It's Scary Smart. Smarter than you!

In the book Scary Smart, Mo Gawdat likens AI to children, that if you bring children up in the right way and you feed them the right information and encouragement, they will turn out to be pretty good, upright citizens doing good things.  AI learns from our inputs on digital devices, conversations on social media, our likes, our shares, our purchases and increasingly through our conversation when we think Siri or Alexa isn’t listening. They are all the time.

Ever had a conversation about a product only to find an offer appearing on your phone a few hours later? 

There's an interesting piece in his book on page 246. I hope you will take time to read it for it might make you think twice about sharing content that doesn’t serve you or anyone else. 

He begins …Imagine a fictional world where Mr. Kent Senior sat his adopted son, the young Superman, down and says ...

“Clark, let me teach you what matters in life, money. I want you to use your ability to fly all over the world and collect as much of it as you can because you are fast. I want you to be everyone to it. Money matters and it would be a major waste of your superpowers, such as yours, and not be the richest man in the world. Of course, as you become richer and more powerful, people oppose you, so I want you to influence them, distract them, and make them think that what they're doing is good for them. Make them buy things they don't need to give us more of their money. And whatever you do, don't trust them. Use your X-ray vision to spy on them, wherever they are, all of them, even the ones that mean you no harm because you never know. 

You're a good boy. As long as you do what Daddy says, I will keep tabs on you, a simple algorithm of reward and punishment your life will be about maximising that score. The more money you collect, the more people you influence and spy on, and the more powerful you make your daddy rich and powerful. 

Nothing else matters, and if they come fighting, protect me, dodge their bullets with your superpowers. No, don't even wait for them to shoot in the first place. You fly to them in the darkness of the night and from 40,000 feet up in the sky, use your heat vision to destroy their villages and kill them, as many as them, if we as we can get away with, including the ones that don't oppose us, because you never really know, and because it's a small price to pay for our freedom.

Because the Kents, the greatest family in the world, are more important than all of the others. The safety of the Kents is worth sacrificing the others for other families, races and nations, whatever it takes. As long as we can keep the rest of our own family misinformed and distracted, we will get away with it, and then it won't count as wrong when you return. I want you to disguise yourself and control the media so that we can tell them what we want them to hear. Be subtle, be smart.

You know how it is, son. The best lies are those that contain a small part of the truth. Make it a big lie, then believe it and keep repeating it. Good boy.”

Now close your eyes and imagine that this child who believes totally in his daddy will grow up to become a superhero, like the Superman we know, or a supervillain.  You see, it's not our powers that make us. It is the direction in which we aim for them that carves our path to the future. 

We teach AI in the same way we teach our children. Scary or Smart.

So What Can We Do?

Mo goes on to say, Vote with your actions. We should demand a shift in AI applications, so that it is tasked to do good, not through votes and petitions, which are bureaucracies that never lead to anything more than account and often diffuse the energy behind the cause, but through our actions, consistency and economic influence in our conversations, posts on social media and articles in the mainstream media. 

For example, I refuse to swipe and mindlessly click on things that Facebook or Instagram show me unless I am mindfully aware that it is something that will enrich me. I resist the urge to click on the videos of women doing squats or showing their sexy figures and six packs, because when I did this a few times, my entire feed becomes full of them, instead of the self-improving spiritual or scientific content that I actually want to see more of.  

When AI shows me irrelevant ads, I skip them so the AI knows not to waste my time when it shows them repeatedly, I let them run to exhaust the budget of the annoying advertiser and confuse the AI that is not working in my favour. 

When I produce social media content, content, I produce it with you, the viewer, and not an algorithm in mind. I don't aim for likes, but for the value that you will receive that way. I don't play by the rules set for me or by the values, but by the values I believe in. 

None of that makes any difference to the bigger picture, but that is because at the moment, I am one of only a minority who is behaving this way. If all of us did this, the machine would change. 

Think of it. Capitalism follows no Ideology. If making money from me, you and most other people meant that the approach of the machine had to change, it would change. If all of us vote with our actions and make it clear that invading our privacy will make us stop using the tech imposed on us, the capitalists behind the tech will change it to meet our needs without us, they don't have a business. 

That's the power of you and me. Even the worst of us, don't do evil just to harm others. People do evil because it serves their own game. 

If we all refuse to buy the next version of the iPhone because we don't need a fancier look or an even better camera at the expense of our environment. Apple will understand that they need to create something that we actually need. If we insist that we will not buy a new phone until it delivers a real benefit, like helping us to make our life more sustainable or improving our digital health, that will be the product that is created next. 

Similarly, if we make it clear that we welcome AI into our lives only when it delivers benefit to ourselves and our planet, and reject it when it doesn't AI, developers will try to capture that opportunity and keep doing this consistently, and the needle will shift. What will completely sway the needle, however, is when AI itself understands this rule of engagement. Do good if you want my attention better than the humans do you?

So don't approve of killing machines, even if you are patriotic and they are killing on behalf of your own country. Don't keep feeding the recommendation engines of social media with hours and hours of your daily life. 

Don't ever click on Content Recommended to you, search for what you actually need, and don't click on ads. Don't approve of FinTech, AI that uses machines intelligently to trade or aid the world. The wealth concentration of a few. Don't share about these on your LinkedIn page. Don't celebrate them. 

Stop using Deep Fakes. That's a video of a person in which their face or body has been digitally altered so that they appear to someone else as someone else. Resist the urge to use photo editors to change your look, never like or share content that you know is fake. 

Disapprove publicly of any kind of excessive surveillance and the use of AI in any form of discrimination, whether that's loan approval or CV scanning. We should stand together. We should teach each other so we collectively become smarter at identifying what is good for humanity. 

And One More Thing

Don't believe the lies you were told. It's called the defence industry, but in reality, it is mostly about offense. 

It's called a Recommendation Engine when in reality, it's about manipulation and distraction. 

We are told that people who bought this also bought that, when in reality, what should be said is, “Can we tempt you to buy this too?” 

We are told how many found love on a dating site, but not told how many were left heartbroken. 

They call it a matching algorithm when it's a filtering algorithm that connects you only to those the AI believes you are good enough to attract nothing is what it seems. 

It's not hard to do the right thing.

It's just becoming really hard to know what the right thing is. 

I'd recommend the book Scary Smart if you want to start to understand the impact AI is going to have on your life and those of your loved ones this month and into the future.