Facebook and AI

It’s fairly obvious that AI and Facebook intelligence go hand in hand just by logging on and seeing ads on the side that are applicable to your life. I do find it a bit weird that they do this, but at the same time they are catering to your likings and making the social media aspect a bit smaller in order for you to feel comfortable. If they gave you platforms that included things you don’t exactly find interesting, then less time would be spent on their social media site. I feel as though I have noticed this trend of AI delivering specific ads geared towards my liking a while ago that it doesn’t’ effect the way I look at Facebook or other social media sites.  Besides Facebook using tracking devices to give you ads relative to your catering, other social media sites such as Instagram and Twitter both use the same sort of way of delivering us particular ads.  Twitter even has their own name of tracking customers on their site, Conversion Tracking. It gives advertisers data upon what the customer has viewed or purchased so that the customer gets more of that product thrown at their face. In particular, “Advertisers can track user conversion and tie them back to ad campaigns on Twitter. This gives them the visibility to optimize their campaigns to meet their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goals.” All of this AI intelligence is revolved around making a large sum of profit for advertisers. That’s their main goal, the money. They will use whatever they can to engage the customer into buying more and more of their products, which is why they need AI to increase their views/sales. I don’t necessarily think that this involves the agency of post-humanism in some instance because of the fact that we’re having something else complete the job for us. It’d be different if we ourselves could perform this particular task that AI is much better at. In some circumstances I can see the argument of post-humanism, yet we haven’t reach that great of an extent upon post-humanism just yet. Therfore, I think that Facebook is definitely a social network of people, yet with the influential aspect of AI. In some ways I do question why Facebook keeps throwing me feeds from the same people each and every time and not a variety of my friends. It’s almost as if they’re making AI enclose your circle of “friends” to a certain group. Although I think Facebook has passed their prime of social media and the fact that the repetitiveness of individuals has made people abstain from it.  I completely agree with Elon Musk with regards to AI. It’s very dangerous if let loose, but in circumstances such as Facebook, I don’t think it makes that much of a dent on the population where people will start caring. In reference towards Vernor Vinge’s thought process of the inflection point, I do agree that one day we could potentially be physically extinct because robots will be able to do whatever human task, 100 times better and more efficient. In factories alone, they can do a human task much faster and with greater precision than any human could possibly attempt. It speaks volumes for where our generation is headed towards when talking about the progression of AI.

https://dev.twitter.com/ads/campaigns/conversion-tracking

Apple vs FBI

Cook, in my opinion, stands strong against the FBI since he knows that if he allows this to happen, it’ll make customers lose trust in Apple, thus moving to a different company, “While we believe the FBI’s intentions are good, it would be wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our products. And ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect”(Par. 5). If I were placed into Cook’s shoes at this very moment, I would absolutely be enacting the same statements that he’s getting across. Yes, the government is attempting to do the right thing, but they are doing so in regards to breaking the law of personal privacy. Therefore, Cook’s mental standpoint on this issue is in line with my thoughts since personal privacy should be respected. Cook could not be any more accurate with the way he is representing his company right now. I love the fact that he did not give in and let the government do what they want just because they have the upper hand all the time. If the government happened to get its way then it’d technically be an invasion of pricy. Furthermore, it’d be bad business for Apple since the customers wouldn’t trust the anymore and convert to other phones. On the other hand, if Apple wins this then it could be seen as though Apple is trying to hide evidence from the government. Although I think it’d be a major problem if the government got its way and not the other way around. Going off of the reading about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12, “ No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks .” Thus, if the government proceeded with this action, then it would violate this Human Right. I think that it’s pretty crazy how our private lives are still being shared out there without our say, “Government agencies are also collecting data from companies whether or not they have search warrants, according to confidential documents leaked to the press by Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency”(Risin. 12). The fact that our information that we provide through certain sites who state that our bio’s don’t get distributed to anyone, but ultimately do sounds slightly mind-blowing. I don’t understand how companies can get away with such actions that completely disregard someone’s personal privacy. In all, I don’t think it’s right if the government does whatever they want because they feel a need to even if it infringes on personal privacy.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/08/25/the-illusion-of-online-privacy

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

The Martens Clause of 1977 states the banning of weapons that violate the “principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience,” explains that we as human beings having obviously disregarded this clause because of the advancements that have taken place in terms of Artificial Intelligence. If we are getting more and more technologically advanced as time goes on, we would have to change this clause in order for there to be a legality aspect that allows humans to reach new heights of technology without a roadblock. Furthermore, the fact that robots could have the potential knowledge to eliminate a person for a certain type of behavior sounds great and all. However, what if it happens to murder someone just because that individual showed signs of a certain trait the robot looks for, “Despite the limits imposed by physics, one can expect platforms deployed in the millions, the agility and lethality of which will leave humans utterly defenseless.” This is something that we as a human species should not want. Where do we go from there if the robot chooses to terminate the person? Who’s to blame for that, the creator or the robot? This is why complete human control is necessary on robots. One wrong move while constructing these robots and we have a large problem. I feel as though each individual that took part in this article has different views towards Artificial Intelligence. Each is towards a world where Artificial Intelligence can be a helping hand towards humans. They believe that it would be such a beneficial experience for us. We shouldn’t be shying away from the argument of bringing in robots, yet we should be able to realize the prosperity that comes along with robots. The two movies that immediately popped up into my mind when reading this article were Big Hero 6 and Robots, the 2005 film. Each presents robot sin their own way, yet the most relevant one would be Big Hero 6. Each robot movie shows the good that robots can do, but they never show the side where something goes wrong and catastrophic things occur. I would be all for a world where we have robots like Big Hero 6, but that’s just not the case in our society. We would have to evaluate the idealism towards making a robot. The good and the bad that could go into the experiment is important knowing if it would be worth creating robots. In all, I think that as time goes on, our scientific knowledge will continue to grow substantially; therefore, we will definitely be able to create a robot that only has good intentions for humanity.

Hayles Posthumanism

     Posthumanism is a fairly complex idea to grasp, yet it takes time to decipher the true meaning. I played with the idea that was explained in the reading, “First, the post human view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an in-evitability of life” (2).  I perceived this quotation through a sense that we as humans dislike the notion of new things in our life at random moments, yet instead we enjoy a pattern that we can sustain everyday. Moreover, when we have repetition in our daily lives and cease to make an error, we just blow it off since the subject matter of the accident rarely happens. Thus the error doesn’t crucially affect the way we live our lives since each of us has this knowing or unknowing repetition of patterns that happen on a daily basis.