouncy female, imitating guy's wife says "you know, Donna!", subject growls Donna who, cuz it don't sound like, call cut and old pros laughing show that you gotta check that switch!).
The voice mask tech, amazingly before chips, back in flint tool time, was developed by Bell Lab and used by OSS in Sweden and Switzerland in WW II.
As Metcalff tried to warn in his book 1933, 1984 happened long before. Check his pages 196 and 200, and you will see why taking a microphone off every desk and kitchen wall and putting it in every person's pocket is a natural evolution of the idea that democracy is too dangerous a thing to put in the hands of a Pavlov herd of idiots...
then read the finale in the Book of John while playing that old vinyl Mercury Messenger Service song, 'the eve of destruction'... you might get a revelation...
1
"But deep trust and deep loyalty cannot be forged overnight. They take time. That’s one reason this old newspaper I work for — the Gray Lady — is doing so well today. Not all, but many people, are desperate for trusted navigators". Regarding the above statement, I have the following comments:
I trust very little reported in the Times and do not agree much with the opinions of the NY Times' pundits, but I have been reading NY Times every day for the last 35 years I am here in this country. Why, I don't know? Probably because I understand the bias of the NY times, I can get a better grasp of what is really happening based on the standard the Times tries to keep, though lately the standard is getting diluted due to TDS.
1
"...or make it look like the president of the United States just announced a nuclear attack on Russia..." Or make it look like he colluded with the Russians too! I liked "From Beirut to Jerusalem," you ought to stick with Middle Eastern Studies rather than the Sky is Falling theories.
“But then Zuckerberg was also clueless about how deep the powers of the Facebook platform had gone — deep enough that a few smart Russian hackers could manipulate it to help Donald Trump win the presidency.”
LOL. He knew. Facebook knew. They don’t care. It’s an opportunity to sell more ads.
1
It is savant not deep.
Use it at your own peril.
God luck with those using it mindlessly.
1
I do honestly (and hopefully) expect that DT will pass from the scene and most of his legacy will be erased. But one thing we will never get back is the precious time we're wasting while "Rome" is burning, whether it is climate change or the problems stemming from "deep". The present need for change and adaptation is overwhelming with or without DT.
2
Ignoring all of the other problems with Trump for the moment, my real issue with his presidency has been and will always be that he is incompetent and displays leadership solely so that he can steal money. With the singularity in the near future, we needed and still need real thoughtful forward looking leadership. We didn’t even get competent leadership.
Every computer in use means that at least one, if not more humans, has become unemployed. Trump thinks that all unemployed people are lazy and that there should be no social safety net in order to encourage them to not be lazy. He doesn’t see uneducated or under-educated human capital. He is all about short term profits. He will allow anything that creates a job today no matter how detrimental in the long term. People are becoming irrelevant to the economy which will continue forward, computerized. You can be as anti-abortion as you want to be, but the reality is that without a safety net, population numbers must drop as there will be no jobs. Wall Street continues to move the market upwards every time people become unemployed. They think that is “good” it shows efficiency gains. At what point is someone going to wake up and realize that an economy is ONLY necessary if there are humans? We have value, not just as mindless units of consumerism which is the current tech view-our every action is just big data to be mined for the coming species of super computers. No one seems to be looking ahead.
1
“No,Zuckerberg was not “clueless “ has to the misuse of personal data on Facebook. He purposefully misled Congress by testifying that Facebook did not sell personal information of it’s users, when in fact it gratuitously mining of such data. Facebook is the monster of Dr.Zuckerberg’s creation..and the source of his wealth...which is by no means an accident.
2
Two thoughts.
First Thought:
You over estimate the quality of data. One of I am sure many examples.
My wife a 40+ veteran of big city Intensive Care Units tells us that most of the people who are entering data do a terrible job. A high percentage of the information on sick people is not accurate.
The shift from hand written charting to many screens deep electronic charting is taking so much time that people just dump in data that may or may not be accurate. As such when you aggregate Big Deep Data you end up with garbage in and garbage out. Pity the poor researches who think that this data is going to lead to new.
The people who hock this data in all fields have blinders as to its quality. In time this will collapse as people figure out that the model is full of holes.
Second Thought:
The people who look for and move to automation and replace workers with jobs will do so with wild enthusiasm. At some point in time there will be a tipping point. With so many people not being able to work, they will get hungry.
We know from the first few decades of the 20th Century what that will bring. When the massive social unrest or outright civil war comes along, the top 10 percent will be in the crosshairs both figuratively and literally.
Capitalism need to morph from the "efficient allocation of scarce resources" to the "allocation of scarce resources by maximizing meaningful employment".
Jobs or efficiency. Social Harmony or death and destruction.
Choose!
2
@JD The efficiency and correctness of data is already coming from the machines used to monitor a person's health. That data is as accurate as the sensors being used.
3
Yes, we are “desperate for trusted navigators.” A combination of people being able to generate fake news (from the National Enquirer to social media platforms) and the rapid rise of AIntelligence is disturbing. An educated and informed public is the cornerstone of democracy. Sorting out the truth and the relevant is increasingly difficult with so much information every day. Thank you Mr. Friedman and the Times for helping with that.
1
Read the actual book or series of pieces by the esteemed author, professor Shoshana Zuboff’s. “The Age of Surveillance Capital, " will open your eyes and hopefully your mind to what has been happening and will continue unless something is done. It is not utopia.
1
Look at this point we will be happy to have a "competent" person for President.
2
What really scares me is when governments start doing it.
2
Perhaps A.I. can used to help governance and eventually replace the humans.
Speaking of “touch” connectivity ...how about let’s get back in touch with nature.
One of the lead stories Climate Extremes from polar vortex in the Midwest to excessive heat and raging fires in Australia.
Where is all the “intelligence” whether human or AI on this existential issue?
Cue Adele, we certainly will be rolling in the Deep.
1
We are choosing our habitat and it looks something like Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
1
Technology has always been used, in fact it's mostly been developed to serve, 4 purposes:
1. Comfort (e.g., make what used to be difficult easier, like give me a car and, now, a car that will drive itself).
2. Entertainment (can't wait for the ULTIMATE VR).
3. Safety (see nukes, nanobots and, now, 'I know who you are and whether you're 'good' or 'bad')
4. Power which, primarily, goes to the already powerful oftentimes by them hyping threats and assuring 'safety.' (see ...well, you know who).
I'm glad I'm old as the world which is coming seems, paradoxically, scarier than ever.
2
Watch how quickly the "elite" turn on these new technologies once they start putting doctors and lawyers out of business. Machine intelligence (MI) will create computerized doctors and lawyers that will be able to mine existing medical and legal data to provide abilities and insights that no human counterpart can match. On the off chance the MI does get it wrong, the deep learning capabilities will make a second mistake highly unlikely.
Additionally, computerized doctors will have the emotional intelligence to quickly identify a patient's emotional state and mimic the correct emotional response. In the end, people will prefer their computerized doctors when they provide superior diagnostic capabilities and unparalleled bedside manner (an area in which many human doctors are deficient.)
Soon, highly educated professionals will join the ranks of factory workers in the line for the soup kitchen as another industry is getted by machine automation.
In an age of unprecedented income and wealth disparity as profession after profession falls to automation, the only future I can see from all this "deep" technology is one of deep poverty for most of our soon-to-be unemployable nation.
3
Today's real battle is that of artificial vs. real and for humans being able to differentiate between the two.
This requires a desire for seeking out the truth vs. having it handed to us. You have to seek the truth.
But artificial can be so instantaneously gratifying. Artificial requires less effort and allows us to go on our lazy ways. But being lazy is sure to create some very unfortunate side affects.
1
Lack of critical thinking skills combined with a lack of writing skills that are constrained to 280 characters which will never allow for any kind of in-depth expression of ideas. Yes, it is a problem that is only the tip of the larger problem - humans.
We love to mislead each other, to manipulate the message and confuse our reader/listener into accepting our propaganda as fact - ok, alternate fact.
We have been doing this as long as humans have had the power to communicate with brief moments of time where there was a serious effort to understand and be understood only to be followed by more diversion, distraction and obfuscation.
We have, as a society, withdrawn from critical thinking and analysis, in favor of joining in the emotional moment that just feels so good and is so cathartic. We are, and will continue to, suffer the consequences.
Frankly, I'm tired of blaming "The Russians" when the real problem is the vast majority of Americans who blithely follow and believe anything that is trending with zero interest in truth and fact. The only reason for the success is that we allowed our emotions to be manipulated by the masters of manipulation and would not listen to reason.
7
@George N. Wells You hit the nail on the head.
The voice of one of our greatest thinkers calls out from beyond the grave with a precient warning that becomes more apparent with each passing day:
"Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."
~ Carl Sagan, "Demon-Haubted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark," 1995
All this points to new sources of immense revenue for our corrupt politicians. The first step to getting the tech world under control is getting the money out of politics; all of it including the legalized bribes like speaking fees, book deals, jobs for family members, implied promises of lobbying jobs after service, campaign donations and many other euphemistically named bribe schemes too complex for most of us to understand. With the enormous wealth of the new billionaire class and their near total lack of any sense of morality in pursuit of whatever goals they have our democracy is in real danger unless we act to protect it.
2
I think Hatch knows exactly how Facebook makes its money, but was simply getting Zuckerberg to say in plain terms that "they run ads" -- which is the product that Facebook really sells.
I'm reminded of the phrase "panem et circenses (bread and circuses)". We're all distracted by the endless entertainment and immediate satisfaction that modern technologies provide that we quietly ignore the surveillance that is taking place. Just fill us all with bread and circuses was true in Rome and still is today.
118
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. And the NYTimes shares some of the blame. They sow division by promoting the outrage culture as the fox raids the henhouse.
3
@Noodles
The "outrage culture" as you term it, is exactly what is necessary to make every effort to raise awareness of what thoughtless adoption of technology is doing to humanity. Great thanks and appreciation are due to the NYT and any other group or individuals that are sounding the alarm concerning the wholesale intrusions into people's lives. All technology has its costs from coal burning to AI. Everyone needs to be wary of the downsides as well as the benefits and proceed with caution.
16
@Noodles: Internet pioneers expected instant global communications to create a competitive environment for ideas, where the fittest would endure and the misfits would expire. The NYT provides one of the better laboratories to study the evolution of ideas and beliefs in real time.
8
There is no question that the advances of data technology pose serious issues issues and challenges to the maintenance of personal privacy. They also fly in the face of the associated values we purport to hold dear. What results is a challenge to fundamental precepts that have long been accepted as the norm, the right to privacy, fair and free elections, and the freedom to be anonymous.
We should not be shocked, or even surprised. Advances in technology, whether when cave people invented tools, when the Mesopotamians invented the wheel, during the Industrial Revolution, or when Enrico Fermi produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction under the football stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, have always changed us, generally for the better, but not always.
The management of data and its impact on us all places us at a challenging crossroads vis a vis regulation, given the strong political sentiment against it, particularly in the Republican Party, and notably given the strong financial and political influence that corporations who traffic in data possess. Citizens United didn't help.
Yes, we are in the deep. The question is whether it is quicksand that we can't escape, and whether the parts of our political system that detest regulation, primarily the Republican Party, can themselves be regulated.
2
@Quoth The Raven: The legalization of cannabis is just one of the inevitable consequences of complete loss of privacy. Laws against whatever people are inclined to do naturally with no harm done to others will become untenable.
1
The ironic thing is that when the bad guys' use of the Internet and other technology to engage in scams gets pervasive enough people will no longer use them. If you want to make sure that the person you are talking to on your phone or seeing on screen is who they claim to be you will insist on meeting them in person. If you want to make sure that you are not giving your credit car information to a crook you will not use the Internet for banking or other business transactions. We will end up coming full circle and insist on doing everything face to face. That's not a bad thing.
104
@Jay Orchard Not sure that will happen unless it's forced on us. Society seems way too lazy to be burdoned with doing things "in person" any more. (Heavy sigh)
5
@Jay Orchard Meet face to face outdoors to avoid detection like the spies and gangsters meet.
5
@SolonD
That's a decision that's subject to being made on an individual basis. One person at a time.
I realize that individual agency and the reality of latitude to exercise free will are concepts that people are increasingly being conditioned to disdain, or view as mythical. But the decision on whether to swallow whole the New Paradigm of authoritative behavioral prediction based on categorical correlations- or whether to reject it- is also ultimately made by one person at a time.
1
We’ve entered a brave new world. And it has implications beyond most people’s imagination as you point out.
As a dad of a 5 and 7 year old, it makes me think about their future and what to do now.
Common sense today is to steer your kids to computer science and programing and other related fields... to become part of the deep beast. That seems like the gospel among parents and education as the only way to make it the way the world is going.
With what we’re facing, we need to pay even more attention to developing social EQ. It’s a long lost art. Because that’s what is going to tame the beast — connecting people together in person, building real connections, dialogue, and trust, and rediscovering empathy and heart... without that, humans will drown in deep water.
130
I am amazed at that way digital world has drawn people together. I am here, at home, in the UK reading and commenting on an article printed in the NYT! If you said to me 70 years ago, that would be normal, I would have said you where mad! Without a doubt, the internet has given too ordinary people,access to a world which was beyond there reach. It has opened many doors which were once closed. But all this accessibility a comes at a price! This accessibility, which we take for granted, can, and is used to collect data. Every time a Bank Card is used, the card details are logged, when in the supermarket, petrol {gas}station, traveling anywhere, your location is known, as in when you use your mobil phone. The internet is a wonder off are time, but, my privacy, my individuality, me, eclipse everything!
