6 ms·

When Algorithms Think You Want to Die

102 points by iron0013 8y ago

proxygeek 8y ago
Similarity and suitability are two radically different scores. But for various reasons - including, but not limited to, the ease of calculating a similarity score - we end up conflating the two in a lot of cases. While calculating similarity scores is getting easier by the day across a lot of content formats (think image classifiers, sentiment scores, etc), the same is not true for suitability scores. Technically, I'd think calculating suitability would need more than just matching patterns based on some selected criteria, which is how essentially all recommendation engines work today.
rhodo 8y ago
It's the same exact thing where YouTube is promoting pedophilia. These systems are content agnostic and will give you what it thinks you will click on. If somehow people really really liked videos about the number 27, then if you click on one video it will start showing you more. It seems to me that it's a fundamental part of what these systems are. It's nigh impossible to say "do this but keep the bad stuff out" unless you have human moderation. I'm certainly not saying these companies aren't culpable. It just seems weird to talk about individual cases in abstraction like Instagram is going out of it's way to promote self harm.
- thebooktocome 8y ago
  > These systems are content agnostic That's pretty demonstrably not true.
- sbr464 8y ago
  What’s pretty funny, I always thought, and difficult to openly discuss; click on a somewhat “typical” blonde on LinkedIn, and unlock the rabbit hole of baywatch-esque related/recommendations pour in. Obvious, kind of funny, kind of sad.
- colordrops 8y ago
  > nigh impossible Couldn't these same systems be trained on moderator censorship to learn what to weed out?
minikites 8y ago
Algorithms are brutally efficient and this is what happens when their creators don't have any incentive to think about the end result of their work beyond "user engagement" or "more clicks".
- Operyl 8y ago
  I think time and time again the creators do end up understanding these things, it’s just by the time they do their ultimate owners don’t care.
arpa 8y ago
Oh, this is great! Well Russia has such content moderator - Roskomnadzor. It is a great tool for state censorship. I don't see why UK, for example, should't follow the well trodden path of totalitarian censorship and surveilance. For the sake of teens, you see. They are, after all, mostly children. Please, think about the children.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  > totalitarian censorship and surveilance Trying to discourage self harm or teen suicide is totalitarian censorship? Such ridiculous hyperbole.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - arpa 8y ago
    Hyperbole? Just recent history in Russia.
    - tomhoward 8y ago
      The primary issue here is not censorship, but actively recommending content to a vulnerable person, that may influence their behaviour towards a destructive or terminal outcome. Behaviour influence for commercial purposes (via data-gathering and targeted-advertising) is one of the biggest topics that HN users are generally critical of regarding the big tech companies. Surely we can be just as concerned about these mechanisms when they may lead someone towards serious/terminal harm to themselves or others.
      - arpa 8y ago
        Supplementing such images with suicide hotline numbers is much more effective than filtering them. If anything, censoring suicide-related content even further marginalizes suicidal behaviour and isolates those vulnerable and in need of help.
sigfubar 8y ago
We wanted platforms that connect the world - now we’ve got them. We’ve given everyone a voice: the pedophiles, the self-harm fetishists, the terrorists. Now we’re reaping what we’d sown.
- xg15 8y ago
  I think that misses the step inbeteewn, where the platforms that connect the world started to prioritize "growth hacking" and keeping the user glued to the screen as long as possible above all else. You do not need agressive autoplay, recommendations plastered everywhere and "we miss you" emails every few hours to organise the world's information.
Memosyne 8y ago
This reminds of the Person of Interest episode "Q&A" where a software company was specifically targeting people with mental illnesses and debt to satisfy their advertisers. Some serious effort needs to go into preventing algorithms from suggesting this stuff, lest we risk a few negligent developers threatening the lives of millions. Then again, that course of action could be a slippery slope: what happens if the algorithms start censoring things that could potentially upset us? We could end up in bubbles, completely unprepared and unwilling to face the hardships that life presents. I think the problem with personalized advertising is that it often isn't personal, since the algorithms base their assumptions on data gathered by observing people who haven't lived through the same experiences. I mean, yes, we can average things out and disregard outliers in the hopes of maximizing our finances, but by doing so we'd be neglecting the individual circumstances befallen a person. I suppose this is the million dollar ethical dilemma that advertising companies are struggling with right? Too much moderation makes content stale, but a lack of it makes things dangerous.
- Odenwaelder 8y ago
  I would think that the impact of this content is overrated. You aren't not prepared for the hardships of life just because you are in an algorithmic filter bubble. People don't kill themselves just because they see graphic content. This reminds me of the discussion in the early 2000s about first person shooter games. You don't turn into a school shooter because you played those. There's a life outside the internet.
  - sverhagen 8y ago
