We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us - and what we can do in response.
Outline:
Terminator AIs are a distant threat and 1984 is not the correct dystopia for the 21st century.
The present threat is not in what AI will do to us on its own, but in how it will be used by [the people who control AI] to manipulate us in extremely negative ways.
AI is a jump in category - it's "a whole different world". It's not just 'the next thing'.
With prodigious potential come prodigious risks.
We "roll our eyes" at online ads, but "persuasion architecture" works. Huge collections of data allow AIs to very accurately guess who will respond to what kinds of persuasion.
The data is far to complex for humans to understand. Tufekci says "It's giant matrices with... maybe millions of rows and columns". (I'd expect significantly more than 2 dimensions).
"It's like we're not programming anymore, we're growing intelligence that we don't truly understand."
This only works with immense amounts of data. Deep surveillance on all of us is encouraged.
Ethics in targeting is an issue. "What if the system targets people who are bipolar and about to enter the manic phase?" Such people are prone to overspending and compulsive gambling. There's no way to determine whether this is the result of AI targeting.
A lot of this stuff is "off the shelf".
YouTube auto-play follows increasing order of extremism. "It's like you're never hard-core enough for YouTube.
With nobody minding the ethics of the store, these sites can profile people to find people susceptible to more extremism. It's cheap and easy to target any category.
Trump's campaign used Facebook to demobilize people, strictly targeted. "Dark Posts", privacy guaranteed.
Facebook - multiple election manipulation experiments proved workable; what if they decided to support a candidate?
"Little by little, public debate is becoming impossible," because the most-used systems for public debate only let you see what you already believe.
Conclusions:
We're building this structure of surveillance authoritarianism merely to get people to click on ads, but what if it gets worse? If authoritarianism is using overt fear to terrorize, we'll be scared, but we'll know it. We'll hate it, we'll resist it.
If the powers that be are quietly watching, judging and nudging, predicting and identifying "troublemakers", using personal individual weaknesses/vulnerabilities... ... if they're doing it at scale through our private screens so we don't know what others are seeing... ...That authoritarianism will envelope us like a spider's web, and we may not even know that we're in it.
The structure of the architecture is the same whether you're selling shoes or politics. The algorithms don't know the difference.
Social media is great in many ways. It's not that people are maliciously and deliberately trying to wreck the world, but the structures and business models are still very dangerous. There's no simple solution.
Restructuring is needed. We have to face lack of transparency, the structural challenge of machine-learning capacity. These structures are organizing how we plan and function; are controlling what we can and can't do.
We have to mobilize our tech, creativity, and politics so we can build AI that supports human goals but is constrained by human values.
We need a digital economy where our data and our attention is not for sale to the highest bidding authoritarian or demagogue!
We do want the prodigious potential of artificial intelligence and digital technology to blossom, but for that we must face this prodigious menace open eyed, and now.
Extraordinary events continue to undermine the stability of our world.
Nobody has a vision for a better/different future.
Those in control can't seem to deal with our problems:
Over the past 40 years
politicians, financiers, and tech utopians
rather than face up to the real complexities of the world
retreated...
constructed a simpler version of the world
in order to hang on to power.
People went along with this because the simplicity was
reassuring?
System attackers (radicals, artists, counter-culture) failed; they
became part of the trickery - they, too, had retreated into the
make-believe world; their opposition has no effect; nothing changes.
Outside, forces are growing and beginning to pierce our fake world.
1975 - New York and Damascus
Two ideas were emerging about how to run the world
without politics
30 years of increasing debt (borrowed from banks to finance
welfare and services)
Then the middle class fled the city
Banks continued lending; debt grew; banks stopped lending.
Banks took control of the city; President Ford refused to help.
8/9 members of the committee to manage NYC Finances were bankers.
Financial Institutions took power from politicans and started to
run society themselves. Enforced austerity. Fired teachers,
police, and firemen.
Nobody opposed the bankers
The revolutionaries had retreated and
shacked up in abandoned buildings doing fry-brained art.
Individualism. They didn't try to change it, they just experienced
it. Everything was going to shit and they just watched.
Their art/music/self-expression tried to change what was in peoples'
heads, but I guess they were too stoned or something.
By detatching themselves, they began to lose touch with the reality
of power. "It was the mood of the era. The revolution was deferred
indefinitely and, while we were dozing, the money crept in".