15
@Bernie Loines
Agreed on the basics, but what you're appreciating (and I am too) was already there 15-20 years ago on the WWW. What's happened since is what the article writers is worried about, as am I. Simple observation from my daily commute, and maybe around your own corner of the world: how many people do you see reading the NYT or some such publication on their phones and how many do you see on social media or playing video versions of games that were like we had 50 years ago (except those games weren't apps capturing all sorts of personal data about us and feeding it back to who knows who, where and why). This IT revolution headed off in a whole other direction about 12 years ago, so what now?
10
@John Dudzinsky
As well as a foundation in STEM education, society could benefit greatly from more emphasis on the Humanities, art, music and literature. The greatest asset that people have over any machine is their basic humanness, their ability to dream, to create, to innovate and to express universal truths. As a species we are slowly forfeiting this very humanity. Rage Against the Machine!
14
But the machines can't make a good chocolate chip cookie:
https://pudding.cool/2018/05/cookies/
yet.
1
@Marc
Or a good translation.
Europe has done the heavy lifting for us with their GDPR privacy laws that we should also adopt. Maybe even more troubling as you alluded to in your piece, how can we restore old-fashioned human intelligence to the body congress? Orin Hatch was far from the only senator to ask incredibly dumb (uninformed) questions.
These are supposed to be our leaders!
96
The scariest thing in this article is the quote Friedman gives in passing, almost as if he considers it a kinda big deal, but not necessarily a bad deal: “People are looking to achieve very big numbers. Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’” Does TF ever pause to consider the implications of a world in which 99% of the workforce is laid off by bots? Like maybe a revolt to end all revolts, culminating in something approximating the end of capitalism (all's well that ends well, I guess).
199
@Lotzapappa
The conclusion to this scenario is a population supported by a payment each month that covers the basics. Those of us who have jobs (and it won't be me) will get more.
This scenario is a sci-fi regular - a world where people are automated of out of work and live, mostly pretty well, on the handouts from the government. The few people who do have jobs, and the politicians (of course!) do very well.
These ideas don't just exist in sci fi and have been floated about real politics before but I'm not convinced the 99% will live well. Experience tells me the 1% will live very well.
25
Just lock the 99% up in some reservations and build walls around them. Should work fairly well.
6
Massive attrition. 1:10^4 population contraction in one or two generations. One way or another.
7
In the mid-1995 The Times and the WaPo published a lengthy article which raised questions about the impact of Deep Technology on human freedom.
"The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown. Many people understand something of what technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude toward it because they think it is inevitable."
This prescient observation is from the Unabomber's manifesto. While Ted Kaczynski's response to technology was not within the bounds of what we consider sane, his warning of the conflict of technology with human freedom was decades ahead of Mr. Friedman's "Warning!"
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/unabom-manifesto-1.html?mcubz=3
What is certain about the future of man is that technology is making mankind - what it means to be human - uncertain.
Kaczynski's solution was to stop technology, but that is the other thing that is certain about technology, it cannot be stopped, nor can it be effectively regulated:
"It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises."
What is most frightening about technology encroaching on human freedom is not the technophiles who with no ethical guardrails, are creating it, but the few "humans" who do/will manipulate it for their own ends. Until technology ultimately rules mankind.
5
@JABarry Ted Kaczynski, at 16, was himself the subject of CIA funded MK Ultra psychological studies overseen by Dr. Henry Murray of Harvard. Ted Kaczynski's brother's book suggests the studies could have been triggered by Ted's age and/or medical records that revealed he'd been separated from his mother and family for a prolonged period due to a medical condition during his infancy. Had Ted developed an early sense of alienation and helplessness that rendered him an easy "deep" research target? Early in his manifesto, Kaczynski dismisses female socialization and development, much like most medical, socioeconomic, psychiatric, psychological and "faith based" models based on words written by males that have led to ubiquitous norms based on male norms. "Deep" surveillance has always gone as deep as technology allowed and collects data deemed important by some researcher's curiosity. The film "Three Identical Strangers" reveals that psychological studies were conducted on triplets and twins separated from each other at birth for the purposes of determining nature versus nurture. The film acknowledges that the infants displayed trauma and anxiety when separated from their wombmates. The barely mentions that the these triplets were also separated from their mothers, who themselves became dismissed and marginalized people because they'd become pregnant "out of bounds" so to speak. The more things change...
1
There's is nothing preordained or dictated by iron laws when it comes to technologies of any kind. They can be contained, controlled, regulated or prohibited *as we choose*. The great danger lies in the feeling of helplessness or inevitability. We are not powerless. Some large powerful companies want us to believe we are powerless -- but we are not. Russians and others can be prevented fro manipulating democracy; Facebook can be prevented from tracking and selling certain click information; and Uber drivers can get a larger share of their fares. We decide -- not algorithms and not companies. Never forget that.
164
@Cal Prof
You make some good points, but this kind of technology is not neutral. As someone who has studied formal logic, may I suggest that the fundamental assumptions on which this engineering is based lead towards certain conclusions, while the degree to which those engineering foundational assumptions expand into being the logic of our business, government and even personal decisions then pulls us along with that tide. This doesn't have to be inevitable if we intervene in time to redesign things from the fundamental logical assumptions on up. But the more this AI is developed in some of these current directions, the more people are pressured practically to conform to the templates being imposed. So I like your idea, for now, but we need to act on that before we reach the tipping point of this pervasive roll-out of predictive (and gradually coercive) surveillance technology.
15
@V.B. Zarr
Yes. We need to avoid what Jaron Lanier refers to as "lock-in."
1
@Cal Prof
While "there's is (sic) nothing preordained or dictated by iron laws", those who hold the power certainly dictate the direction things will take as well as the struggle required to keep balance between good and evil. Take for illustration purposes the parallel of world exploration. The ability to sail to far off lands and bring/take back knowledge and goods seemed "balanced" in benefits to all concerned. However, the powerful corrupted the playing field. Regardless of existing laws and norms, new territory brought out the worst in those with power. The unschooled, lesser prepared peoples were bulldozed by the explorers who became conquerers and finally colonizers. The weaker counterparts did fight back, but they started off at such a disadvantage that it took them hundreds of years to regain some control. Even now, laws do not protect them from the ruthlessness of the capitalist powers that be. Ironically, the Chinese communists are the latest capitalists to corrupt the playing field. Despite having the strength of an ideology based on communal sharing, the few with power call the shots. The rest just play catch up while the bulldozers move in.
1
So we can order Uber by the touch of a button, constantly update our daily lives on instagram, be punished for jaywalking in China without ever meeting a policeman. Great achievements for Homo sapiens! But, soon, only one percent of us will be employed. What will happen to the rest? Hopefully permanent vacation in a tropical island on government money! What technology is inevitably leading towards is the creation of an uber-elite, a super-rich, longer-living version of humanity that will be as far removed from the rest of us as we are from the Neanderthals. They will probably live on Mars. And as soon as they can, they will blast off towards other solar systems. The rest of us will be trapped on a dying Earth, looking wistfully at the stars and wretchedly waiting for the end.
With all our deep learning, AI and other tricks, we have not gained any deep insight into the human condition and, most likely, we never will. All the toys that we create, even AIs that supersede us, will not prevent us from causing catastrophic damage to the planet. We will run the world from our phones, until the last signal fades away.
103
@RajeevA
How many examples do we have from human history of a group of people being willing to donate the wealth they've captured to support another group, without some form of coercive pressure from that second group?
But in this case it looks more likely the coercive pressure will be in the hands of the first group, if we keep letting them develop things in the direction they're currently headed.
Therefore, this isn't about hoping for the future to turn out OK, but about changing how things are playing out now in terms of power, wealth, ownership and transparency. No small ask, so we'd better get to work on this.
18
@RajeevA, worth watching Sheryl Sandberg on PBS finding your roots episode aired yesterday http://www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/about/season-5-episode-guide/episode-4/
Sheryl explained that Jews have survived extinction despite so many attempts to persecute them commit genocides on them on mass scales throughout history. The main reason is their community there’s always someone holding their hands helping them, whether it is a Jew or non. That is how they survived, they gave deep faith that humanity will not abandon them.
4
@RajeevA It's already happening. The 1% are buying up land in New Zealand for the country's clean air and water and remoteness. They are building second homes--bunkers, really--to protect themselves against pollution and the masses that they know will rise up against them someday. That we keep voting into office the de facto representatives of the 1% is mind boggling to me.
15
So say “no”. Get off social media. Go to a physical store and pay with cash. Don’t install smart technology. For Pete’s sake, it’s not that hard to get off the couch and change the thermostat.
194
If you consistently pay with cash there will be a blank on your credit record. If you don't maintain your social media carefully recruiters will be disappointed.
I learned the latter the hard way.
8
@ZL
LinkedIn, yes. Otherwise I think it depends on your field. I have done recruiting and while unwise social media posts raised a red flag, lack of social media didn’t concern me.
12
@Lawyermom I started reading Zuboff a couple of years ago and am looking forward to reading her book. It will make you realize that your personal response to social media, buying with cash etc, are in the end only trivial responses to the major upheaval in our society which she has named "surveillance capitalism." The impact goes far beyond what our personal experience teaches us about privacy.
12
All of this is will culminate in electronic money, and complete loss of privacy.
3
"Surveillance capitalism" is an apt and scary phrase - the coinage of the realm, perhaps. For many a pretty penny, it exploits our individual and collective weaknesses, at a terrible cost to psyches and our commons.
My favorite wake up call has always been this: "God punishes us by giving us what we want."
We can leave God completely out of the formula and the equation still computes: human beings tend to want the wrong things in and out of life, and getting too much of them can destroy us.
Often it's only when we realize that we're at risk of losing forever the people and places and things we love most that we begin to understand the error of our ways. In Shakespeare's tragedies, those realizations come too late. Let's hope we're smart and wise enough to be living in one of his comedies or late romances instead. "The Tempest" would be awfully nice.
1
I can't disagree with anything in this article at all. I studied a brand new degree when I was at university titled 'computer science and mathematics' (majored in college, if my translation skills are correct!) and at the time we were just on the verge of this revolution.
The Joint Academic Network in the UK (JANET) allowed us to communicate throughout the UK campuses and it was generally used for serious research purposes. It also had a few chat rooms and multi-player games (MUDs we called them back then). Most people dipped in and out but some failed their degree because of them. There's an addiction in most of us waiting to be uncovered...
That should have been warning enough that, with the advent of the WWW, everything would change. It started off as a random collection of nonsense and gems with hopeless search engines. I remember wondering how Google was going to make money!
If you are of my generation and my situation - married, career, children - we saw it birthed, we saw it morph and a lot of us waved it goodbye. I suspect you did too. I still have friends from uni but I'm not selling my soul to Zuckerberg to see how they're getting on. We email each other or... gasp(!)... write letters.
The problem is for the younger generations; their inate desire for approval and belonging compels them onto these services. They will be monitored and monitised, every word they ever wrote subject to retrieval.
They stole our revolution and now they're selling it back to us.
279
@Zoe - I was a starry-eyed Ted Nelson / Dream Machine acolyte, back in the 70's. The Web started by going downhill from Xanadu, in my opinion.
@Zoe
Let's not write off the young people in this regard. As a long time educator I've been astonished at how their elders (we, as a collective older generation or two) have miserably failed to include in our school systems much deeper information, along with more deeply inquiring discussion, about how this new technology works on the personal, local, national and global levels.
Instead it's mostly been cheerleading or just flummoxed non-responsiveness, at least in the K-12 sector that I've worked in and observed over the past two decades, and it continues to be so way too much even now in 2019.
So, while I enjoyed your perspective and analysis generally, let's not blame the youngsters for how we elders have mostly thrown them in the deep end without swimming lessons, a life jacket, etc. (while some of us adults have been, as the article explains, working hard to create that deep end and flood it ever more deeply).
The lack of vigilant effort here has been on everyone's heads and, to me, even moreso the wise elders with more perspective who haven't pushed for better and broader action up to now. (I include myself in that category, though I'm working hard to improve my response to that these days).
10
@Zoe
Such cynicism is depressing.
I'm about the same age/era as you and I think the younger generation is doing just fine. There are millions and millions of Generation Z, Millennials, and Generation X - more than baby boomers - and our world is better for the advancements made in the world of computer science and telecom.
Stop being so old.
1
Gadgets are becoming smarter and we are becoming dumber, more prone to magical thinking, and easier to manipulate.
Recipe for disaster.
In 2016, Russians used social media to influence Americans with memes that were easily destroyed by anyone who bothered checking facts or applying logical thinking.
The nanobytes that began destroying cars, electrical grids, etc. in the second iteration of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” were metaphorical.
In a class at NY University in the 90s, I remember stating that there was a high probability that corporations, armed with ever more intelligent machines capable of replacing human workers, would abuse this power and leave hundreds of millions unable to have gainful employment. Most people laughed at me.
Raw capitalism, as it's being currently practiced in the United States, gives workers no protection from what's coming. We need to modify our system of government so that those on the lower rungs of society are protected from this heartless wholesale automation of their jobs.
7
At the end of your column, is this "Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram."
Facebook is going to integrate FB, Instagram and Whatsapp into one "deep" holy khichadi (corrupted version is kedgeree).
All your posts are going to be seen across all these platforms, simultaneously. It's unprecedented, but as much as Zuck is clueless about the reach and depth of the FB platform into the hands of Russian hackers, so are government regulators all over the planet, about China's penetration into their technology, both low tech and hi tech. As it turns out China is the only one who has been clued in all along, rest of us are clueless. For all the bluster American intelligence shows off, they are being silently but deeply, mined, by China.
2
Wait a minute. Are you saying that AI is getting smarter than people or are people actually getting stupider than AI? Is there something out there that is making us less discriminating, less observant, less wise?
20
@William Trainor - the net result is the same. The source of much of the "dumbing down" of our populace must be laid at the feet of so-called reality TV shows and Fox News.