    >People don't kill themselves just because they see graphic content This was never the point. The article describes how people who have a predisposition to self-harm get an above-average amount of content related to that, which just compounds the negative feelings they may already have and thus possibly accelerate them actually making the step of harming themselves. Respectfully, but you seem very insensitive to the subject matter.
    - Odenwaelder 8y ago
taneq 8y ago
Information systems are a force multiplier on gaining knowledge. They don't magically stop working if what you're interested in is not what "society" thinks you should think.
- delusional 8y ago
  Maybe they should.
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    - Hey Siri, don't think about a pink elephant. - Okie, I won't be thinking about a pink elephant.
    - taneq 8y ago
      I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't not do that.
the-great-assyr 8y ago
So the problem is the algorithm. This is baloney. It's like when there has been the columbine massacre: everybody pinete pointed the accusing fingers on the music of Marilyn Manson. Yeah. Of course it's cheaper, easier and a good scapegoat. Better than take the responsibility of a totally failed parenthood. Or a totally failed school system. Yeah. The fault is in the social network that "helped that snowflake to commit suicide by flooding her with suicidal contents". You all must be joking, right? That parent is just deluding himself. The fault for the death of his little daughter is his own. Period. Accusing pinterest or instagram is understandable but totally hilarious. Where was that father when she was putting suicidal contents online? How come that he wasn't aware about how messed up her daughter was? And now he screams and cries that the fault is too be find in the WWW and you all agree with that??? You are as messed up as that man. I hope none of you have progeny and will never have. Sick.
- omeid2 8y ago
  I understand your point, parents and society as general are responsible for the people they create, however, please consider that the line between online and offline life is getting ever blurrier, specially for younger generation. When large media outlets* are not mindful of the kind of content they push to younger people, they're failing the society and should be hold responsible for it, this of course, is not mutually exclusive with parents responsibility for monitoring what kind of content their children are consuming. * I am intentionally using the term media-outlet instead of social-media to bring the parallel with television and radio. Consider how you would think if TV or Radio pushed graphic content for audience they did as matter of fact know are kids?
  - the-great-assyr 8y ago
    Again, I have to underline that if the father or the family of that girl was well aware of what was going on in the messed up head of that girl, she would not have committed suicide, no matter Pinterest, no matter Instagram, no matter any goddamn social network. And if it's true that the border of online and IRL is getting more and more blurry, then again the most efficient solution has to be found in the education, scholarization, in the mindful usage of these tools and in taking the responsibilities from the bases. Yes, algorithms should be perfected but accusing them to be the cause of death of a fragile, insecure, mentally unstable adolescent is so utterly ridicule. And it is distracting from the real goddamn problem that is not "the evil algorithm" or "the evil company" but the ignorant, stupid parent that was so absent not to understand how sick he daughter was!! Oh, but my reasoning is harsh because it throws responsibilities in your faces, I know. Better demand. Better delude yourselves. Better think that the fault is "somewhere else" and let someone else take the fault. What pisses me the most is to see all those people agreeing with that bowl of shit that is wired...
xg15 8y ago
Interesting article, though I find some of the reached conclusions somewhat unexpected: > The issue is not just about making graphic content disappear. Platforms need to better recognize when content is right for some and not for others, when finding what you searched for is not the same as being invited to see more, and when what‘s good for the individual may not be good for the public as a whole. > And these algorithms are optimized to serve the individual wants of individual users; it is much more difficult to optimize them for the collective benefit. This seems to suggest that the psychological effects of recommenders and "engagement maximizers" are not problematic per se - but today are simply not used with the right objectives in mind. I find this view problematic, because "what's good for the public" is so vaguely defined, especially if you divorce it from "what's good for the individual". In the most extreme cases, this could even justify actively driving people into depression or self-harm if you determined that they would otherwise channel their pain into political protests. If we're looking for a metric, how about keeping it at an individual level but trying to maximize the long-term wellbeing?
- DanBC 8y ago
  > though I find some of the reached conclusions somewhat unexpected > > The issue is not just about making graphic content disappear. Platforms need to better recognize when content is right for some and not for others, when finding what you searched for is not the same as being invited to see more, and when what‘s good for the individual may not be good for the public as a whole. Isn't this a good thing? It's very easy for politicians and bureaucrats to simply say "ban everything", so it's welcome that they're saying "it's complicated, we don't want to ban everything, we do want to make it harder for some people to access some content". It's a more honest discussion.
  - Mirioron 8y ago
