Cognitive Enterprise – Page 11 – IS Survivor Publishing

Who needs Skynet?

We humans are giving up control over our lives to non-human entities that don’t have our best interests at heart. No, that isn’t strong enough. We’re inviting it.

This isn’t some bizarre conspiracy theory. It isn’t some sensational but unlikely rise-of-the-machines here-comes-Skynet fear mongering.

It’s a conclusion that’s inescapable if you’re even minimally aware of current events. Consider:

Factoid #1: Not only humans are persons

Starting with Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad and continuing recently with Citizens United v FEC, corporations now have the legal right to influence our elections, on the theory that corporations are persons too, or, if not persons entirely, than imbued with significant levels of personhood.

I’m not going to argue with SCOTUS. But I do have a question: Shouldn’t reciprocity reign? If corporations are people, why can’t all people be corporations? In addition to a lower tax rate, we’d get more deductions, too. After all, when a corporation buys a car it can depreciate it on its tax returns. Human persons can’t. Why not? Because we aren’t allowed to be corporations.

Factoid #2: Algorithms

In case it’s escaped your notice, the stock market has been what’s euphemistically described as “volatile” recently. Those who write about such things are calling it a correction, as they think the market was overvalued, not that many of them said so before the volatility began. But some are also suggesting that algorithmic trading has had a lot to do with, if not the market’s decline in value, then very likely the wild swings we’ve seen during the decline.

Algorithmic trading is something done by non-human entities. Automata. And the decisions made by these automata have a significant influence on our economy and financial wellbeing.

Factoid #3: The rise of the ‘bots

Recent research reveals that more than 25 million Tweeters are actually ‘bots — 9 % or more, which in the last election accounted for an estimated one out of every five political tweets or more.

Are these automata influencing things? After all, just retweeting something … or Liking it if we’re talking about Facebook … isn’t an act of persuasion, merely an act of repetition. It makes someone’s voice louder, not more convincing. Except that it does, in two respects.

First, ‘bots don’t announce “Hey, this is just one ‘bots’ opinion!” in their retweets. They pose as humans, and they adopt a demeanor that says they’re the same sort of people as their intended audience. That people like themselves think in a certain way is, to many people, quite a strong influencer. ‘Bots might not broadcast debate-team-worthy rhetoric, but they do broadcast the message “Here’s what members-in-good-standing of our tribe believe.”

When 25 million of them broadcast that message, many of those who want to be Members of Tribe in good standing will find themselves thinking the same way without spending much time to ponder, let alone to independently research the topic, whatever it is.

Worse, they’re likely to become even more tribal through the same dynamic.

Even those who aren’t tribalists are likely to be influenced by Twitter ‘bots, too, because when to all appearances 25 million people appear to have adopted an opinion … more when you add tweets by actual humans to the numbers … it legitimizes a view that reasonable human beings might otherwise consider utterly preposterous.

So here’s what I’m thinking: If everyone who lives in a democracy is concerned about covert Russian influence over our elections … and that certainly isn’t an unreasonable concern to have … then shouldn’t we be even more concerned that increasingly, non-humans are taking control of our economy, politics, and lives?

I suggest some civic-minded lawyer bring a fundamental question to SCOTUS, namely, what are the boundaries of the rights of non-human persons? Start with the First Amendment and whether it applies only to human persons, or whether all entities, human and non-human alike, should enjoy its protections.

The existing carve-out for the press should certainly be maintained, although what constitutes “the press” might need a bit of clarification.

Beyond that, though, it should be neither difficult nor controversial to insist that only we human-being-style persons have the unrestricted right to express ourselves.

Sure, if aliens from another planet or human-like androids become our friends and neighbors we might need to revisit all this, just as the United Federation of Planets did when Commander Data’s humanity was called into legal question.

But we aren’t at that crossroads just yet. Right now we find ourselves faced with just one last question: Is this supposed to be satire, or should you take it seriously?

I only wish I knew.

How I came to not write “The Feminist Lie”

In the early days of business computing, stupid computer tricks appeared frequently in the popular press … stories like the company that sent out dunning notices for customers who owed $0 on their accounts. (Resolution: customers mailed them checks for $0 to cover what they owed.)

Somewhere in most of these stories was an obligatory explanation, that computers weren’t really the culprits. Behind any mistake a computer made was a programmer who did something wrong to make the computer do it.

Years of bug fixes, better testing regimes, and cultural acclimatization pretty much dried up the supply of stories like these. But we’re about to experience a resurgence, the result of the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence.

This week’s missive covers two artificial-intelligence-themed tales of woe.

The first happened as I was driving to a regular destination from an unfamiliar direction. My GPS brought me close. Then it announced, “Your destination is on your right.”

Which it was, only to take advantage of that intelligence I’d have had to make a 90 degree turn that would have had me driving off the shoulder of the highway and up a steep grassy slope, at which point I could hope I’d have enough momentum to knock down the chain-link fence at the top.

Dumb GPS. Uh … oops. Dumb user, as it turned out, because I’d been too lazy to look up my client’s street address. Instead I’d entered a nearby intersection and forgotten that’s what I’d done. So AI lesson #1 is that even the smartest AI will have a hard time overcoming dumb human beings.

The more infuriating tale of AI woe leads to my making an exception to a long-standing KJR practice. Usually, I avoid naming companies guilty of whatever business infraction I’m critiquing, on the grounds that naming the perpetrator lets lots of other just-as-guilty perpetrators off the hook.

But I’m making an exception because really, how many global on-line booksellers that have authors pages as part of their web presence are there?

I was about to point a new client to my Amazon author’s page, as he’d expressed interest, when I noticed an unfamiliar title on my list of books published: The Feminist Lie by Bob Lewis.

If you’ve read much of anything I’ve written over the past 21 years you’d know, this isn’t a book I would have written. Among the many reasons, I figure men shouldn’t write books criticizing feminism, any more than feminists should write books that explain male motivations, Jews should write books critiquing Catholicism and vice versa, or Latvians should publish patronizing nastiness about Albanians.

Minnesotans about Iowans? Maybe.

But I distrust pretty much any critique of any tribe that’s written by someone who isn’t a member of that tribe and who feels aggrieved by that tribe.

But some other Bob Lewis proudly wrote a book with this title, and somehow I was being given credit for it. Well, “credit” isn’t the right word, but saying I was being given debit for it might be puzzling.

In any event, I don’t think all of us named “Bob Lewis” constitute a tribe, and I want no responsibility for the actions of all the other Bob Lewises who are making their way through the world.

And yet, somehow I was listed as the author of this little screed.

Oh, well. No problem. Amazon’s Author Central lets me add books I’ve written to my author page. Surely there’s a button to delete any I don’t want on the list.

Nope. Authors can add and they can edit, but they can’t delete.

Turns out, an author’s only recourse is to send a form-based email to the folks who run Author Central to request a deletion. A couple of tries and a week-and-a-half later, the offending title was finally removed from my list.

And, I got an answer to the question of how this happened in the first place. To quote Amazon’s explanation: “Books are added by the Artificial Intelligence system Amazon has in our catalog when the system determines it matches with the author name for the first time.”

Artificial what? Oh, right.

Which leads to one more prediction. Whereas as of this writing “artificial intelligence” has some actual, useful definitions, within two years the phrase will be about as meaningful as “cloud,” because any and all business applications will be described as AI, no matter how limited the logic.

And, as in this case, no matter how lacking in intelligence.