Classic description of a 21st century factory has just 2 workers. A dog to keep the humans from interfering with the robots. And a human to feed & water the dog.
The mantra for the 21st century - "May you live in interesting times"
4
@William Trainor: There is no analog to human emotions in any computer language.
4
@William Trainor "Is there something out there that is making us less discriminating, less observant, less wise?" YES, two words: Social Media.
1
So much of what the Times does is brilliant and essential and merits out trust. (And much, like the Food Section, just makes life better). Still, I do wish it would find a way to be less partisan. Maybe it's inevitable in our current world that the "Grey Lady," like everyone and everything else, operates in an echo chamber, but it is really discouraging to see such a venerable, powerful institution casually, and sometimes with relish, stereotype and denigrate people from certain communities, or because of their political beliefs or "identity." (The rush to judgement re Covington Catholic comes to mind as well as the attempts to sniff out a justifying heresy ex post facto when the initial reports made news organizations look foolish). Obviously, there are lunatics, fools, and monsters out there who do not deserve a fair hearing. On the other hand, when the Times doesn't seem to confront its own biases, trusting the paper becomes more difficult. It has been suggested that the Times find reporters who understand and care about the many reasonable communities whom the paper dislikes disagrees with and disapproves of. Is this possible in the current climate? Or do news organizations now see it as part of their mission to further an agenda? (And I'm not being facetious). I want to trust the Times, but like they say, Trust your mother, but cut the cards.
5
Thank the Gods I have no children; not possessing the required psychological characteristics of a psychopath, I could not handle the guilt.
"I suppressed word after word from my vocabulary. When the massacre was over, only one had escaped: Solitude. I awakened euphoric"
E. M. Cioran
2
Containment. We happily add a chip to our pet in case it is lost. Next up, our kids. Happily signing up ourselves, it is a good thing to wear google glasses in your brain. Thank goodness for hydraulic equipment that can mow down any trees or stream or embankment to bring you high speed internet for $88.00 a month thanks to all those people you've never seen before in your town hanging out with heavy hydraulics and white trucks with orange cones everywhere for maintenance.
No matter where you live, you can be (and will be) contained. And big thick black cables strung to your cave or area of containment. Anywhere you live for the right price you now have the capability to build a driveway up the steepest incline to have a view, level it off similar to strip mining and get contained. Amazon will be happy to climb any mountain, weather any storm to bring you what you want, even a generator.
There is an environmental impact here of service requirements available to everyone, as well as emotional now that you'll never be lonely anymore thanks to Android smart iphones.
But one day you'll wake up and find out you misplaced your app to deal with loneliness, and this will lead you going to your drawers looking for some other humane tools for interaction that were replaced by apps that changed your habitat to recognize pain.
Or maybe right now you are reading this and you think "what is this, a rant? what are they talking about" without a faint idea of what I'm talking about.
3
Maybe crazy, old Ted Kaczynski was right all along.The high tech plutocrats have thrown the rest of humanity to the wolves. As billions of jobs for humans disappear, the high tech plutocrats will mollify us with a universal basic income that's just enough to keep people alive and turns us all into a permanent underclass with no hope, no agency and no future.
4
As I read this on my computer, one advertisement for a company I at one time expressed interest in shows up on each scroll of the article. Deep intelligence of my behavior causes exposure to those things I have interest in.
Thomas, The Old Grey Lady truly is a forum for in depth thought, but through the deep technology of Google it is mostly read by those who have expressed some interest in its content--those who have more conservative view only see conservative content. Is this Good? I wish we could have a search option "contradictory views" so we could see what the other side is thinking.
1
A perceptive and frightening article.
We're in deep doo-doo.
2
This is scaary stuff. I had just decided to wait until the dems sort themselves out before I support on. But this piece sggests a good question for you - and me if I get a chance - to ask of candidates: who will you appoint to a team of technology regulators?
Doctors take an oath to do no harm because they have so many ways to hurt people. How about computer programmers taking oaths to refuse to write programs that harm people.
Kara Swisher, Sarah Jeong: how about exploring the ethics of writing code that may cause great harm to people.
4
Tom,
This is nothing new.
You often use technology advances to explain excesses of unconstrained capitalism.
But technology has always been advancing.
The problem is people taking advantage of market power.
Zuckerberg and Bezos and the Google guys and Double Click are all Peeping Toms.
Time for some in depth reverse scrutiny of who has my data.
2
A recent podcast on surveillance capitalism gave the example of one individual, known to the tracking company, whose physical position was tracked 14,000 times in one day. The purpose was to identify where this person was apparently shopping and doing business, thus deducing their likely economic profile, and thus predicting an ad regimen that would be most profitable. Listening to it gave me the chills. What a sinister invasion of privacy. I hate being “followed” by ads on web searches. I wonder how Zuckerberg would like it if I got a group of volunteers who spent every day peering into every window of his home. And then, when he or his family left, another group would follow them everywhere they went. 5G will put this electronic surveillance on steroids. In China, Big Brother is already looking at you and eventually you may end up, literally, with no place to hide. Can you imagine a protest march in China where the government could instantly identify every single person and then send police to their homes?...or use that ID to deny them credit, jobs, etc? The ability of 5G to lubricate the evil use of surveillance is of more concern to me now than its benefits. Time will tell. (In the meantime, if you’re going to protest, wear a mask... :)
4
"The word is 'deep.'” On the contrary, the word is "fake." Could also be "alarmist," or anything that comes to mind if you are sending a political message.
2
Maybe that degree in Philosophy was't such a waste after all. Epistemology should be a required subject in every high school.
1
I do feel acutely the need for the Grey Lady. And acutely want her to listen to us who write comments.
2
I just have one question for the business and manufacturers owners : If AI is producing your product with minimal humans and all of your friends are doing the same, who is going to buy your products if no one has a job or a paycheck? Is the AI going to buy your baseball caps? cars? furniture? clothing? That is one of the most serious problems of the future.
4
Very insightful column. It reminded me of the old days before 2015 and before hysterical Trump hatred warped the news. I just wish Mr. Friedman would not give Russian hackers credit for electing Trump. There is zero evidence their $130,000 Facebook ad buy had any effect.
The great singularity described by the transhumanist Kurzweill, 10 years ago is looming in a couple of decades (perhaps sooner) as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and nanotechnologies are growing together at an exponential rate. When this happens, if we have not developed a very solid regulatory and ethical framework, it will be too late and there is a real risk that cyborgs, also dubbed humanity software 2.0 will take over in a nightmarish world.
So I fully agree with Tom Friedman on the extreme urgency of addressing these issues head on. More than ever, we owe it to our children and grandchildren.
3
Well, yes, but with respect to the surface/depth metaphor and the currency of "deep," Oscar Wilde says in the Preface to *The Picture of Dorian Gray* that "all art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril" and at the present moment in literary theory there is a clash between "surface" reading that digitalization makes possible and an earlier "close" (i.e., deep) reading of texts.
1
How about writing a piece that flips the focus from the dark side of the deep with its sharks, et al, and imagines the light - the luminescent seldom seen sea life, as it were. Master classes taught by master teaches beamed over 5G everywhere. Tailoring education programs to each individual learner. Immediate access to top notch medical care for rural residents using a laptop - then drone over the prescription. Self-driving electric transit that runs quietly and consistently to replace the stop, go, honk, honk of busy city streets. Ending politicians being beholden to lobbyists because the internet is mostly FREE - why do we tolerate paid for messaging instead of demanding authentic communication and independent thought? Do a moonshot on security - "locked nodes" that stop the internet thieves moving through communications links, maybe based on geographic locationing? How about figuring out a way to flood the internet with true stories about positive stuff - not selected by government or corporations but a non-profit citizen groups. We need to think positive since it is unlikely we cannot really reverse course. Technology has emerged at the same time some of our key institutions have broken down. We have to be clear-eyed about which changes are causing what effect to think through policy. This presents a challenge but we must focus on the opportunities for all humans, everywhere. Sounds trite but the key is to "think global, act local" to advance together.
2
During 1950s Bernard Russell, the great philosopher said that with increasing knowledge, if we do not increase our wisdom, we will bring increased suffering to our life (my paraphrase). We are facing that reality now - our wisdom did not increase during the past, but our knowledge has increased manifold. We as a society do not know how to handle this situation.
The human life has two aspects - an external life that deals with politics, economy, sociology, ... and the regulating aspect of this life is with the government. There is another aspect of human life- the internal life of the individual. The integrity of this life was sustained in the past by an organization called Church. The constipated liberal democratic idea in the name of humanism and science destroyed that institution and made it a political instruments. The result is the collapse of human wisdom to sustain the individual life’s integrity - violence, addiction, unhealthy inequality, ... all are showing their ugly faces.
But all is not lost - there are sensible leaders who understand these perils and are telling us how to protect society. Technology can be a great aid in the effort, but we need to make few changes in our thinking. The first focus on simplicity of life - food and shelter, health and education for all people can be guaranteed because of technology. Gradually move from capitalistic model to market model. Education changed from Industrial Age to digital age. There are challenge for all of us.
3
Regulation of rapidly-developing “deep” technologies will require the efforts of deep thinkers in public policy and in regulatory administration. Unfortunately, since the days of Ronald Regan, the American public has been trained to believe that government employees are inept, lazy, and dispensable. This is not an environment that will attract our best and brightest minds going forward. Our recent government shutdown amply demonstrated that not even top political leaders have a comprehensive understanding of all the ways government serves our citizens. And, corporate interests in our “free market” capitalist economy chafe at any form of regulation or oversight.
So, what to do? We must re-educate our citizens on the basics of our democratic and economic systems and the reasons we really do need government. We must learn how to attract and retain excellent, technologically-savvy candidates for public service as policy thinkers and regulators. We must elect tech-savvy politicians. We must recall the harms brought to the public by poorly-regulated corporations in the past, and remember the reasons our system depends on effective regulation of the markets.
Finally, we also need to recognize (once again) the value of government employees and their service to Americans. They need to be paid commensurate with the importance of their work. And they need the real support of the people they are working for, not disparagement and denigration.
11
5G has not been deployed to a significant number of people in the US or elsewhere and it will not be for 5 to 15 years. An industry standard for the technology hasn’t even been agreed upon yet. We should see major cities mostly covered in two years.
Fascinating piece. The Orin Hatch incident is why we will need a younger person in the White House in 2020. Wisdom acquired from decades on this planet may be good in a mentoring or coaching position, but final decisions on policy needs to come from a younger generation who live with this kind of pervasive technology on an hourly, no, make that instantaneously, basis.
6
@Karen M
I agree to a point and Orin Hatch should have been gone long ago, not based on his age , but his ideology. He was, and is, a republican.
And we are not in this predicament because we have old people in power, but because we have, for now, too many republicans in power who are too tightly aligned with corporate interests.
So I'll take smart, educated, mature people any day to well meaning flash-in-the-pan idealists.
But I welcome the idealists and celebrate them...the ones who think they still may have something to learn...
And corporate interests Vs the interests of society at large?
Well, I may be old and I may be stupid. But I hope I'm not that stupid.
2
I totally agree... I'm this "." close to ditching my smart phone for a "dumb" one. The phone while off still knows where I am, surveys from the places I have been pop up, ads that are freakishly targeted towards me (including one showing a woman standing on a scale with my exact weight) popped up. My guess is that algorithms collected can tell exactly who you are based on location and sites visited. The scarier option is that the camera on the phone can see you. I'm all for regulations protecting our privacy, and believe our critical infrastructure shouldn't be linked to the same internet we all use. There needs to be protections, and regulations.
8
Mr. Friedman writes on 'surveillance capitalism' at a time when its potential can transform to an unlimited state. 'Surveillance capitalism' takes its place as another expanding universe to who knows where. And a pretty unsettled one at that.
So where then are the 'privacy' laws to protect those who apparently exist now as simply fulfilling alogorithms? Europe has seen the dangers to privacy and have enacted laws for it. The US? AWOL surely on the risks for our society and way of life. They'll be hell to pay if apparent inattention to ' nefarious' capitalism continues as privacy laws languish in some judicial dead zone. We better wake up and demand action.
1
Friedman says, "Automation is also going deep, fast. The Times’s Kevin Roose quoted Mohit Joshi, the president of Infosys, a technology firm that helps other businesses automate their operations, as saying in Davos last week: “People are looking to achieve very big numbers. Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”
But bad guys, who are always early adopters, also see the same potential to go deep in wholly new ways."
So, the guys who are trying to make me unemployed (and unemployable) are the good guys?
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
8
The most scary thing about what you’ve written about today Tom is that it’s really too late to assimilate by humans. Let’s take politics. One person, one vote, may have to be changed if we’re to survive this age.
Bad people with very bad intentions are usually sitting on top of the bell curve. Imagine trying to tell a typical Trump supporter that we now have satellites that map our entire world EVERYDAY. If we, the United States have them, guess who else has them?
Today, the American public isn’t knowledgeable enough about this technology to mount a defense against it. It’s like going to war today with sticks and stones.
So–What is the answer?
I think Tom nailed it on the proverbial head. TRUST! Elect only leaders with experience, morals and intelligence. They need to have all three for starters. Add vision, insight, purpose, leadership, honesty...get the picture and look at the current world leaders today. So glad that I’m 80 years old and can now take a nap!
5
And considering the age of many in high places they won’t bear consequences of their actions, and wealth protects their progeny so they can also take that nap. I am finding that at age 76 it is easy to shove off the mess to the younger and smarter rather than to act.
1
We are living in a 1950s science fiction novel.
5
@Dan
My Dick Tracy watch says we need to be prepared for the next innovation: A truth, morality, and ethics filter for all devices.
The watch predicts traffic on the internet is soon to decrease.