    It sounds only slightly better. In essence it's still about the government telling others that they know better than the person. This kind of thing is bound to get false positives. We also know that the government doesn't care about false positives, because I almost never see a politician address abuse from involuntary commitment.
weddpros 8y ago
Instagram thinks you want to starve yourself to death when you search for #fasting and offers help... but has no problem with #bingeeating or #meth... Maybe it's not only algorithms that have a problem: I think it's our very belief that Instagram should do something to curb certain ideas and push others that's wrong.
- omeid2 8y ago
  I think there is good and important reasons for unfettered social media and internet in general, but no one should knowingly serve graphic content to kids, specially when they're actively targeting them.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
DanBC 8y ago
Here's Matt Hancock's letter to IT companies: https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528 https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528 He's current secratary of state for the department of health and social care. He's by far the most tech-orientated SoS we've had for years, doing a lot of work to push digital in health. He's rampantly pro-IT. Sometimes when politicians make requests like this (make it harder to access images of self harm) people dismiss them as "think of the children". That would be a mistake here. He's not asking for all images to be removed; he is asking for the malgorithmic pushing of self harm content to vulnerable people to be fixed. People sometimes complain about laws that appear out of the blue. His tweet above is the start of a long slow proces of building a law. It's a clear warning: get better at self-regulating, or we'll regulate you. The lead for suicide prevention in the UK (Professor Louis Appleby) has this to say: https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089528954158043136 https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089528954158043136 "Self-harm images on Instagram just part of problem we need to address. In our national study, 1/4 under 20s who died by suicide had relevant internet use & most common was searching for info on methods" and this: https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089525522084884480 https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089525522084884480 "Important change in political/social attititude. Just a few years ago, internet seen as free space, no restrictions, complete lack of interest in #suicideprevention from big companies. Now mood is for regulation, social responsibility, safety." Finally, here's my example of malogrithm ad placement. I've mentioned this example before, and I think it got fixed (so thank you if you fixed it!) but I search for suicide related terms for my work, and sometimes the ads are terrible. https://imgur.com/hhOYUJb https://imgur.com/hhOYUJb
- Kalium 8y ago
  > People sometimes complain about laws that appear out of the blue. His tweet above is the start of a long slow proces of building a law. It's a clear warning: get better at self-regulating, or we'll regulate you. You're absolutely right! One reading is that it's a request. Please fix this problem, before we have to regulate you into fixing it. Is it possible that there may be an alternative reading? A cynic might suggest that humoring such a plea is a great way to demonstrate that content problems like this can be solved! Then regulators can require those very useful tools be applied to whatever they please in a much more general way. The odds of whatever Secretary Hancock gets to solve the very real, pressing problem he has so wisely pointed to being completely inapplicable to literally anything else are virtually zero. I can think of a few places where safety and social responsibility means things like never disagreeing with The Party. As technologists, it's on us to think through the consequences of our choices where we can. It's often not plausible - nobody thought TCP/IP would lead to malgorithmic ads! But tools designed to enforce arbitrarily defined social mores?
hamilyon2 8y ago
Ethical AI is a serious business opportunity. Machines are getting more and more intelligent. They find content for us, summarize things, generate speech and text. Look at how complicated human sosiety is. Trying to directly program questionable and socially unacceptable behavior is next to impossible since border is way too thin. There are loads of unwritten rules about minors, for example, that vary from culture to culture. About what is ok for what age. So anyone who uses machine intelligence opens himself to liability. Filters are needed, and everyone needs same set of filters
nullandvoid 8y ago
As much as I don't like the whole 'blame the algorithm' movement that's been going on I think it's pretty clear this is a large part of the issue for me. I know that I've been trapped into YouTube's reccomendation trap before - good luck getting out without deleting all previous history etc. whilst I'm 'wise' enough to notice this fact and clear all YouTube history etc does this option even exist for Instagram and would kids/ those vulnerable think to do this?
esotericn 8y ago
Social media seems to blur the lines between fantasy and reality for many individuals in a way that they don't seem able to deal with. In times gone by we'd generally expect that children realise what happens in a movie or a videogame is fantastical. By contrast, social media is treated as a set of interactions with real people, whether those be your friends or whoever else. Even posting here on HN is an example. The platform guides me; my (and I assume your) viewpoint of what the development community thinks about things is swayed. I don't think the platform creators are to blame as much as, well, the entire society we're in. We really need to push organic interactions with the communities we're in, the people around us, not online bubbles with incredible bias that aren't even necessarily made of real humans.