Trump. Saw a scheme to scam $$ from the state. Started buying up
derelict buildings. Negotiated 160M tax breaks. Banks sprang with
loans. Trump transformed NY into a city for the rich; made fortune
off the situation; paid practically nothing.
Damascus, Syria
Damascus, Syria - Henry Kissinger vs. Hafez al-Assad
Using politics to change the world
vs
Run the world as a stable system.
Assad was ruthless. Killed/Imprisoned; had a vision to unite arab
nations
Kissinger felt it was a threat. He was a creep; inconsiderate,
tempermental; saw himself as a "hard realist"; thought history was
a struggle for power. Saw the world as an interconnected system.
Wanted to maintain a balance to prevent chaos
- really, he helped cause the chaos we now live in
Kissenger thought strengthening the arab world would destabilize
his balance of power; he betrayed Assad; broke the arab alliances.
Egypt + Israel. Palastinians were ignored.
Kissenger's first thoughts on structural (global balance of power)
Kind of ignored humanity.
Assad raged (controlled fury) about treachery; demons from below;
retreated. Lost hope in his transformation of arab world; became
brutal, vengeful.
1980s
Soviet dream had failed. No food. No "belief". No vision of future.
Technocrats pretended everything was OK. Everyone knew - could see -
that their world had fallen apart; they pretended all was OK because
what else could they do?
The "fakeness" was "Hypernormal".
SyFi - stalkers; the zone; Nothing is what it seems; reality changes
minute-by-minute; hidden forces change the way you think and feel.
Reality had become shifting and unstable. (Roadside picnic)
Reagan
Wanted to make the world moral. Fight evil. make the world a better
place. "Into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an
afflicted mankind." *BLARGHHHH*
...but Reagan had to deal with Kissinger's mess... and didn't.
Instead, he used Ghadafi as a scapegoat.
Massacres. Christian/Lebanese slaughtered Palastinians. Israel let
it happen.
Reagan sent Marines as neutral "peacekeeping force". Assad didn't
believe a bit of it; ended up using suicide bombers.
Ayatollah Khomeini
Taught people that suicide was OK if you took enemies with you.
Took 10s of thousands of young boys from school to walk through
mine fields so the army could pass through unharmed.
Assad took the lesson.
Oct 1993 - Marines killed by suicide bombers. 241 dead.
Regan mourned "the loss of those splendid young men," promised to
respond, but instead turned and left. Assad thought he was hot for
forcing the Americans to leave the middle-east.
Syria and Iran thought they could control it.
Mid-80s
Banks had risen. Banks were taking control of the nation, but in a
hidden way.
Gibson: book about powerful information networks; Raw brutal
corporate power.
Hippies tried to make a hippieish cyber space; an alternative
reality; Acid-heads.
by 2000, computers were really making cyber-space worlds.
(
This bit seems a bit fluffy to me; not sure these guys weren't
still dropping acid
)
Hackers thought so, too. Hacked the hippies and published stuff.
Hacked TRW, too (military computers, then big business); stole
and publiched hippies' (barlow's) credit history.
Showed the emergence of "a new and growing power that was way
beyond politics".
Reagan Again
He became desperate to show America struggled against evil.
Framed up Ghadafi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi
He became a fake criminal mastermind; he liked it for the fame.
Ghadafi thought he was a revolutionary, fated to take on the west.
Third Universal Theory - Green Book - Nobody read it. He was crazy.
Had no power/global influence.
Dec 1985 - Syria started suicide bombing in Europe.
Reagan blamed Ghadafi and Ghadafi took credit, despite that the
Europeans knew it was really the Syrians. America insisted it was
Ghadafi and pressed it. Ghadafi loved it - insisted it was him.
Shot his mouth off all over the place.
Ghadafi pretended to be pretending NOT to be getting into missile
development, WMDs. Journalists pushed the idea. Ghadafi became a
"global supervillian" at the head of "a rogue state".
More terrorism in Europe; Reagan wanted to bomb Libya; analysts
were being pressed to come up with evidence against Ghadafi. The
Americans and Ghadafi were generating a false narrative; phony
evidence.
Europe insisted it was Syria, but America was to scared to face
Assad. Less support (arab, soviet) for Ghadafi. America attacked
Libya - killed a bunch of men, women, children. Ghadafi basked in
the supposed sympathy. American bombing was hugely inaccurate.
IT WAS ALL BULLSHIT.
UFO Craze
UFO theory vs Secret military technology theory.
Fueled wide-spread belief that governments would lie.
Perception Management
A bluring of fact and fiction.