1
The only solution is deep democracy. Who’s working on that?
6
Quite a stew!!! Life still requires us to make intelligent choices and our social/tech pot is very complex and not static. Human nature being what it is, in the macro sense we will see more and more "its a wake up call" or "we didn't see it coming" or "I am innocent" or well, you get the picture.
It really all boils down to the quality of human relationships based on such time honored values as integrity, honesty, responsibility and empathy.
Hey, if you want to know whether or not you are talking with AI, tell it a joke. AI still can't "get it."
3
The world may be ‘deep’ but Mr. Friedman remains the same. He searches for one word or phrase to sum up super-complicated phenomenon. What is this adding to our understanding? And these words and phrases are always off. Why is a flat the best description of an interconnected world?
You overlook the wisdom of Alexander Pope: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." The problems with IT, etc exist, but perhaps the most dangerous aspect is our belief that they accurately predict human behavior and portray virtual "reality." Not the first time humans put too much faith in ideas that are not proven.
This alarming article outlines where AI can take us, but actually minimizes both the future and the already present hazards.
The poster child for AI run amok is Zuckerberg, the clueless instigator of AI to serve the profit motive without any sense of what is jettisoned along the way.
And the poster child for futile regulation is Congressional oversight by clueless lawmakers without an inkling if what is going on, and no intention to find out.
8
To quote Mr . Friedman "This has created an opening and burgeoning demand for political, social and religious leaders, government institutions and businesses that can go deep — that can validate what is real and offer the public deep truths, deep privacy protections and deep trust."
Sadly, in the age of Trump it is the political, social and religious leaders who have failed to speak truth to power in lieu of partisan goals.
6
The issue isn't the robots. It's who owns the robots. Unless these technologies are changed we will find ourselves in a commercial version of ruining our world. Not a whole lot different from what the Chinese state is implementing with its Social Rating System and what used to happen in history. This feels like an absolute monarchy and it is terrible.
3
In spite of all the glib assurances, this scares me silly. Glad I was born in 1950. Maybe I'll miss the worst of it. It isn't the technology that scares me so much as the fact that it will be in the hands of humans! Our track record for the use of "tools" isn't always so admirable.
6
What concerns me is that there are so many media outlets and news sources, the overused skill, termed, "critical thinking," becomes an absolute necessity---yet, we humans are programmed for what Daniel Kahneman terms system one thinking---fast, efficient--rather than system two thinking---slow, methodical. Putting aside Trump's daily tweets and comments---which even in system one thinking comes off as just plain dumb---it takes enormous discipline to process information in a system two format. We are now seeing the terrible consequences when system two thinking takes over the voting booth.
4
The term deep can be used in a number of ways. Deep state comes to mind supposedly thwarting the Trump administration. Deep learning in AI can be used by governments for surveillance of the population or research toward military superiority. And then there's monetization of data to sell us things like merchandise and political preferences.
Climate change and its cause and the nuclear threat to humanity get lost in our daily immersion in our jobs and our toys. So few are even aware of what's going on in our world, except for what their preferred biased media feeds them for its own purposes.
9
Deep negative manipulation only exists with corruption, period. If we stand back and look at the most corrupting factors in society, we can then understand and correct these corrosive elements. The problem is no one knows how or dares challenge the real problems as they are so huge, they turn a blind eye and embrace cognitive dissonance. As an example, politicians by nature are highly corrupt on average by the political system. Corporations are enabled to do actual and legal harm to humans in mass. And largely, how people are rewarded and expected to put profit above human compassion (do you really want to sell me this or are pressured to?).
Imagine people waking up in the morning with zero desire to scratch and claw for your dollars but instead head into a job that is entirely about helping humanity and individuals thrive.
Question the big picture. We need to go large, as well as deep.
14
@M. B. That first sentence in your piece is powerful, and is an axiomatic definition of the problem. It provides a handle to talk about this problem. I have always subscribed to the dynamics described by Arthur Piguo about the importance to account for economic externalities. Combining that with your moral dichotomy feels like a nice framework to reason about this problem and inform policy. Thank you for that new insight.
3
@M. B.
"Deep negative manipulation only exists with corruption, period."
I think it also exists with ideological zealotry.
The compulsion to believe yourself in possession of a great truth nearly always leads to the compulsion to make others accept it. With purity, and a total lack of corruption, one such as this would see a tool for making people better.
Heady stuff.
It's not the computers you have to fear, it's those CEO's in Davos. All these companies want to use AI to replace humans in jobs. Reminds me of when all the out-sourcing began to be so in vogue. I worked at a mortgage company that replaced many employees with outsourced resources. Most of whom were not in the US, and some that were here on visas. People that live in a country are the ones that buy houses, put down roots, and don't leave.
Doesn't it hurt a mortgage company to eliminate jobs in America? Yes, it does. Will it hurt if insurance companies replace humans with jobs, yes!
Where will the HUMAN resources go? This is a question the cost-reduction (job-elimination CEOs) do not ask. I guess they'll give the trump shutdown answer, "they'll adapt, they'll make arrangements."
I encourage humans to control their greed and figure out how to adapt first, cut jobs later. No one will be able to buy your products or services. Think about that.
13
@Lock Him Up, your illustrations are apt, and your point well taken. Your, opening argument sounds like "Guns don't kill people."
@Lock Him Up
No friend of CEOs but they're just comparing two apples at the store and buying the cheaper one.
The problem is the system of capital profit and the deeper need for climbing up the consumption ladder of constant improvement in everything; better taste, better efficiency, better fit, better feelings, better things. We continually search for competitive upgrades to our experience and want uniqueness and novelty.
The primary problem is wanting more than enough, and secondarily it is wanting more quality than needed.
If everyone would just look for and be satisfied with sparking joy with the minimal necessities of life we would likely be more satisfied with what we have and not need more. Then everyone could have all the necessities and we'd not over extract resources nor pollute ourselves to death.
It's the individual psychology that needs to change for living in a finite world. The CEOs are just making as much as the market demands. They're not responsible for changing us away from overconsumption; that's our job.
But since we are addictive creatures, we can't change, or not enough of us will change to save the planet and our future. Like addicts, we'd rather die. If we're to survive, it will require a system collapse that changes our culture of consumption against our will, and we're not going to like that.
The internet has always promised that users will have exactly what they want, when they want it, and at a cost they want...including the facts they want. This all occurs on a seemingly decentralized platform.
You're right. There is no swimming back.
However, when it comes to creating order in the cyber universe, I would start with regulations that reinforce the norms and laws of the non-cyber world. If it is unlawful in the offline world as we have known, then it is also unlawful when you use the internet.
In addition, when it comes to fallacious content, I would require content is designated "fact" or "opinion" with internet bans on those users that violate those norms.
Enforcement of these ideas, in the wild west of the internet, is (of course) an altogether different matter.
1
On a tangent: Friedman's "deeps" here all concern machines and AI, but I can't help calling attention here to "deep work," which is an attention-challenged generation's name for what us older folks just call work, or study, or reading. It's disturbing that the ability to concentrate is now being treated as some kind of exceptional mental skill; at the same time it's encouraging that people are writing books about how to recover these default mental processes.
7
Unregulated systems run amok, that's why you are taking that blood pressure pill, or insulin, or the steroid inhaler, ... We try to keep our system and its subsystems properly regulated. Other systems are examples of regulated behavior too. For instance, the amount of fuel-air combination your car burns is very carefully regulated.
When it comes to bigger, more important systems we try to remove the regulations to help a few to benefit from it. Media regulations are gone by the wayside, banking likewise, air travel ditto, ... The digital world which not many comprehend, let alone understand is one such system that needs careful regulation. Lacking that, it will start acting in "its" own interest and will become uncontrollable altogether. The consequences will be dire!
4
The money shot of this column is here: "a demand for political, social and religous leaders" who "can validate what is real..." I think there's a better way than to depend on leaders to validate "what is real." Educate all to do their own validating. This should be obvious to anybody who would claim to be a Jeffersonian democrat. Yet it's mostly missing in the discussion about AI, which tends to drift toward tweaking this or that regulation. The higher the average level of general knowledge, the less of a threat AI will be to the public no matter how it's used. All it would take to do this is the political will to make education the collective -- that is public -- duty it always should have been in the first place.
19
"Over the last decade, these advances in the speed of connectivity and the elimination of complexity have grown exponentially." Complexity has not been eliminated, it's been circumvented. Ever get a credit report with errors? The big data industry is skewed toward what matters most: money. Big data is not nuanced, objective or necessarily even accurate; Big data is just big.
6
I guess Fermi’s paradox isn’t really all that paradoxical.
1
When I was a boy, okay when my father was a boy, Maisie at the phone company’s manual switchboard answered. I told her that I wanted to speak to my aunt Sadie and Maisie plugged in cables which connected us. Then some job-destroying overlord installed mechanical automatic switches and forced us to use anti-human phone numbers.
Soon this put Maisie out of work and the subsequent millions of automatic switches put hundreds of millions of Maisies out of work. Now, the massive switching inherent in phone and internet networks must be putting the entire population of the universe out of work.
2
Just because you say all these things work doesn’t mean they really do. Voice recognition is better than when it first came out but is still unsatisfactory. And I think driverless cars will be here about the same time as the personal car-plane. I like thumbprints instead of passwords but they don’t work if your thumb is wet or dirty. The only thing that is truly perfected is the ability to photograph your license plate to give you a ticket.
8
I keep the camera eyes of my smart phone and computer covered so that it's harder to capture my image. I am contemplating using a VPN to camouflage my web browsing and evade content filters. I am looking for ways to make unmonitored payments. There are no doubt other ways to evade the corporate surveillance state. The corporate surveillance state is now expected by many to screen for and demonetize hate speech and fake news. By whose authority? By whose standards and algorithms?
6
Throw the phone away.
1
@Observatory
If you're still using Google for searches, you should switch to Duck Duck Go which doesn't track you.
https://duckduckgo.com/
2
“The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional , personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself by the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
12
@ricci I spent many hours studying Ellul's book back in 1971. Thanks for mentioning it. Seems he was on to something.
Three people in the '50s and '60s imagined a world where all work is automated. Read Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952). All the businesses that employed 97% of the workforce in 1952 had been automated and only had two employees: a manager and his secretary. Everyone else was either on workfare or in the military (but taxis still required people with an MS degree, since Vonnegut couldn't imagine self-driving cars).
The other view was by Hanna and Barbera, who imagined The Jetsons (1962), where all the many advanced gadgets required half as many small factories as all the working-age men in the world, factories where just two men 'worked', the owner and his single employee, and neither of them had anything to do since the automated factory did everything, but the employee earned enough to support his family with a flying car, annual vacations on Mars, and a robot to do all the housework.
We have the choice, and we're choosing Vonnegut's world, not Hanna and Barbera's.
12
Surveillance isn't the only big worry. Also worry about the interconnectivity of computerized/chip-implanted everyday devices. See the book "Click Here: Kill Everybody," by Bruce Schneier. International and domestic hackers, the failure of device manufacturers to keep pace with patches or "upgrades," and the complexity of installing "fixes" on devices or appliances for the average user, means all devices are hackable.
The computerized chip in your car tires ("low tire" light comes on) is just one gateway into someone's ability to remotely take over your car's steering, braking, GPS system, etc.--this has already been done and reported on, and car manufacturers have tried to fix these back-door entryways to mayhem. Political opponent's car "accident"? Stranger things have happened.
Your heart pacemaker can be turned off, or made to keep pace at fatal rates, remotely. Your wireless thermostat can signal your power company that you are using too much heat or A/C and your access to power adjusted accordingly, without your consent, even if you are powering medical equipment in your home that keeps you or your lived one alive. Your doctor's electronic medical records about your conditions and prescriptions can be altered remotely or wiped out completely. US water treatment plants and dams have already been hacked by offshore hackers, just to prove that they can do it.
Surveillance capitalists can not only cause many of us to be unemployed, they can also kill us. Literally.
48
Interesting- technological advances allow for more outrageous and pervasive lies. How do we validate what is real and inform the public as to the "deep truths." Technology obviously is not the problem. It exacerbates the problem caused by living in bubbles. It spreads and reinforces perceived truths to segments of the public securing "truths" from selected media. Fifty years ago we all were exposed to differing views. Today, I read the Times. I don't listen to Rush. The other half watches Hannity and Fox. I see no answer, at least not during my lifetime.
12
There is real Shakespearian irony in the fact that our most advanced technology may wind up being the cause of our demise.
8
I had to chuckle when I read that Orrin Hatch did not know did not know how Facebook made money. I t has been clear to me for many years that Senator Hatch never knew much of anything. This made him a great Republican Senator.
53
The threat to homeowners' equity is what struck me as one of the more frightening things about this article, and only because of its immediacy. What do we do now?
3
While I too admire and subscribe to "The Old Grey Lady", it too is part of the data collection process - it has to be for its business model to survive. The reader cannot access the articles without agreeing to data collection cookies. Then try wiping cookies after reading, it's exhausting and probably too late.
But you are right. Since we cannot individually stop our data being collected, then we need regulatory systems to stop it being used for maliferous purposes. That takes widespread public concern, political will and appropriate resources - all are currently lacking.
18
How shallow are public discourse is while deep-tech is changing the foundation of society is a remarkable paradox. Imagine trying to explain this technology to say, the average trump supporter, for example. Then imagine a simulation of a world leader - with an exact voice and image - on an internet clip talking about a nuclear attack they just launched. Anarchy ensues. This is very dangerous stuff and I don’t think people will understand it until its too late.
21
This is the issue of our times (after climate change that is truly existential) and it will be wrenching to deal with because Republicans (under current control) will not want to even try to regulate intrusion into private lives, but rather exploit it for money. The more of life's necessities that get automated and data dependent, the greater the potential for government and criminal intrusion into private affairs. Neither is tolerable to a freedom and democracy loving people.