102 points by iron0013 8y ago

Similarity and suitability are two radically different scores. But for various reasons - including, but not limited to, the ease of calculating a similarity score - we end up conflating the two in a lot of cases. While calculating similarity scores is getting easier by the day across a lot of content formats (think image classifiers, sentiment scores, etc), the same is not true for suitability scores. Technically, I'd think calculating suitability would need more than just matching patterns based on some selected criteria, which is how essentially all recommendation engines work today.

rhodo 8y ago

It's the same exact thing where YouTube is promoting pedophilia. These systems are content agnostic and will give you what it thinks you will click on. If somehow people really really liked videos about the number 27, then if you click on one video it will start showing you more. It seems to me that it's a fundamental part of what these systems are. It's nigh impossible to say "do this but keep the bad stuff out" unless you have human moderation. I'm certainly not saying these companies aren't culpable. It just seems weird to talk about individual cases in abstraction like Instagram is going out of it's way to promote self harm.

thebooktocome 8y ago
> These systems are content agnostic That's pretty demonstrably not true.
sbr464 8y ago
What’s pretty funny, I always thought, and difficult to openly discuss; click on a somewhat “typical” blonde on LinkedIn, and unlock the rabbit hole of baywatch-esque related/recommendations pour in. Obvious, kind of funny, kind of sad.
colordrops 8y ago
> nigh impossible Couldn't these same systems be trained on moderator censorship to learn what to weed out?

minikites 8y ago

Algorithms are brutally efficient and this is what happens when their creators don't have any incentive to think about the end result of their work beyond "user engagement" or "more clicks".