1980s Perception Management became a central part of the American
government.
Tell dramatic stories that grabbed the imagination - middle-east,
central america, etc... Distraction from intractable complexities
of the real world.
How to manipulate people; reality is not important - just something
that you "handle".
Soviet Empire Imploded
Nobody (politicians, think tank, journalists, academics) saw it
coming.
Can't do anything about the world - it's too complicated.
Managed Outcomes
"The System" became [management of a post-political world]
Runaway world; Impossible to predict outcomes; Try to predict
dangers and avoid risks.
Extra-political systems forming to predict and manage the world.
1992 - Aladin; prediction tool, monitoring world, comparing to
events in past; moves investments from dangerous areas;
Incredibly successful. Controls 15T assets (7% of world)
Prozac, Eliza; REPEAT BACK TO PEOPLE WHATEVER THEY'RE SAYING.
"Everybody is kind of brainwashing each other into being happy."
In an age of individualism, what made people feel secure was
having themselves reflected back on them, just like in a mirror.
AI Changed Direction
We started creating systems that "reflected people", but on a
gigantic scale; Intelligent agents;
Intelligent agents work by monitoring individuals, gathering vast
ammounts of data about their past behavior, looking for patterns
of correlation from which they could predict what they would want
in the future.
It's a system that orders the world around "you"; Reassuring in an
age of Anxious individualism, frightened of the future, like Eliza.
Puts people in a "safe bubble", protected from complexities of the
world.
Profitable applications;
A New System
A New System promised to keep world safe
Finance controls unpredictability of free market
IAs online predicted what people would want; how they would behave
Politics became part of a wider system that's managing the world.
Voice of the weak against the powerful was eroding; cracks forming
around the edges of society.
Dangerous Flaw: In the real world, not everything can be predicted
by reading data from the past.
...boring story of trumps losses in las vegas...
Back to Assad - Dec. 1988
Pan Am plane bombed over Scotland; Evidence pointed to Syria.
Then there was a change and it was said to be Libya because
America and Britain needed Asad as an ally in Gulf War.
Gadaffi became the scapegoat again.
Assad's terrorist power had betrayed him; Hamas caught on, and took
it to civilians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
Everyone went nuts, and the peace process was over; more and more
violence.
In America, Focus on Future Dangers
Pessimism spread; from technocrat world and across the country.
Dark Forboding, spread through violent, horrific disaster movies.
("Dream Baby Dream" sequence)
9/11
Bush and Blair blah-blahing about WMDs that didn't exist; They made
yet another show about Ghadafi
"...and the line between reality and fiction became ever-more
blurred."
Sept 2002: WMDs stolen from the 1996 movie "The Rock"; which, for
technical reasons, no real nerve gas would be packaged like.
IT WAS ALL BULLSHIT.
2000 - Assad Died; Son took over.
He tried to bring back his dad's old tricks; It quickly got out of
his control, of course.
This made Bush and Blair look bad, so they made a show of turning
Ghadafi "turn over a new leaf" and be a good guy.
Engineers of a Fake World; a huge group of people and professions.
In reality, Ghadafi had no WMDs.
MORE! Libya was caused to confess to the Scotland plane bombing.
New lies being constructed on top of old lies.
Ghadafi's son: "It was their (USA) game, not our game."
Reframe the narrative: Ghadafi is now a "modern world figure".
They brought other "modern world figures" and tv people to meet
with Ghadafi (who was still the same buffoon he always had been).
A World Without Power
People began to turn from politics; People felt they'd been lied to
and that whatever they did or said had no effect.
People went into cyberspace.
Bayes Networks; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network
Behavior prediction with incomplete information.
Rational agents; mimiced human behavior; based on economics.
Only a vague representation; "It will never be clear who they are
working for - you or someone else."
The web began to look like the real world, but in fact, no matter
what you're doing, it's just the same thing - it's reflecting you
back at yourself.
"They only heard and saw what they liked, and the newsfeeds
increasingly excluded things that might challenge peoples'
preexisting beliefs."
It's reflecting me back at myself.
Behind the superficial freedoms of the web were a few giant
corporations with opaque systems that controlled what people saw,
and shaped what they thought.
More mysterious is how they made their decisions about what you
should like, and what should be hidden from you.
2008 - Financial Crash
Politicans saved the banks but did nothing about massive corruption.
Public anger burst out; Occupy movement took over Wallstreet, and
the Senate in Washington.
Arab Spring began.
Internet played key organization role.