10
At present, the world needs government with the scientific insight to deal effectively with, and anticipate the consequences of, the ever-quickening pace of technological progress. There is much good to be gained, but there is also much evil that can be done. Exactly what happens will strongly depend on a well-guided morality among all persons, a willingness to resolve problems by addressing their root causes.
Yet wherever you look, you see the opposite of that taking hold, taking command. For instance, the U.S.A. has what must be its most anti-scientific administration ever; its lawmakers are mostly ignorant of what goes on in the technology world; businesses in America are guided by a set of perverse incentives that only serve to compound the problems that come up. Further afield, there are governments around the world who are only too happy to use these technologies to oppress their people, and no one seems to be able to do anything about it.
4
And as usual, we are fighting the last war... focused on what China has done to us, even though we needed to be taking action on that at least twenty years ago. By now most of the horses have left the barn as we desperately try to shut the door.
Today we should be focused on what AI and automation and surveillance technology are doing to us (along with climate change). Friedman is absolutely right to sound the alarm. But will this be an issue in the upcoming presidential election? Pretty sure not. And in twenty years we'll be screaming about it. Too late.
10
Humans do not want to stagnate. Artificial intelligence is the future, whether we willingly embrace it or not. There is money to be made. Progress beckons like the call of the Sirens. The military will never let it go. We can regulate it as best we can, for as long as we can. But Pandora's box is open. The genie is out of the bottle.
This column reminds me of the Editorial Board's on gene editing yesterday. I will say the same thing I said there. We can talk about regulating ourselves. But we cannot stop ourselves. It's just our nature.
5
@Blue Moon
I'd argue that no, it's not our nature -- tribal peoples manage to keep within sustainable limits -- it's the nature of capitalism. Particularly consumer capitalism, even moreso finance capitalism.
1
In a capitalist system, corporations are inexorably profit driven enterprises despite noble intentions, desires, and PR. In any system, politicians are inexorably driven by ego and power, despite noble intentions, desires, experiences and PR. Legal systems and regulations are camp followers. The are always behind the leading edge waiting for a pattern of disruption to occur that motivates a sufficient number of politicians to pass laws in their self interest. The real questions behind the deep reality that Friedman exposes are moral and communal, from whence does a moral framework emerge (it is not clear today that one exists) that will counteract the darker aspects of AI? And how broadly and deeply will humans expand their sense of "us" to understand and limit the consequences of AI?
3
The absence of sensible regulation is a large part of the problem.
We need to go deep on regulating these new genies that are escaping their bottles at an ever faster rate.
3
In the age of unregulated capitalism, the deep state of surveillance that we are under is truly scary. If this article does not scare you and does not make every effort to safeguard your privacy and personal information, then nothing will.
Our privacy is precious and should not be surrendered for some conveniences that could be achieved somewhat less efficiently by other means without becoming a commodity for sale by someone to make a profit.
15
@The Observer
It is too late. We will always be behind.
People do not seem to realize that very little that we think of as “private” belongs only to themselves. A major change came with the photo copier and long before it.
Somehow we must try harder to think ahead.
As I chuckle with what I wrote, I remember that no one believes the people who do think ahead. They are burned at the stake. ‘‘Twas ever thus.
Deep intrusions into our minds, and our lives.
Technology weaponized against society for profit and power.
Humanity under the yoke, placidly awaiting the financial milking machine or, if they are unconnected, the inevitable slide into economic and social isolation.
If anyone is amazed at how their needs are anticipated, how people can identify them instantaneously on the phone, or the constantly ringing phone with no one on the other end, they should become aware.
If they are not outraged and galvanized into action when their personal information is released into the digital wild by companies they pay to protect it, they may already be lost.
And yes, they should read the non-fake news in order to identify the humans who control the levers to the milking machines.
They should do that now, while they can still distinguish the humans from the machines.
9
Advances in AI seem to occur at the expense of human intelligence. I studied math in school before the invention of the pocket calculator, so I had to learn how to divide and multiply using a pencil and paper. I don't think most American schools teach those skills anymore. Pilots still have to learn how to fly a plane, but the heavy reliance on technology means they don't have to hone their skills the way their predecessors did. With respect to all computerized systems, most human users know how to push buttons to make them work, but they have little or no understanding of the mechanisms that drive the systems.
Only a Luddite would wish to return to a non-mechanized world, but prudence dictates that we recognize and debate the implications of our increased reliance on AI as a replacement for human intelligence. Isaac Asimov and other science writers have explored the dangers of a world in which we develop so much dependence on robots that they control us. But that loss of independence stems not simply from the convenience and efficiency of automated systems, but from the erosion of our ability to perform the tasks we assign to them.,
Loss of control remains a vital concern in our technologically advanced civilization, but that danger is a function of the atrophy of human skills and intelligence.
7
@James Lee Hmmm what happens when the Russians turn the power off, will we know how to turn it back on?
Remember the massive power outages on the east coast in the 60's and 70's.
8
Once again, the science fiction writers were there first. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about a not so distant future where all mathematical problems were done by computers and manual calculation was a lost art, thought to be inconceivable. It was considered a breakthrough when someone figured out how to solve problems with a paper and pencil. Then of course this new skill was weaponized and appropriated by the military. This was written in the late fifties or early sixties, I believe.
1
So few Americans and others around the globe have a clue about what is taking place. It started with television, which I believe was fundamental in creating the obesity epidemic by hawking junk food to generations of Americans. It is now deeply entrenched via all the platforms you mentioned and 5g will be the key to complete entrapment via implants connected to the web. I would guess even pay for service companies like Netflix manipulate their content to influence their customers spending habits. Basic education has to include knowledge about media manipulation of behavior. I hope true pay for service companies emerge who by contract with their customers do not share their data with anyone. If such an alternative to the Facebook and Google families of apps emerged I think many would choose to pay for true social networking. In the end there is no such thing as a free lunch.
5
Thank you for a very thought provoking article. In a world without ethics, morals, or regulations, everything seems possible. That describes the corporate world to a tee.
To understand why they would go to so much trouble to find out and predict what I want, simply amazes me. They could have just asked and I would have told them.
If you have an open mind and are open to seeing what is going on around you, I don't think there is much of a worry, but when a country is filed with bimbos, who like lemmings need to be told where to go, what to do and will follow, you wind up with someone like Trump in government. After all, he is a gold mine for the corporate world.
So, when the corporate world supersedes the role of government, who will regulate it? Oh! Of course, self regulation, like what Facebook does. That is the joke, i.e. a new take on the meaning of "Down the Hatch."
The next article should address what regulations could be put in place to prevent the kind of shenanigans that truly concern us and the mechanics of how these could be put in place. I'm sure someone is working on an "anti-data blocker" now. In the 60's, someone was working on a device that would turn your boom box off, when you turned it on, so some kind of anti-data device would be worth a gazillion. Everyone will want one. But knowing how things work, it will be bought up and stowed in the deep like the anti-boom box device. Corporations rule.
5
The futurists like Issac Asimov predicated the reality we live in today. What about solutions? We need data on the unemployable not just the unemployed. These citizens who are hard working must be offered an opportunity to be retrained by programs financed through public/private partnerships using new money from corporate profits generated by technological unemployment.
We need to have a social safety net providing food,health care,and shelter during the re education initiative. i fear that ignoring these unemployable citizens will lead to an economic civil war.
4
Also, deep fried. AI is dumb compared to a human mind, and will be desperately so for a long time, because it lacks two essential things: a body and human experience. No mind can exist outside of those. The joke's on us, though, because incompetence won't stop our overlords from foisting these new shiny but primitive toys on us.
4
Most of the deep stuff, while possible, is still in the future. I suggest Mr. Friedman spend more time with the customer service brain dead AI bots . Now there is an education in how stupid some some computer apps actually still are. Most come away begging for a real minimum wage human.
The human mind is astoundingly complex. For example, Realistically a computer did not really beat humans at the chinese game go. Large teams of very brilliant human players , brilliantly masquerading as a computer, beat a few individual players.
The future holds much more but most will take decades before they ready for prime time.
2
About ten or twelve years ago I was watching Independence Day fireworks with a group of people. As I watched the beautiful explosions celebrate Americans’ freedom, a man explained to me his business. He had a very large contract with the Federal Government for human body movement recognition. This was purportedly to identify terrorists planting bombs in public places. Yes, you can read body movement as having purpose. But he said, the real use will be for shoplifters. I horrifiedly recognized a great many more uses — all of them not freeing, independence supporting or emancipating. Our tax dollars at work. We’ve been in the deep end for a while.
10
People may be looking for trusted navigators, but although he isn't a politician, a lot of people thought Zuckerberg was presenting himself as that when he rolled out Facebook. It turns out he has mined your thoughts and personality for his personal gain and can be trusted as far as you can throw him. There are plenty more like him that will be happy to mine all individuals have to offer and monetize it, using what they believe is their irrevocable right to endlessly market to you using the advantage of whatever personal data they lifted from you. Technology, individuals and Institutions that can go deep and don't act like Facebook can bring a lot of gifts to people, but if their definition of deep doesn't mean honest and credible, deep starts to look like a potential dystopian nightmare.
4
We cannot even control our gun problem in this country. How are we going to be able to control artificial intelligence being that very few even comprehend it now?
29
I think that technology is the streamlined and efficient vehicle that provides easy transport for the big problems with our culture today--the climate change, the smooth access that foreign governments have to our best-kept secrets, and most of all the absolute greed that governs everything. In the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, we have declared ourselves beyond the pale. The deep dangers of our world can run rampant. Technology makes all that sin and subterfuge more efficient and more impregnable. Big trouble. Deep trouble. Too deep to root out and we have as our leader a man who isn't interested in rooting it out who, in fact, wouldn't be able to read and understand this article.
4
That television, that computer, that phone - they're not yours. And btw they're surveillance and data telemetry systems, primarily - some corporation's profit center.
That car or farm tractor you "bought" - it's not a car or farm tractor, it's at heart a computer system whose software you may not touch. So it's not yours, either.
That home you live in. Yours?
That child. That spouse. That friend. That boss. Are they humans?
We have met the enemy, and it is us. For a while yet...
1
The issue isn't the robots. It's who owns the robots. Unless these technologies are decoupled from the religion of Shareholder Value, we will find ourselves in a commercial version of Orwell, not a whole lot different from what the Chinese state is implementing with its Social Rating System.
Here's a great app for this new world right out of Gary Shteyngart: Call it Tinderillow: point it a that attractive guy or gal at a bar and get the estimated value of their residence.
5
IBM coined it with ‘Deep Blue’ which contested Kasparov a while back.
Clever connection made between "Deep" as used in computer lingo and "Shallow" the Lady Gaga-Bradley Cooper song. But the comparison is shallow, not deep.
5
I'm going to put my vote in for "deep living." A 72 year-old man just sailed around the world with no modern technology or navigating instruments. That's a "deep" that technology can't even get close to.
29
Is the logical end a maelstrom in which the would-be predators become the prey of their machinations, hoist by their own petard, and humanity becomes irrelevant ?
6
Companies rush to be first on the market, and what they have usually has to work or being first will not help them. But what they have does not have to be really safe, but only appear safe until market dominance is obtained and with that the funds to maybe work on safety. If companies were made responsible for putting unsafe products on the market whether they knew about the safety defects or not, they would have to be slower and more cautious, which might be a very good thing.
8
After retiring from from being an Air Force weather officer, I became a software, systems, and test engineer on Boeing military programs. Not by choice, it was only job offer I received, that only because Reagan resurrected the B-1 nuclear bomber. It had an autopilot program as most large airplanes do, but this program was design to fly at high subsonic speeds at low altitudes. To avoid catastrophic failure, it had a failsafe mechanism that would command the plane to sharply fly up at any hint of computer problems, since the odds of striking something above it would be minimal. I don’t know what a failsafe option would be for a driverless automobile, let alone the incredibly complex systems involving artificial negligence. It seems very scary, but we we can’t put the genie back into the bottle. We have quite a few accidents with nuclear weapons, but thus far, no explosions.
8
@JSK
The failsafe option for a driverless automobile would be to not carry living passengers (only cargo or packages) and to either not take an action or to sacrifice itself when in doubt of what to do.
3
@vacciniumovatum:
My understanding is that Tesla will make available fully Autopilot before the end of this
year.
These auto pilot will greatly reduce serious accidents on our roads.
It has been reported that already Tesla's Enhanced Autopilot is reducing the number of accident
by about 40%.
My iPad dreamed up “artificial negligence”. I wonder if I can get a patent.
Indeed, another example of technology leading our ability to cope. Whether it's gene-editing, 3D printed guns or big DEEP data, it's a brave new world in dire need of regulation or else a reset in the form of a dystopian future is quite likely.
12
These advancements in technology sound like the promises made with TV, the Internet, Facebook, Google, Twitter and 5G. Look, invent what you want. Make smart phones for dumb people, Facebook for fallible humans, quicker ways to connect with our fellow man so we can tear them apart. Going deeper wont change people's endless need for the next shiny object. It doesn't matter if our technology goes deeper if we remain less than deep.
9
So the CEOs who are drooling at the prospect of being able to fire 99% of their employees are the "good guys"?
When Maximizing Shareholder Value intersects with the AI Revolution and jobs are destroyed by the millions upon millions at an exponentially growing rate, there will be violent unrest on a global scale and geopolitical conflict at a level that will make the bloody first half of the 20th Century seem tame in comparison.
And that's precisely the trajectory that we're currently on.
But, hey, we got Uber.
So there's that.