Operyl 8y ago
I think time and time again the creators do end up understanding these things, it’s just by the time they do their ultimate owners don’t care.

arpa 8y ago

Oh, this is great! Well Russia has such content moderator - Roskomnadzor. It is a great tool for state censorship. I don't see why UK, for example, should't follow the well trodden path of totalitarian censorship and surveilance. For the sake of teens, you see. They are, after all, mostly children. Please, think about the children.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
> totalitarian censorship and surveilance Trying to discourage self harm or teen suicide is totalitarian censorship? Such ridiculous hyperbole.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- arpa 8y ago
  Hyperbole? Just recent history in Russia.
  - tomhoward 8y ago
    The primary issue here is not censorship, but actively recommending content to a vulnerable person, that may influence their behaviour towards a destructive or terminal outcome. Behaviour influence for commercial purposes (via data-gathering and targeted-advertising) is one of the biggest topics that HN users are generally critical of regarding the big tech companies. Surely we can be just as concerned about these mechanisms when they may lead someone towards serious/terminal harm to themselves or others.
    - arpa 8y ago
      Supplementing such images with suicide hotline numbers is much more effective than filtering them. If anything, censoring suicide-related content even further marginalizes suicidal behaviour and isolates those vulnerable and in need of help.

sigfubar 8y ago

We wanted platforms that connect the world - now we’ve got them. We’ve given everyone a voice: the pedophiles, the self-harm fetishists, the terrorists. Now we’re reaping what we’d sown.

xg15 8y ago
I think that misses the step inbeteewn, where the platforms that connect the world started to prioritize "growth hacking" and keeping the user glued to the screen as long as possible above all else. You do not need agressive autoplay, recommendations plastered everywhere and "we miss you" emails every few hours to organise the world's information.

Memosyne 8y ago

This reminds of the Person of Interest episode "Q&A" where a software company was specifically targeting people with mental illnesses and debt to satisfy their advertisers. Some serious effort needs to go into preventing algorithms from suggesting this stuff, lest we risk a few negligent developers threatening the lives of millions. Then again, that course of action could be a slippery slope: what happens if the algorithms start censoring things that could potentially upset us? We could end up in bubbles, completely unprepared and unwilling to face the hardships that life presents. I think the problem with personalized advertising is that it often isn't personal, since the algorithms base their assumptions on data gathered by observing people who haven't lived through the same experiences. I mean, yes, we can average things out and disregard outliers in the hopes of maximizing our finances, but by doing so we'd be neglecting the individual circumstances befallen a person. I suppose this is the million dollar ethical dilemma that advertising companies are struggling with right? Too much moderation makes content stale, but a lack of it makes things dangerous.

Odenwaelder 8y ago
I would think that the impact of this content is overrated. You aren't not prepared for the hardships of life just because you are in an algorithmic filter bubble. People don't kill themselves just because they see graphic content. This reminds me of the discussion in the early 2000s about first person shooter games. You don't turn into a school shooter because you played those. There's a life outside the internet.
- sverhagen 8y ago
  >People don't kill themselves just because they see graphic content This was never the point. The article describes how people who have a predisposition to self-harm get an above-average amount of content related to that, which just compounds the negative feelings they may already have and thus possibly accelerate them actually making the step of harming themselves. Respectfully, but you seem very insensitive to the subject matter.
  - Odenwaelder 8y ago

taneq 8y ago

Information systems are a force multiplier on gaining knowledge. They don't magically stop working if what you're interested in is not what "society" thinks you should think.

delusional 8y ago
Maybe they should.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  - Hey Siri, don't think about a pink elephant. - Okie, I won't be thinking about a pink elephant.
  - taneq 8y ago
    I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't not do that.

the-great-assyr 8y ago

So the problem is the algorithm. This is baloney. It's like when there has been the columbine massacre: everybody pinete pointed the accusing fingers on the music of Marilyn Manson. Yeah. Of course it's cheaper, easier and a good scapegoat. Better than take the responsibility of a totally failed parenthood. Or a totally failed school system. Yeah. The fault is in the social network that "helped that snowflake to commit suicide by flooding her with suicidal contents". You all must be joking, right? That parent is just deluding himself. The fault for the death of his little daughter is his own. Period. Accusing pinterest or instagram is understandable but totally hilarious. Where was that father when she was putting suicidal contents online? How come that he wasn't aware about how messed up her daughter was? And now he screams and cries that the fault is too be find in the WWW and you all agree with that??? You are as messed up as that man. I hope none of you have progeny and will never have. Sick.