People everywhere were rising up; When there was an uprising in
Libya, America and Britian proclaimed Ghadafi to be the bad guy
again. Libya soon descended into chaos.
The uprisings (occupy, arab spring) ended unsatisfactorily because
nobody had come up with a way forward.
Muslim Brotherhood took over arab springs; Spring 2013, Military
took over.
Occupiers went home.
2008 - Financial Crash
After the Revolutions (Occupy, Arab Spring, etc...)
Nobody had any idea how to change the world
Politicians had given most of its power away to finance and
managerial bureaucracy, that they'd become managers themselves.
Abroad, all their adventures had failed; their simplistic views
of the world had been exposed as dangerous and destructive.
Political Technologists - Key figures behind Putin
In russia, some had seen how the situation (dark uncertainty about
the future) could work to their advantage
Politics had been turned into a strange theater, where nobody knew
what was true and what was fake;
Some of these Politica Technologists had been fans of the science
fiction (stalkers/roadside picnic); After communism they took
control of the media; used it to manipulate electorate "on a vast
scale". Reality was just something to be manipulated - shaped into
whatever you wanted it to be.
Surkov
Ideas from theater -> heart of politics; Not just manipulation, but
undermining of peoples' perception of the world so that they're
never sure what's really happening.
Directs Kremlin money to a wide range of groups (the full range...
neonazis to liberal human rights groups who then attack government...
even whole political parties that were opposed to Putin... Everyone!)
AND - He let it be known that he was doing this. Nobody could know
what was real in Russia.
"It's a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly
confused; a ceasless shape-shifter that is unstopable because it is
indefinable"
The real power was "hidden behind the stage, excercised without
anyone seeing."
Then the same thing seemed to start happening in the west.
It was evermore clear that the system had deep flaws:
Every month brought new revelations - of banks involvement in
global corruption; of massive tax avoidance by all the major
corporations; of secret surveilance of everyone's emails by
the NSA - yet noone was prosecuted except at the lowest levels;
The massive inequality kept on growing; The structure of power
remained the same.
Then the shape-shifting began.
Trump's shape-shifting; "when they call, I give; when I call them..."
He pushes peoples' fears into the open.
He lied a lot, but his supporters rarely (if ever) cared.
Defeated journalists, who are to expose lies.
"Angry people click more."
Liberals were outraged, but they expressed their anger in cyberspace,
so it had no effect; "the algorithms" made sure they only spoke to
people who already agreed with them.
Their waves of angry messages and tweets benefited the large
corporations who ran the social media platforms.
The fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the
power to change the world; it was becoming a fuel to feed the new
systems of power.
Liberals never believed Trump could win, but...
The version of reality that politics presents is no longer
believable; The stories politicans tell the people about the world
have stopped making sense.
In the face of this, you can "play" with reality; constantly
shifting and changing; further undermine old forms of power.
Syria and Destabilized Perception
Civil war in Syria. Suicide Bombing came back around to bite them;
tearing the arab world apart - the opposite of what Assad wanted.
AmeriBritain bombed Isis to help Assad *eyeroll*
Russians started making freaky unexplainable moves; the idea is
Nonlinear Warfare: Use conflict to create a constant state of
destabilized perception. in order to manage and control.
March 2016, the russians announced they were leaving Syria;
They didn't. They're still there - nobody knows why.
NOTE:
There was some stuff I didn't catch about "Al-Sury". It looked
like they were implying some kind of connection between him
and brexit and i don't know what all. I guess I need some help
with that bit.
This video begins by asserting that, due to lobbying and various other forms of legalized corruptions, most people feel that there's nothing that can be done to change things for the better.
Here are a few of the terms used to describe such "legalized corruption":
Lobbyist Fundraisers
Revolving Door
Bundlers
SuperPacs
Antitransparency
..."literally dozens" of other ways...
The obvious solution is to "make corruption illegal". A proposed "Anti-Corruption Act" has been written and is available at https://anticorruptionact.org/. This site lists three main goals:
Stop political bribery so special interests can't use job offers and donations to influence politicians
End secret money so people know who's buying political power.
Fix our broken elections so the people, not the political establishment, are the ones in control.
To bypass the obvious conflict of interest, such laws might be passed (at state and local levels) by means of Ballot Initiatives, a process by which citizens can force proposed legislation to appear on local and state ballots by gathering enough signatures.
There are more then 22,000 cities in America where we can use the ballot initiative process to pass locally tailored anti-corruption acts.