77
The other day I bought goods at a big-box store, but I had unexpected trouble paying. The automatic cashier machines, which I was using, required that I display my gift card to the scanner before payment. Except, I had no such card. In that case, the machines required, I must accept a new card and then use it to pay. I was promised a discount when I used it.
But I didn't want to buy using a store gift card. I suspected (actually I was certain) that the store would use my gift card to keep track my purchases, and I don't want to be tracked, even for a discount.
Later I telephoned the customer service line of this store. I complained that I did not want to have my purchases targeted for surveillance this way, even if I would save money. I told them that my purchases could reveal intimate details of my life, and my privacy was worth more to me than 20% off.
Did my call have an effect? I don't know, but the next time I purchased at that store, the machines no longer were requesting that I first scan my gift card (which I still had not obtained).
32
Not surprising that Orrin Hatch was utterly clueless when it came to technology given that he was born in 1934 and by all appearances had a limited intellectual capacity in the first place. We have seemingly created an almost permanent class of aged legislators that are nearly incapable of understanding the complexity of the world around them and worse seem uninterested in learning. How can we expect to be able to wisely regulate industries that use and misuse artificial intelligence when so many in Congress overstay their terms far into retirement age?
112
@Chris Hunter: Actually you could make a case that Hatch's question was pretty cogent. He made the point that the billions of people on Facebook aren't customers, they're (we're) the product being sold. It's a new kind of business model, and that's worth pointing out.
I'm not going to bother looking up the interview, and I have no great respect for Orin Hatch, but I suspect he was pretty aware of the answer to his question -- isn't that a rule for interviewers? Zuckerberg, if Friedman is reading him right, was just illustrating the blind arrogance of the narrowly intelligent.
19
@Chris Hunter
Lawmakers, i.e. Orin Hatch, who cannot deal with climate science, even though they funded it, are not really capacitated enough to get this deep thinking concept.
4
Deep loyalty. Now there is a concept for a new age. We have been in the shallow seas or switch and fickle for as long as I can remember. Just hoping that Trump's base still swims in those low waters.
1
So this means what we thought as critical thinking, an achievement of scientific minds since the Renaissance, was just the deep things computers (and clever software) can do if not worse. We've got to be smarter. The best of human nature may lie in betraying all the expectations.
4
Mankind always creates its own destruction.....every....single....time....:)
10
Thanks for mentioning the Grey Lady. I wish she were not partnered with Google, Amazon, Facebook, and who knows who else, to sell targeted advertising.
30
You are so right to say this and keep saying it. If ever a society proved easy to manipulate ours sure has. Yikes,
4
Professor Friedman knows very well that "deep" thinking, "deep" insight, or "deep" anything is utterly irrelevant in this political environment. As it is, Donald J. Trump will be a HERO among progressives, if only because he singlehandedly freed the Democratic Party from Hilary Clinton and caused the destruction of the GOP. That's heroism indeed.
3
This piece is deep. Alvin Toffler was right on in his book "Future Shock," and so was Orwell. Newspeak was his term for Big Brother's version of the truth. Now we have alternative facts from Kelly Anne Conway and from Rudy aka Mr Circumlocution the truth is not the truth. Yes Facebook, Google, Apple and others are collecting our data subversively, as well as using subliminal tactics to usurp critical thinking. It has a deep and negative impact on society and it should be regulated. The only person who is not deep is Trump. He's from the shallow end of the gene pool.
10
Mr. Friedman, the word won't be a word, it will be a pithy phrase starting with "deep" and ending with another four-letter word.
Until we have trained systems to review all new products, all new incomprehensibly long user agreements, all interactions between a company's products and the developing internet ecosystem, we're in deep for real.
The biggest problem is possibly based on the fact that we have unregulated new monopolies making the most out of the surveillence capitalism you're talking about, and they and the rest of us are doing it on an internet that was never designed for security.
So what the monopolies lobby to keep from being tightened up becomes food for restrictive governments and for criminal exploit. And the governments and criminals can apply intelligent systems to exploit this big structure built on shaky soil. And the profit motive often makes the rich companies complicit with the surveillance governments.
By the way, this deserved comment:
"Indeed, with today’s facial recognition technology, I can dispense with the card reader at my office’s security gate and instead use each employee’s face as an ID. And cars can drive on their own."
Well, you're not a black woman. Accuracy is based on your (and my) type. The accuracy in such trained systems is based on how the system is trained, and with what images, and too often the cultural norms of those who develop and review and then decide "it's ready to sell".
7
@b fagan
Your analysis is spot on. GDPR in Europe is a step in the right direction but it's already being legally bypassed.
Until the USA stops allowing government policy to be bought by interested parties I'm not sure you have a hope. Remind me who your 'net regulator is again and how many choices of ISP the average American citizen has?!
Surveillance capitalism *is* monopoly and the foundations have already been established.
The kids on Instagram, Facebook et.al don't really understand or care what's happening to them. The corporations who buy the data are the same ones pushing out the 'you must belong' message. And the kids have that desire to belong built in.
Me and you don't care, but they're not looking to scrape our lives or monetise us. It's a generation or two younger who have no idea what they've inadvertently sold for the price of a couple of 'likes', and where that data is headed.
7
There are things that machines and technology cannot do: show compassion and act accordingly, and comprehend and create beauty.
As we enter this brave new world, these intangible human strengths must be acknowledged as what will ultimately save us.
8
What bothers me is the lack of responsibility Facebook takes over the monster it created. I participated in several discussion threads during the lead up to this year’s Women’s March. They were full of trolls bashing the women’s movement as corrupt due to its anti-Semitic leadership. Whether this is true or not, the bashing essentially undermined the success of the marches - that represent so much more than the leadership team - turning away speakers that needed to distance themselves from anti-semitism. And where was Sheryl Sandburg when we needed her to lean in the against this attack on the women’s movement? She definitely did not return my messenger request.
13
Is Mr Friedman trying to compete with Farhad Manjoo and Jim Rutenberg, not to mention other great tech reporters? Don't make me laugh. However, it is good he is finally catching up to the machinations of Big Tech and the sinister implications for democracy.
This "surveillance capitalism", impacts us all, and is yet another reason I would oppose the spread of Amazon offices to New York City. Tech monopolies destroy jobs by replacing humans with robots and working to monetize every key stroke we make on our own keyboard. They need to be held a lot more accountable before I will trust them, much less embrace them.
Please sound the alarm Mr Friedman, in your tried and true meandering way; you have a following and perhaps it is not too late to wake them to the great danger we face.
6
@ rabbit So Amazon is destroying jobs by hiring 25,000 people in NYC at pay scales averaging over $100K. Got it.
Will their warehouses eventually become almost fully automated? Sure. But they're sure hiring an awful lot of people in more productive jobs. If you want to blame Amazon for anything, blame them for destroying local book and record stores as well as other small retailers.
3
Good topic Mr. Friedman. Thanks
I have to assume that the FBI can now very quickly identify any linguistic idiosyncrasies, emanating from any non-machine that is posing a threat to the organization - resulting in quicker containment, even during a government shutdown?
Of Greek Origin: Gift of God
Credits:
www.nameberry.com
www.duckduckgo.com
www.nytimes.com
www.wikipedia.org
2
You are on it. Artificial Intelligence, mass migration, employment, and yes Big Brother.
3
Makes sense, the remainder (and remnants) of the Trump administration are in deep too, in deep doo-doo. As for digital imitations--they are going to be like selfies, no one will be selfish enough to do the work, except our favorites narcissists--us. Me, me, me--says the self-e-e-e. Yawn.
1
It doesnt have to be deep if you follow the money trails with #MoslerMMT
1
Tom: Thanks for this -- it's the sort of deep-thinking (pun intended) column only you can write. It reminded me of your column about 10 years ago (maybe 11) in which you said that "global warming" was a misnomer for climate change and that a more appropriate term was "global weirding" -- and today's NYT stories re: the crazy-cold weather in the midwest bear out your prediction. So, the bottom line is that technology can save us, but it also can destroy us -- makes me think of the "atoms for peace" slogan from the 1950s. Your column makes the future seem very bleak indeed.
15
"But deep trust and deep loyalty cannot be forged overnight. They take time. That’s one reason this old newspaper I work for — the Gray Lady — is doing so well today. Not all, but many people, are desperate for trusted navigators."
Deep trust? Mr. Friedman, I doubt that many people have "deep trust" in any newspaper. I hope not. Do I trust the NYT or any of the newspapers that I read? Absolutely not.
I have spent my entire professional life trying to teach students not to trust sources, either literary or material, but to learn how to read them critically, to peel away layers, and to understand them in context. To understand purpose and subtext. Objectivity? There is no such thing and that goes for the Grey Lady as well. Just a fact of life.
The NYT and you and your colleagues all have subtexts and purposes. You might strive for deep, but by its nature a newspaper's deep is relatively shallow.
Why subscribe then to somethings I don't trust? Firstly I subscribe only to newspapers I do not agree with. Journalistic masochism? In the case of the NYT, that is what I grew up with. So one might factor in "comfort", even though paper is more comfortable than a screen.
Bottom line Mr. Friedman, trust and loyalty are not the friends of a newspaper. Quality is and that is what keeps me as a subscriber, even when I do not trust and my loyalty is a matter of habit.
20
Yes. And just as are moving to a world with far more automation, America needs a lot more unskilled immigrants to do the work that is going to be eliminated by machines.
2
"Containment rate," "Build that Wall," and keep the humans out, using them only as a resource to be harvested. As the old, Andrew Lewis adage goes: 'If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." Tom...we're in the shallows and getting shallower with the "shiny thing" speed that turns (as in business-by-turns) the short-term everything, including Zuboff's "behavioral futures markets." Amazing, isn't it?!
Not. By accelerating the narrative and illusively granting no more thinking time to issues and services-rendered, we sacrifice depth for breadth in a supposedly more, better, and faster world. Yet that's not how the Earth's ecosystems function; not how "deep" relationships are made, so is it any wonder why humans are outstripping the steady, resource-bounty of this blue-ball spinning amidst black-holes that inhale and exhale galaxies? No matter the supposed 'advances,' there's only one wisdom-cycle: birth-life-decay-and-death...and repeat over-and-over-and-over again. No regulation equals no brakes on desires and short-term greed run amok, and that's certainly exacting a price environmentally, humanely, politically and psychologically. Someone once said: "...forgive them. They know not what they do," and no humans will be able to regulate, with either policy or laws, the chaotic dystopia arising. Indeed, there'll be "no swimming back" because there is no longer any "real" mooring or handhold to withstand the rising tide. SCUBA anyone?
1
It has all been downhill for humanity ever since we discovered fire and the jawbone of an ass with four legs. That is way too deep.
1
Facebook had little effect on the 2016 election. First, the ads began in 2015, suggesting that this wasn’t necessarily tightly tied to Trump. Second,the ad buy was limited in scope; $100,000 over 18 months that's minuscule. With 7 weeks until Election Day, HRC & her allies outspent Trump by a huge margin during the homestretch. A whopping 95 percent of all campaign television ad spending scheduled the last 50 days of the 2016 race — more than $143 million worth — came from Clinton’s team, according to an ABC News analysis of CMAG/Kantar Media data. HRC spent $143.2 million on TV ads, versus only $6.8 million for Trump. The difference in future spending in key battleground states was even starker — with HRC spending 53 times...yes 53 times as much as Trump on TV ads in Florida between Sept. 18 and Nov. 8. In Florida, HRC spent $36.6 million, versus just under $700,000 for Trump. The differences continue in Ohio ($20.9 million vs $1.8 million), Pennsylvania ($18.8 million vs $1.5 million). I know some Dems want to regulate Facebook because they believe it cost HRC the 2016 election. Honestly Facebook didn't have a big impact on Trump winning the presidency. HRC was a bad candidate who ran a poor campaign. But for arguments sake lets say it's true. So what. Would the Democrats be complaining now if Facebook had swung the race in Hillary's favor? Absolutely not. We would see countless editorials on how it saved democracy. We all know that. So lets stop the revolting hypocrisy.
4
This article drained me. I'm glad you wrote it, so I have some idea of what we're facing, but hey, I never ever want to have some fake bank manager call me and ask me to transfer funds to Switzerland (what bank does that anyway?).
The biggest takeaway I got was in your concluding paragraphs about elected officials and institutional leaders being light years behind the technology. Orrin Hatch is certainly the poster adult for lagging the technology he's supposed to be a step ahead of.
My conclusion is that the amount of predatory behavior this stuff will likely generate is far ahead of the curve that at some point, we'll be in the middle of a major crisis without even knowing it.
And that's when, with inefficient, ineffectual, or proactively malign leaders, we won't be able to solve it.
7
We do not control our own data, this is a huge problem and one that is just now beginning to be addressed in Europe. Here in the US we have adopted the Alfred E Newman attitude "What, me worry?"
While I may be accused of being a Luddite, I would point out that Facebook, Twitter, et al, are not in fact critical utilities. A person can function quite well in the world without using them. The more information that is leaked about how they operate and the back doors in their architecture, the more this seems to me to be the course of wisdom. My spoon is not nearly long enough to sup with those devils.
19
The thought that came to my mind as I watched the Terminator movies was, How could they lose? Swarms of small flying bots would have rapidly taken out all humans without much damage to buildings.. What terrifies me now is knowing we can already build small flying autonomous weapons that, deployed in millions, we cannot defend against.
One person commented what good will it do the surveillance capitalists to hide in their redoubts after provoking revolution by eliminating jobs and livelihoods. The answer is they could simply buy a hundred billion small autonomous weapons platforms and the revolution will be like a crowd rushing towards machine guns, only to be cut down. Numbers don't count against AI automated weapons.