omeid2 8y ago
I understand your point, parents and society as general are responsible for the people they create, however, please consider that the line between online and offline life is getting ever blurrier, specially for younger generation. When large media outlets* are not mindful of the kind of content they push to younger people, they're failing the society and should be hold responsible for it, this of course, is not mutually exclusive with parents responsibility for monitoring what kind of content their children are consuming. * I am intentionally using the term media-outlet instead of social-media to bring the parallel with television and radio. Consider how you would think if TV or Radio pushed graphic content for audience they did as matter of fact know are kids?
- the-great-assyr 8y ago
  Again, I have to underline that if the father or the family of that girl was well aware of what was going on in the messed up head of that girl, she would not have committed suicide, no matter Pinterest, no matter Instagram, no matter any goddamn social network. And if it's true that the border of online and IRL is getting more and more blurry, then again the most efficient solution has to be found in the education, scholarization, in the mindful usage of these tools and in taking the responsibilities from the bases. Yes, algorithms should be perfected but accusing them to be the cause of death of a fragile, insecure, mentally unstable adolescent is so utterly ridicule. And it is distracting from the real goddamn problem that is not "the evil algorithm" or "the evil company" but the ignorant, stupid parent that was so absent not to understand how sick he daughter was!! Oh, but my reasoning is harsh because it throws responsibilities in your faces, I know. Better demand. Better delude yourselves. Better think that the fault is "somewhere else" and let someone else take the fault. What pisses me the most is to see all those people agreeing with that bowl of shit that is wired...

xg15 8y ago

Interesting article, though I find some of the reached conclusions somewhat unexpected: > The issue is not just about making graphic content disappear. Platforms need to better recognize when content is right for some and not for others, when finding what you searched for is not the same as being invited to see more, and when what‘s good for the individual may not be good for the public as a whole. > And these algorithms are optimized to serve the individual wants of individual users; it is much more difficult to optimize them for the collective benefit. This seems to suggest that the psychological effects of recommenders and "engagement maximizers" are not problematic per se - but today are simply not used with the right objectives in mind. I find this view problematic, because "what's good for the public" is so vaguely defined, especially if you divorce it from "what's good for the individual". In the most extreme cases, this could even justify actively driving people into depression or self-harm if you determined that they would otherwise channel their pain into political protests. If we're looking for a metric, how about keeping it at an individual level but trying to maximize the long-term wellbeing?

DanBC 8y ago
> though I find some of the reached conclusions somewhat unexpected > > The issue is not just about making graphic content disappear. Platforms need to better recognize when content is right for some and not for others, when finding what you searched for is not the same as being invited to see more, and when what‘s good for the individual may not be good for the public as a whole. Isn't this a good thing? It's very easy for politicians and bureaucrats to simply say "ban everything", so it's welcome that they're saying "it's complicated, we don't want to ban everything, we do want to make it harder for some people to access some content". It's a more honest discussion.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  It sounds only slightly better. In essence it's still about the government telling others that they know better than the person. This kind of thing is bound to get false positives. We also know that the government doesn't care about false positives, because I almost never see a politician address abuse from involuntary commitment.

weddpros 8y ago

Instagram thinks you want to starve yourself to death when you search for #fasting and offers help... but has no problem with #bingeeating or #meth... Maybe it's not only algorithms that have a problem: I think it's our very belief that Instagram should do something to curb certain ideas and push others that's wrong.

omeid2 8y ago
I think there is good and important reasons for unfettered social media and internet in general, but no one should knowingly serve graphic content to kids, specially when they're actively targeting them.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

