Artificial
Intelligence is a frighteningly powerful new tool — and weapon. Who
and what will it serve? In the U.S., tech giants Facebook, Google,
and Amazon and their corporate agendas; in China, the needs of the
public and the economy. These two models should be thought through
now.
by
Jim Carey
Part
2 - Silicon Valley: A hotspot of AI development and unethical
business
Elon
Musk may worry about the future of AI but this is not a feeling
shared by many of his colleagues in Silicon Valley. When it comes to
discussing the AI research sector in the U.S., it is useful to focus
on the most well-known of Musk’s fellow tech behemoths who are
leading the way. There are three companies that deserve the most
scrutiny: Facebook, Google, and Amazon — which, working with
agencies like the CIA and NSA as well as in partnership with other
private companies, now dominate the AI game.
Although
these giant companies score very low in public trust, they’ve
nonetheless been placed in charge of the nation’s AI, essentially
by default. When it comes to trusting names like Facebook, Google,
and Amazon with this kind of technology, if their current business
models are any indicator, we should all be wary.
Let’s
start with the example of Facebook; a company run by Mark Zuckerberg,
a man who is so lacking in empathy that he has no problem doing
things like running psychiatric tests on unaware customers or
attempting to steal land from indigenous people.
Facebook
has already launched several projects to develop AI, led by their
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) program. Included in this group’s
research are projects such as the collection and analysis of Facebook
users’ personal photos to better understand “the popular
visual concepts illustrating various cultural lifestyles.”
While
FAIR’s smaller projects don’t always make the news, they do on
those occasions when they begin producing results that show the
research has surpassed programmers’ expectations. Such was the case
in July of last year when Facebook’s AI began speaking a language
the humans couldn’t understand, causing that particular program to
be shuttered.
Facebook
also applies AI to its user data in other ways, such as the system
revealed late last year that will track users’ online activity and
behavior to evaluate their mental health. While that may sound
altruistic to some, having Facebook leading the charge should cause
some concern.
After
all, Facebook is the company that admittedly ran a (borderline
illegal) experiment to manipulate the mood of its users by filtering
the content they saw. This gross breach of trust with its users was
later justified by Facebook, whose lawyers said the experiment was
all within the guidelines of the user agreement, which comes in at
over 15,000 words and readers may remember as that book-length
document (with links to several more specific agreements) that tech
companies are fully aware nobody possibly has the time to read.
It is
also important to remember that Facebook serves as a giant marketing
platform that derives its value from its ability to provide
advertisers with users’ personal information. While it’s known
that the platform is filled with easily-purchased and highly-targeted
advertisements, there is also suspicion on behalf of users that
Facebook could use phone and computer microphones to listen in on
conversations for further ad-targeting.
While
Facebook denies these claims, the other two companies on our list are
a lot more open about their spying, while also engaging in business
practices similar to those of Facebook.
Facebook’s
AI competitor, Google, is also advancing its programs, including one
that perfectly mimics human speech. Innovations like these are the
reason many experts think that Google is at the head of the pack on
developing its AI.
Much
like Facebook, however, Google also is guilty of collecting massive
amounts of data on its users. Also, like Facebook, some of the means
Google uses in this data collection rely on AI — such as the Google
‘voice search’ feature, which has been shown to record
conversations even when not in use.
Google
also recently launched its photography software, which they claimed
would “instantly recognize faces of special interest to its
owner and, when it spots those faces, takes candid pictures of them.”
Many people were uncomfortable when Google first unveiled this new
technology — including Elon Musk, who criticized the software on
Twitter, saying it “doesn’t even *seem* innocent.”
If all
of this isn’t bad enough, now Google is also creating devices that
utilize AI to do even more blatant and comprehensive data-gathering.
In this new arsenal is the popular Google Home, an AI assistant that
responds to voice commands, which has been shown to listen in on
users even when not in use.
This
unwanted feature of Google Home is also built into products from the
last company on our list of AI giants: Amazon. Much like Google Home,
Amazon Echo and it’s AI program ‘Alexa’ also listen in on
users.
Also
following Google’s strategy, this data is then combined with data
taken from other methods, such as monitoring search histories or
product purchases, and added to massive databases kept by these
private tech firms. This stored data is later fed back into Amazon’s
AI, which then uses the data to drive Amazon’s “algorithms for
demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals
recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection,
translations, and much more,” according to CEO Jeff Bezos in a
letter to shareholders.
If the
massive storage of data and unwitting exposure to things like
experiments “educating” these advanced computer learning systems
for private companies isn’t enough, things get even murkier when
you examine the relation between these three tech giants and the U.S.
government.
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