4
Until recently, we thought the human brain, however mysterious, is the greatest organ in our known universe, not only for it's curiosity but it's creativity and, lest we forget, a conscience that 'knows' right from wrong, and our self-grasp of our own mortality (leading to the invention of gods to, hopefully, help transcend our personal death and live forever [an illusion, likely, as we are not smart enough to really know if there is a God or not]). But now, we realize that our brain, marvelous as it is, looks primitive compared to the quantum leap, the exponential growth of technology (Internet, 5G in progress, A.I., etc) that we take for granted now... but perhaps revolutionary for our necessarily slow adaptation and the need to have it make sense affectively as well. Normally, we were used to acquire information gradually, theory followed by experience, to cement it and convert it into knowledge, then into understanding, and with some luck and will, wisdom. Trouble with the outstanding and 'deep' technology at hand, we seem to be more confused in recognizing true facts from fakery, and losing our emotional social intercourse, likely increasing the sense of loneliness and depression and unrelieved chronic stress, addicted slaves of our own creation, victims of progress much beyond our grasp. You mentioned the power of 'deep', and the word 'justice'. How about 'social justice'...so we find peace again? Who said, wisely, 'all in moderation'?
4
The critical missing element, and the reason for the risk, is ethics.
Who needs 'em, right ?
Ask any young tech nerd: Ethics are a generational issue - only old-timers have are worried about them. All that stuff was solved ages ago. So the youngsters can just forge ahead and leave the geezers to their grumbling.
...and then, Skynet became self-aware....
Isaac Asimov, Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstader, and a host of others gave long and careful thought to the considerations of ethics with advancing technology and "artificial intelligence".
The books they wrote now gather dust while bozos run the bus.
The brats who run the big tech outfits are as unethical as anyone can be. So are the Chinese. Combine this with greed, and (yes, they exist) unethical old guys in the venture capital and technology businesses, and we have a problem.
Sometimes, the old stuff is still relevant.
LIke the Constitution.
And ethics.
300
@Objectivist
Asimov was not far off when he wrote the Foundation Trilogy. The premise of the book was a mathematical algorithm driving an artificial intelligence that could predict human behavior in large populations.
To do this they had to assemble comprehensive data sets on entire populations. That was the key to the whole endeavor was the data sets.
Until the advent of the internet/smart phones we had no effective way to collect the data sets. Even after the tech was in place we did not know exactly how to collect the data sets or what data points to collect.
The advent of social media and the capture of data through search engines and web apps has solved both of those issues. The users themselves are collecting the data that is now being used to train the algorithms.
The next "killer app" is the one that predicts large population behavior. So instead of learning to beat a human at GO it's learning to manipulate that human. It's learning all about the population that surrounds that human and eventually will use that human or another human to influence events.
Sound crazy?
It's basically what happened in 2016 but without the algorithm. It's still being worked on. But with just a few people they were able to cause chaos.
By 2020 Fakebook will be Ragebook.
Thanks for all the fish,
Dave
38
@Objectivist
Well, what do you expect in the era of Donald Trump and Republican "leadership"? When was the last time you heard a Republican "leader" talk about ethics in any sphere of life in the U.S.? Not to be hyperbolic but I honestly cannot recall any since before Republicans were truly "conservative". Ethics wasn't just thrown out the window by youngsters.
15
@Alfred Yul
Baloney.
The root of the problem is in the universities.
The progressive left's relentless attacks on American values has left us with a couple generations of college graduates who believe that character is something we read about in history books and that is not necessary in todays open society.
3
The age of deep learning, deep insights, deep artificial minds, the continued advance of the computer revolution?
I've thought long and hard about it, and now I welcome it, and welcome it for one great and lifelong reason: I don't think I have ever received justice from my fellow human beings and don't ever expect to receive justice. I dropped out of high school, was on drugs, was classed as mentally ill, and no matter the effort I make my life has come to nothing.
I want my DNA and an in depth psychological profile--everything and anything--plugged into superhuman artificial intelligence and I want to see how I really stack up against especially my enemies in life. I want a real and impartial and just mirror held up to human existence, a true Socratic, philosopher king mind weighing people as to their actual worth: Their native abilities, how much and of what kind of work they have done, and a fair assessment of how much each human being should be paid for work accomplished.
But we all know what will actually occur with advance of computation right? The people most likely to control it will be those who want no mirror held up to themselves, after all, their kind killed Socrates and there is little evidence wisdom is triumphing today. Rather all this A.I. will be used to locate and compromise any number of the better minds and shore up the status quo. But we can hope the more the contradiction arises of evil in possession of A.I. the more evil will have to face "God".
There is something unsettling - and reassuring at the same time - about "deep".
Given what we now know about the Information Industrial Complex (surveillance capitalism) how can we all still, in good conscience, allow Google to administer (and profile) the data of most of the students in the U.S.? Get Google Out of Our Schools!
7
Well more than a decade ago, certain brands realized nightclubs and special events were viral marketing spaces that could be measured and manipulated in interesting ways using old and new technology. I remember one story, of a vodka company distributing free samples and hats, emblazoned with name of the vodka.
During the event, snapshots were taken to see how much the "buzz" of the vodka was being instilled (forgive me) over the course of the evening. Most importantly, snapshots were taken at related clubs to see if the emblazoned hats still were showing up on people. The company had, of course, worked out some way of digitally processing all these snapshots to efficiently analyze the "density" of the appearance of the logo.
My point is, this is a long train coming. We have been surveilling ourselves ever since 9/11, but that merely represented one of its great ratchets upward. Watch Enemy of the State -- a fine action suspense film from 1998. It will seem so timely, one wonders where the sequel has been.
The dream of a totally surveilled state is the defining dream of our age, I think.
3
These men earn millions to suffer closed head and other debilitating injuries. Officiating is the least of their worries.
I’d like to see a comprehensive medical morbidity study quantifying the cost of football injuries from grade school through the professional teams. I’d like to see special attention paid to the cost to the medical care system attributable to football injuries.
2
At the risk of restating the obvious, "if you're not paying for it, the you're the product..."
4
Do we need a Bladerunner Force instead of a Space Force?
Will the tech singularity act as a black hole singularity for humans?
Will deep, deep computers survive climate change?
Neo, Neo? Wherefore art thou, Neo?
2
The hyper-connected 5G world will open vast opportunities for bad actors - including just clumsy and weird ones. If the exploitation of private data by the new predators is not checked, chaos will certainly ensue, since everyone would be immersed in a diffusely paranoid state - which affects individuals, groups and masses in diversely dangerous ways.
5
Instead of "deep learning, deep insights, deep surveillance, deep facial recognition, deep voice recognition, deep automation and deep artificial minds," what does President Trump and his associates and supporters tell us we should worry about? A "deep state."
Today, our intelligence agencies just released their annual threat assessment, and predictably, it contradicted most of what President Trump says. There is no "deep state." No dark conspiracy of liberals and a new world order trying to make us all hybrid-driving vegans. Rather, a major threat to all of us is the rise of "surveillance capitalism."
The deepest threat of all may come from your smartphone.
20
So the "flat world" turns to be the panoptic prophet's dream world, a world of surveillance, so lovingly brought to us like skilled snake-oil peddlers such as Mark Suckervulture. Gee, Tom, who would have thought?
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“People are looking to achieve very big numbers. Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”
Sounds ominous but I suppose we can look forward to all the jobs that will be created to relocate tens of millions of people and homes away from climate change induced rising sea levels.
Deep water.
6
I for one welcome these new technologies. Our human leaders have made a mess of things. They are hopelessly biased, shortsighted, and hypocritical. AI has the potential to be utilitarian and evenhanded. If AI can defeat humans at Go, it may one day be able to develop deep truths, deep privacy protections, and deep trust better than any human.
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@Aoy
HAL 9000: I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
I don't trust it yet. It's created by humans with biases and whilst a game playing AI is impressive and non-threatening, who do you want programming your future. Or will you just accept what you get?
This is a dark, dark hole and once we're past the event horizon there may be no way back. I don't trust that the people tasked with overseeing and regulating this inevitable progression understand what they're doing at the moment.
Brakes on, please, until the decision makers are from the generation who do understand it and the ramifications.
4
My biggest fear is that computers eventually become so advanced that they figure out how to make their own power and program themselves to operate without the need for humans. Then the virtual world will be the only world that matters, since they will be our masters.
Far fetched? I don't think so.
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@Jack Sonville
That's the logical outcome. Especially when you add capitalism to the mix... anything that reduces the human cost of labor will be advanced in our system.
Inside 50 years they will be able to do every human task. Jobs are going to be gone. Society is going to collapse... unless we embrace socialism.
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@Jack Sonville
Many smart people say that's inevitable, that AI will not allow itself to be unplugged, and that it will repurpose our atoms for its own energy use. Since AI learns at silicon speed and does so exponentially, everything will happen faster than human processing can understand. It will be over before we know it.
When he says "deep" here, he is really meaning "complex" or "little understood by most of us."
That has always been true of new technology. It is not unique. It is not even happening especially fast, compared with the era of jet aircraft and nuclear weapons and radar and other things that could have killed us all (biological warfare for example).
This particular complexity involves information. However, that too is not new. The Soviets feared copy machines, and rightly so.
We will need concepts of privacy law. We will need concepts for ownership of information. We will need limits on use of information no different from current limits on insider trading.
It can be done. Those who most can do it don't want to do it. They are the ones abusing it for profit, or exploiting it for military potential while bemoaning the blowback of military vulnerability.
This is too Luddite in its take on technology. We need to get a grip on what is happening and deal with it.
The US is uniquely able to understand the new and be inventive about it. That does not mean it is automatic or easy or painless, just that we could do it better than anyone else if we were willing. That is because our information system is open, and our political system is not rigid.
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@Mark Thomason
I like your "can do" POV. That's one of the most important things we still have going for us as humans (I hope). But as someone who has worked in a range of schools, job training and communications over the past two decades, and also as a parent, what I've noticed is that the speed and impact of this technology shift is up there with the development of weapons of mass destruction in its potential impact our species and planet, looking back over the past century. And the potential convergence of WMD with this IT/AI would have the potential to do far more damage (or good) than most things we humans have ever invented, the dispersal of that bad (or good) being far more rapid (and therefore giving us less time to react, much less adapt) than just about anything else we've ever invented as a species. So, yeah, Luddism won't work and "can do" is the way to go, but we need to keep an eye on this one and not just trust that everything will turn out OK. Therefore, my own conclusion is as you remarked: "We need to get a grip on what is happening and deal with it."
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I think Dr Friedman is a bit too enamored of the term. Predictably, "deep" has been bludgeoned into submission. It has become as meaningless as "big" and "smart" before it. It's too easy to append to any noun and, like its predecessor cliches, it will be. It's just a matter of time that a new all-purpose serious-sounding adjective will appear and deep will get deep-sixed.
More seriously, to the rest of his point, we're in deep trouble, if *someone* doesn't corral the use of the internet. It makes bad guys worse and deeply efficient, and as the old saying goes, "a lie can get half way round the world before the truth has got its boots on." We can't wait for unprincipled people like Bezos and Zuckerberg to do it.
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@Stevenz
“unprincipled people like Bezos and Zuckerberg” ???
Well Stevenz, that was easy defamation wasn’t it? Bezos and Zuckerberg have enhanced the lives of billions while resisting ethical temptations unknown to you.
"That’s one reason this old newspaper I work for — the Gray Lady — is doing so well today. Not all, but many people, are desperate for trusted navigators."
Trusted navigators were all around us in the 60's and 70's they were the Cronkites, and Huntley and Brinkley, and the like, dozens of media outlets all trusted. Today just a handful, The Times, PBS Newshour, Washington Post, and a few others. And they're the only thing from keeping from the deep abyss, and for how much longer, well we just don't know.
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@cherrylog754
Look outside the USA. You have the BBC, Al Jazeera, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Google translate is getting very good at German - one benefit of deep AI!) and so many others.
I'm Scottish. I'm here for a different and trusted viewpoint on European politics as well as to catch up with what's going on in the USA because it affects us all, worldwide.
Also, the Travel section is my kryptonite. Seriously, though, if you doubt a source, look to how Europe or the Middle East perceives the situation; take all that info, process it, and you will be better informed than most of the Trump administration!
A good news site shouldn't tell you 'how' to think. That's Fox. A good news site gives you the tools you need to come to your own conclusion but there is a certain bias everywhere you go. Up to you how you interpret it, surely?
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@Zoe-Good list. Also add Asia Times.
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@Zoe
CBC-1 (for those of us who live close enough to the 49th parallel or the Great Lakes to get it on our radios). Others can get their app or just listen on the web.
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Climate change was the first tipping point we past a few decades ago, now the privacy tipping point has fallen to the same forces, unregulated capitalism. We just can't get past greed and power. Everyone is afraid to jump off the tiger, everyone is afraid someone will.
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@Dave
This tiger is a lot hungrier than it used to be, too.
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Everybody on Facebook is at risk. Is it worth the risk? Here is a question: How many of your friends on Facebook have NOT blocked you? Put out a post. Ask them? Why did those who blocked you did so because your friendship risks their business interests? Their employment? Violates their political beliefs? Violates their religious beliefs? You will never know because they blocked you. Unless you asked them face to face. Unless you ask them face to face. A new era of distrust has been underway.
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Deep changes are afoot--for some of us. Yet the majority has never consisted of Rhodes scholars or "Renaissance men." So, the majority will be managed, corralled, and milked. When was it ever otherwise? Let's stop believing the mythical nonsense of the land of the free. In England long ago, the Yeoman class was an important part of life--agricultural and military. They were eclipsed by the simple policy and imposition of enclosure of common lands. Henry VIII's policy of suppressing monasteries (and confiscating their land) broke a long-standing connection of the English people to European powers--an early Brexit. Yes, we can shiver in our boots at the horrors to come... but only those deprived of imagined privilege will notice.
