Mega corporations greatly influence the world. The advent of social media monopolies brings even greater influence to those seats of power. Facebook has already shaped much of our modern interactions. And the future they are setting out towards looks bleak and dark.
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Facebook has filed two patents of concern this year. One is for emotion recognition technology. It's supposed to recognize a human emotional state from facial expressions, determining if a person if happy or anxious at a given time. All it takes is a webcam or phone camera. Artificial intelligence drives the analyses through complex algorithms which then decipher facial expressions. The duration and intensity of an expression corresponds to an emotion.
For example, contempt can be measured from a range of 0 to 100. An expression of contempt can be discerned through a smirking smile, frowned brow and wrinkled nose. The facial data leads to an emotional conclusion and can be linked to certain dominant personality types, like the Big 5 of extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
AI Advancement
Matching a facial expression to an emotion may not be perfect. But as AI get better and self-learning improves, the gap to match human intelligence is being shortened. AI can already calculate quicker than humans.
A competition from Columbia University shows how could they are getting at competing with human thinking. Lawyers and AI opponents has to read non-disclosure agreements with loopholes in them. Humans found 88% of the loopholes, but the AI found 95%. Also, human lawyers took 90 minutes to find those 88%, yet AI only took 22 seconds to find the 95%.
Just last year Google’s self-learning AlphaZero beat the open-sourced chess engine Stockfish 8 which had centuries of human chess experience programmed into it. AphaZero taught itself through machine learning principles, without any human instruction. It only took 4 hours for it to teach itself how to play chess, and won 28 games and drawing the other 72 of 100 games.
Dark Results
AI deep "neural" learning is being developed mostly for benign or positive application, but what of dark purposes for it's use? AI could become another tool in the arsenal of the elite to consolidate their power and control in society. Advances in technology, in the hands of a few mega corporations or governments, is a serious concern.
Algorithms can learn and pattern human psychology. They can filter data, predict what will come based on a pattern, and learn through feedback loops. They can also manipulate a target. We're already manipulated into accepting or rejecting certain information by managing perception and manufacturing consent through the media and governments. Companies are also doing it to get our money, and AI will play an even greater role as the years go by.
The Guardian has written about an internal report Facebook had done for deteting teenagers' moods. Apparently, "the company has a database of its young users – 1.9 million high schoolers, 1.5 million tertiary students and 3 million young workers".
A Boston company called Affectiva also claims to be able to use emotion recognition technology (ECT) to detect "complex emotional and cognitive data from your face, voice and physiological state" from 12 billion "emotion data points". They claim to even be able to detect your heart rate from a camera alone. Their goals are ultimately to "enable media creators to optimize their content". That is to say, to make money by decoding our emotional states.
Ads could be targeted to us based on our current state of mind. With all the data Facebook collects, a new era of psychological targeting for commercial gain can be brought forth.
Dystopian Attention-Seeking Wormhole
The second patent from Facebook, US20180167677, is pretty dystopian, called Broadcast Content View Analysis Based on Ambient Audio Recording. Secret messaged called "ambient audio fingerprints" are added to TV ads and trigger smart technology to record you while the add plays in an effort to gauge your reaction. The recording would then be sent "to an online system for determining whether there was an impression of the content by the individual." This "impression" of the content is then stored online.
Content providers would like to know who has viewed their content and how it's affected them. Emotional states would be monitored to make money, tracking our moods like digital lab rats. This would amplify the already huge economic and cultural power that mega corps have with their "manipulation engines", "emotional engineers", "choice architects" and "product philosophers".
Not only ads for goods or services, but whole ideas and beliefs could be targeted and sold to people, further eroding our individual freedom of agency based on our own thoughts. We would more easily buy into the ideas being sold to channel us into predetermined avenues and conditioned ways of thinking and behaving. Attention equals profit in the attention economy. Energy and actions flows where attention goes.
Companies like Verint already sell "intrusive mass surveillance systems worldwide including to authoritarian governments". China loves it mass surveillance of society to exert greater control. They are already developing a surveillance network to roll out by 2020 called Xueliang or Sharp Eyes. Instead of neighbors watching each other to report to the government, technology will be able to do it all, and much better as we've seen with AI development. Socially approved validation is growing across the planet, not just in China with their social credit system.
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We are headed towards "an attention seeking gravitational wormhole" to suck us into a profit-seeking universe. How many times are you summoned to pay attention to your phone each day? Most people average at 150, and most of it is social media based. The future is an attention arms race, and the big tech giants are trying to capitalize on it. The information war is getting harder to combat.
References:
- With New Patents Facebook Brings Us One Step Close to a Dystopian Future
- Broadcast content view analysis based on ambient audio recording
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