DanBC 8y ago

Here's Matt Hancock's letter to IT companies: https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528 https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528 He's current secratary of state for the department of health and social care. He's by far the most tech-orientated SoS we've had for years, doing a lot of work to push digital in health. He's rampantly pro-IT. Sometimes when politicians make requests like this (make it harder to access images of self harm) people dismiss them as "think of the children". That would be a mistake here. He's not asking for all images to be removed; he is asking for the malgorithmic pushing of self harm content to vulnerable people to be fixed. People sometimes complain about laws that appear out of the blue. His tweet above is the start of a long slow proces of building a law. It's a clear warning: get better at self-regulating, or we'll regulate you. The lead for suicide prevention in the UK (Professor Louis Appleby) has this to say: https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089528954158043136 https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089528954158043136 "Self-harm images on Instagram just part of problem we need to address. In our national study, 1/4 under 20s who died by suicide had relevant internet use & most common was searching for info on methods" and this: https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089525522084884480 https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089525522084884480 "Important change in political/social attititude. Just a few years ago, internet seen as free space, no restrictions, complete lack of interest in #suicideprevention from big companies. Now mood is for regulation, social responsibility, safety." Finally, here's my example of malogrithm ad placement. I've mentioned this example before, and I think it got fixed (so thank you if you fixed it!) but I search for suicide related terms for my work, and sometimes the ads are terrible. https://imgur.com/hhOYUJb https://imgur.com/hhOYUJb

Kalium 8y ago
> People sometimes complain about laws that appear out of the blue. His tweet above is the start of a long slow proces of building a law. It's a clear warning: get better at self-regulating, or we'll regulate you. You're absolutely right! One reading is that it's a request. Please fix this problem, before we have to regulate you into fixing it. Is it possible that there may be an alternative reading? A cynic might suggest that humoring such a plea is a great way to demonstrate that content problems like this can be solved! Then regulators can require those very useful tools be applied to whatever they please in a much more general way. The odds of whatever Secretary Hancock gets to solve the very real, pressing problem he has so wisely pointed to being completely inapplicable to literally anything else are virtually zero. I can think of a few places where safety and social responsibility means things like never disagreeing with The Party. As technologists, it's on us to think through the consequences of our choices where we can. It's often not plausible - nobody thought TCP/IP would lead to malgorithmic ads! But tools designed to enforce arbitrarily defined social mores?

hamilyon2 8y ago

Ethical AI is a serious business opportunity. Machines are getting more and more intelligent. They find content for us, summarize things, generate speech and text. Look at how complicated human sosiety is. Trying to directly program questionable and socially unacceptable behavior is next to impossible since border is way too thin. There are loads of unwritten rules about minors, for example, that vary from culture to culture. About what is ok for what age. So anyone who uses machine intelligence opens himself to liability. Filters are needed, and everyone needs same set of filters

nullandvoid 8y ago

As much as I don't like the whole 'blame the algorithm' movement that's been going on I think it's pretty clear this is a large part of the issue for me. I know that I've been trapped into YouTube's reccomendation trap before - good luck getting out without deleting all previous history etc. whilst I'm 'wise' enough to notice this fact and clear all YouTube history etc does this option even exist for Instagram and would kids/ those vulnerable think to do this?

esotericn 8y ago

Social media seems to blur the lines between fantasy and reality for many individuals in a way that they don't seem able to deal with. In times gone by we'd generally expect that children realise what happens in a movie or a videogame is fantastical. By contrast, social media is treated as a set of interactions with real people, whether those be your friends or whoever else. Even posting here on HN is an example. The platform guides me; my (and I assume your) viewpoint of what the development community thinks about things is swayed. I don't think the platform creators are to blame as much as, well, the entire society we're in. We really need to push organic interactions with the communities we're in, the people around us, not online bubbles with incredible bias that aren't even necessarily made of real humans.