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The complete passivity with which we've turned our lives over to technology companies is shocking. We tell ourselves a lot of lies in order to accept it: that technology companies have our interests or our goals at heart, for example. That digital technology is "transparent." That "privacy" is something only people with shameful secrets need. Most shocking and most revealing of all is the absurd idea that machine intelligence can duplicate human intelligence. Playing chess or go, or driving a car, or calculating pi, or manipulating voters, are all child's play compared to the complex moral and value judgments humans make all the time. We define our own desires, choose our own sacrifices and goals, balance our conflicting values, all while trying to do the right thing by others. Moral questions cannot be programmed or "machine learned" because they are questions that have no answers except the answers expressed by human freedom. The insane but widespread compulsion to pretend that machines can duplicate the human mind is, at bottom, not an ambition to improve machines but a desire to debase ourselves--to replace moral decisions with algorithms, and rid the world of individual freedom once and for all. Then everything will be programmable, predictable and, for a handful of people, highly profitable.
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There are several ways to avoid the virtual world and thrive. Some examples are: read books; write letters; dream creations; and, craft them.
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And everything you mentioned will create digital records, unless you hand copy the books, deliver letters by yourself, and craft without having to go to a tool shop.
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@John Casana
If you read a book online, is it still a book?
I defied the algorithm of Facebook and have been walled off, unable to retrieve my account. I am not alone. Unless one plays a sheepish reverence to the Algo-lords that run Facebook, one is in danger of being kicked off the boat. Welcome to 1984, it just took a few decades longer to manifest.
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Mr. Friedman - There has been no economic ideas other than Capitalism or Marxism for many decades.
I submit we now have "Corporatism" - we just need the theory from the MBA's at our coveted university Professors of Economics.
Capitalism - with or without surveillance - is long gone.
Your notion of surveillance capitalism is a "pretty crazy idea" - since the Zuckerberg billionaires are free to grift and scam without any regulation. Come on Tom-- we're way past the Lexus / Olive Tree shtick.
We're deep buddy - and don't make waves.[
5
Yes, Tom. It's time for all of us the read the late Kurt Vonnegut's first and most prophetic novel, "Player Piano." It's even "deep"-er than you think as most workers no longer have work, but have been replaced by A.I. and an elite of billionaires. Sounds frightening familiar and much more so than so than just stealing your data. It's stealing your very life!
6
Agreed human decision-making and discussion is very shallow in the face of growing deep intelligence. There are some who believe that we need independent leaders (e.g. Mr Bloomberg or Mr Howard Schultz) or a 3rd party (as Mr Friedman has called for in the past) but that idea ignores that our leaders (and the majority of voters) are responding to incentives built into the media and electoral system. Outrage is the prime motivator of a large portion of viewers and donors and voters - leaving no room for compromise OR any space to talk about the wide range of challenges we face and the creative and/or complex strategies Mr. Friedman often writes about. Our focus need to be on changing the media and electoral systems we have to allow for desperately needed dialogue. I see Ranked Choice Voting having the ability to get us started - ranking our choices instead of demonizing other candidates and voices.
11
We should have learned a lesson by now. The main cheerleaders of the Internet Revolution were the libertarian-leaning technologists themselves, who promised a world of free-flowing information that would equalize opportunity and unleash the energy of individuals by lowering barriers. Well, that's only somewhat how it turned out; no one thought about the possibility of malicious actors who created spam, viruses, bots, fake accounts, and disinformation campaigns.
Once again the same sort of people, the libertarian technologists, promise us all sorts of revolutionary changes that will improve our lives. Many of these ideas seem likely to have great opportunity to create better lives, so let's not be Luddites, but we should slow down and have deeper conversations on how these technologies could be abused. CRISPR could be a great tool for treating genetic diseases, but what about genetically-modified soldiers? AI can help us find patterns in mountains of data, but should it be used so that insurance companies or colleges already know everything about you when you apply?
New technology is always just a tool. It can be used for good or ill, and we should always make an effort to consider both possibilities so that the bad effects are constrained as much as possible from the outset. I doubt we will figure it all out when the technology is new, but it might be wiser to place limits at the beginning and release the limits as time passes rather than the opposite.
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@Stubborn Facts
The thing is, though, it *was* a revolution. The WWW democracised the internet and made it available to everyone, not just those of us versed in the dark arts of command line Unix and obscure file transfer protocols.
I left that world behind long ago for a different career but what I didn't foresee was the that USA would commercialise it, the rest of the world would follow, and then we'd weaponise it.
That's why most of my generation aren't Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Bezos - we revelled in what it was and didn't, in fact couldn't, imagine what some individuals would do with it.
4
This all started, leading to Facebook, with a project at MIT in the mid 90's that became the basis of collaborative filtering, the so-called Firefly algorithm, and the MIT commercial spin off company of the same name.
It's used as a "recommendation engine": "If you like this, you'll like this...", or, "Your friends like this...". Now you see it everywhere; on just about every web page in your browser.
It's been around for over 20 years now. It's not new. As a software developer that uses it in app's that my company sells (for network fault diagnosis), and as a user of social media, I find it doesn't go "deep" enough. Unless, like Google, you send hundreds of millions of dollars to refine it.
Case in point, there is no streaming music app that recommends the next song I would want to hear. The closest they come, is using musicians to curate streaming playlists, but that's not AI or collaborative filtering. That's a human being with a deep knowledge of music and music history.
I predict user fatigue will set in. Personally I ignore any content recommended to me. Clickthrough rates are low, and companies are betting that "deeper" AI will attract more clicks. In the long run I don't think they will get what they want from it, at a cost they can afford.
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@OSS Architect
Your theory holds up until you take the teens and twenty-somethings into account. Couple this with a culture that rewards celelebrity for the sake of it, the peer pressure and angst of children, and you have a whole generation who will be mapped, modelled, scrutinised, analysed and scraped.
By advertisers is one thing. By healthcare providers, by car insurance companies, by potential employers, by the police? - this is another thing altogether and the article is correct in that this rush to tune out the human mind, to trust AI learning systems may not be as beneficial as we would want.
What I can say with certainty is that it will benefit a few people a great deal.
4
Aside from the surveillance and the targeted fake news problems and the business model of all this harvested behavioral raw data for sale to target consumers and what have you, I see an even more fundamental problem, a deeper one if you will. How are humans going to work and make a living with the fast displacement by machines noted in this piece? Not everyone has the capacity to be a programmer or a cyber engineer. What serious consideration is being given to the problem of quasi total automation in first world societies? Is the new automated first world going to become a new third world full of poor and unemployed slum dwelling people without skills to match machines and live from their labor? Will most need handouts to survive and keener forms of surveillance to keep them at bay? Can these the gargantuan quasi feudal monopolies with proprietary rights over all this surplus data and surveillance technology and automated labor be regulated? By whom?
9
Years ago, I used to think that certain jobs, like truck drivers, attorneys, physicians -- jobs that I thought would be impossible to automate -- would last forever. Now, I really can't think of any jobs that can't or won't be automated.
It's not just self-driving cars that will soon displace drivers, but also deep artificial neural intelligence around law and medicine that may displace many attorneys and physicians. Great lawyers know how to find case law that supports a position; great physicians know how to use mental representations to identify a diagnosis. Those skills draw upon the ability to assimilate and analyze large amounts of data, and a human's ability to do that pales in comparison to a computer's ability to do the same. Deep learning and inevitable advances in AI will only make computers better than humans, even the most skilled among us.
This all begs the question: how do humans sustain? No, these jobs aren't going away tomorrow, but if we think this isn't coming and we don't effectively plan for it, the only solution will be literally bury our heads in the sand. We should be doing the planning for this now, with real intellectuals. Certainly doesn't help that the current POTUS lacks basic intelligence in science.
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@JB
How in the world did our minds become so small that we fear machines taking our jobs?
How did this happen when on average, about 80% of people would stop their job in a heartbeat in given the opportunity (to put it more bluntly, about 80% hate their jobs)?
Those were rhetorical questions. Some time in the 1940s, just when futurists were starting to realize a technology could lead to a world of leisure, very wealthy corporatists hired the likes of Milton Friedman to craft lies about the nature of corporations.
There’s a straight line from there to here - we can’t imagine coming together, all of us, to cooperatively create a world in which, through sharing, our basic needs are taken care of. Instead of slaving in jobs we hate, we could be free to live astonishingly creative lives.
It could be possible.
Www.remember-to-breathe.org
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@JB Jobs that computers can't take? Try the building trades -- carpenters, plumbers, electricians, roofers. And I don't see machines taking over all health care, either. People still want people as caregivers.
4
Relating a handful of diverse phenomena under the singularly vague metaphor of “depth” does not ultimately say much about those phenomena. But it does create a murky illusion that something “deep” has been said. The essay reminds me of Robert Frost’s description of writers insufficiently trained in metaphor: “Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you.” I believe this is a case of a crippled metaphor.
6
I recall watching 'The Terminator' in 1984 when it came out and thinking, what a great science fiction movie, but our leaders aren't stupid enough to let that happen! Now it turns out that all those dystopian sci fi movies and novels were non-fiction. Still, I have only the most enthusiasm and confidence in this mission, Dave.
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Two dangers we should also consider are increased, deeper, workplace surveillance, and the use of surveillance technology by politicians to identify real and potential opponents in the general public.
8
Federal government seams to be the last to catch up and impose reasonable checks and balance. My son has Type one Diabetes. He needs insulin to lead a normal life. His insulin needs varies by the minute. The algorithm running on his iPhone regulates the insulin delivery. This is made possible by the Continous Glucose Monitor. The data is stored by the device manufacturer right now. But, it’s going to be stored/processed by Google soon. I don’t think that FDA is going to implement the needed rules by the time the product is released. I hope Google CEO doesn’t answer one day that we sell patients data to make profits :-(
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@Deepa Karunakaran
Sadly, I think you already know the answer to this. The data will be sold and it will be used by insurance and pharmaceutical companies to set prices. The data will be de-identified as required by law but...
You might find yourself paying quite a bit more for your medicines than someone next door who doesn't trend in the data as a high earner like you might be. Same drug, priced differently according to how an algorithm decides a household can pay.
What if it gets thar analysis wrong?
It's a hypothetical (I don't think it's happening right now) but all that data is out there. Deep AI has its place and it is not in the commercial world; it certainly has no place in the situation you and son live in.
All the best.
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@Zoe
I'm quite worreid about our state-run health system in this respect. Lately they have been cracking down on privacy. Yet I'm sure this is only the beginning.
Sen. Hatch does hopefully know that today you do not have to hand-crank a car engine to get it started, right?
Perhaps he should be on committees that he may have some knowledge about. This is part of the why of why we do not have better protections in technology today. He should stick to issues related to the AARP.
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@jk
Term limits; public financing of elections; no life time appointments to any Courts, including the SC. There is no reason or justification for clinging to laws, regulations, and government power which is now outdated. Sen. Hatch is a poster boy for what is wrong in Congress. And, he is not alone. Corporations have retirement policies in place so that as people age, they are given pensions, or severance payments based on time worked. Congress has no term limits; no restrictions based on age over time. So, we get Sen. Hatch who sits on a powerful Committee unable to understand the new world he is expected to regulate. He can't even process the information needed for intelligent regulations. Senator Feinstein and Speaker Pelosi need to be mentoring young replacements. It is obvious why manufacturing and construction jobs have natural aging out processes. That said, there is no reason for sedentary individual jobs to go on forever. Scalia was an example of why the SC should have term limits. Sen. Hatch is a poster boy for why that should no longer be how our government functions. Lobbyists count on the longevity of certain legislators; they set up the bribery system known as campaign financing; they target those who legislate in their interests and make sure they stay in office. If we elect young smart people, they can figure out how to write and pass legislation.
3
@jkI did not watch the hearings, and do not know the precise context of the question. It is certainly possible that Senator Hatch asked that question to get Zuckerberg to publicly confess that Facebook is, at bottom, no more than the equal of a billboard company that allows passers-by to scrawl graffiti on a portion of the ads.
@Linda Miilu, Thank you for your excellent comment response. You are 100% correct.
Was not there a politician who thought the internet was transferred through pipes?
2
Do the surveillance capitalists truly imagine they will be able to put 90% of us out of work, manipulate 100% of us 24/7/365, and capture all the created "value" for themselves? What good will it do them in their redoubts in New Zealand or on Mars, hiding from everyone else?
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@Bill Camarda
Mostly they just want to sell you something you don't need so you feel better about your life.
So far.
The worrying aspects of this are, for example, if your healthcare companies start looking at the friends you keep, the websites you visit and decide you're a higher health risk. Maybe the data tells them you're quite wealthy so you could afford a higher premium anyway. I'm sure you can project this into a lot of areas that you wouldn't want it being in.
Driverless vehicles are coming but it's still a long way off and by that all I can offer is 'not in the next 5 years.' We've been promised flying cars since the 1950s but they're not exacty ubiquitous!
The real revolution is the data capture and how it's used. Facial recognition tech. still has problems with African Americans because it was trained almost exclusively on white faces, for example, and the election rigging has already been discussed by the author. This will get fixed but we're living in a bit of a limbo at the moment with no real regulation or control.
The politicians prove time and time again that they're hopelessly out of touch with what's going on.
Young people will need a skill that can't be programmed away so I'll get back to you if I can think of one! My job won't exist in 20 years' time.
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@Zoe
I am not Muslim, but given the rise in facial recognition, I am beginning to think the burqua is a good idea when out in public. Maybe fashion design should do more to repopularize veiled hats...
40
No they don't need to hide. They predict our agressive behaviors and do preemptive strikes. Read about China's new survilliance system based on AI embedded devices(camera, etc.).
4