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Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom were mocked for warning about the dangers of powerful future AI. I've said this here before, the primary use cases of machine learnin
by AJ007 8y ago
Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom were mocked for warning about the dangers of powerful future AI. I've said this here before, the primary use cases of machine learning right now, today, are hostile. That does not bode well for our future. We have very manipulative advertising, mass surveillance used to put ethnic and religious minorities in concentration camps in China, and in YouTube's case, recommending a lot of totally junk science to people who just want to learn new things. I'm afraid these four things probably impact way more people than translation systems and self driving vehicles right now.
I am completely in favor of the internet as an uncensored communications platform. However, in a war of ideas, there is a giant chasm between making a propaganda video of any sort available to watch in an archive and showing the stickiest propaganda video to those who are most likely to be retained watching it.
When I was at NIPS last year, the only person I heard get really angry about something, from an ethical standpoint, was relating to deep fakes. If you are a researcher or a project developer, you need to think really hard about what you are building, because soon you won't be the one building it.
edit: I don't think YouTube should solely be singled out for bad recommendations. Netflix has a lot of junk science on their platform and my assumption is their algorithms are bumping it to the top. In their case they have to proactively go out and pay for licensing for those videos, which is really inexcusable.
- b0rsuk 8y agoIf you watch the 20ish minute talk, she really doesn't limit it to youtube, but also talks about Facebook, Twitter etc.
- beefield 8y ago> I've said this here before, the primary use cases of machine learning right now, today, are hostile Yes. As I think that it is quite obvious the majority of current AI is only superficially designed to help me, while fundamentally they are designed quite successfully to f#ck me and get my money, I have occasionally tried to figure out ways to somehow level the playing field against the current crop of AI, but it is difficult. One of the only tools actually having any effect is adblocking. And if I engage in that, I am blamed that I strip content creators of their income. I guess the fundamental problem is that nobody has any economic incentive to fight against the current AI army, while a large bunch of people seem to actually enjoy getting manipulated (to buy unnecessary stuff or get radicalized to some fringe ideology) by our machine overlords.
- darepublic 8y agoThere has always been junk info floating around. What truly scares me are people lIke the new York times who want to censor anyone they disagree with: to the point of wanting youtube to only show political and scientific videos that they personally agree with. Sometimes on YouTube I watch junk science because I'm bored. I know it's bullshit. What I like about he platform is it represents a diverse range of ideas and I can watch anything I choose to.
- calt 8y agoYou're misrepresenting the article. It's not so much about taking the videos down, as the recommendation algorithms pushing people in the extremist direction.
- retox 8y agoOver unity or other 'zero point' energy videos are fun to watch even if you think they are bullshit, same for a lot of the UFO videos. I thought the flat earth videos might be similarly entertaining but they I have found one that is. I used to read Rense.com for a giggle. If someone doesn't have the cognitive abilities to consider the veracity of a video that's on them. Let me watch what I want.