The Social Dilemma — How AI Algorithms and Tech Companies Produce Dystopian Results and Changing Social Contract.
We humans, we invent a lot of things that we can’t even control. things that give us an assisting hand in fixing many problems around us.
Engineers and scientists are building and implementing tools that improve our social contract, however, it has a dystopian rank at the same level and even more than a utopian rank.
In 1943, the first step was taken in the framework of “Cybernetics” by Warren McCulloch and Waler Pitts that both proposed the first model of a binary neuron (0,1), in 1949 Donald Hebb released a new sate of artwork that include the first fundamental rules of the reinforcement learning between those Artificial neurons, then Alan Turing who built a first modeled ruled based AI machine to decipher/decrypt the famous enigma encryption that has been used by Nazis in 1943 during WW2 to share information among them.
This was 13 years before the birth of AI by Frank Rosenblatt who created the first Perceptron which is a single layer based on MacCulloch and Pitts model and Hebb’s rules to make the first decision-making prototype taking into consideration the improvements that Marvin Minsky did to the reinforcement learning models using a maximum of 40 neurons for the network that make the machine learn through a neural network that shares information between them.
Seppo Linnainmaa In 1970, Paul Werbos in 1974, Kunihiko Fukushima in 1980, Yann Le Cun in 1985, David Rumelhart, Geoffery Hinton, and Ronald Williams in 1986, all of them presented backpropagation in their work that would allow the neurons to adjust their weights and learn from the feedback loop and cost function that would improve the whole network, here the deep learning era kicked off and began where eventually allow the network to look deeply into the patterns and learn from the mistakes to provide solutions for many current world problems that threaten our life and do useful predictions addressing disasters such as climate change, and environmental crisis like floods and earthquakes, or disease like cancer, viruses like covid19 so on so forth of many useful use cases. Even Steve Jobs said in the 80s that “The computer is the bicycle for our minds”.
They all shared the same thought that the technology will help us to tackle different problems but without knowing the dark side of the technology and that it’s going to create a same level of good as of an evil when it’s placed in the hand of people that could misuse it for many reasons such as political leverage, persuade public opinions, make more money by dominating the markets and acquire competitors to put an end to any resistance that might raise their head and fight back for a place in the market.
Basically, this is what the tech juggernauts and social media companies are doing for the last decades (Facebook, Google …).
The Social Dilemma is a fine documentary interviewing former co-founders, former workers, and Authors who all worked in many companies and helped to build the current tools that we are using every day (and yes I am using it to write this post!!).
As Tristan Harris, a former Google worker, said “we’ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to addiction and manipulation-based technology environment. Social media isn’t a tool that’s just waiting to be used. It has its own goals and it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you”. Others explain the consequences of keeping the current business model up and running powered by biased AI algorithms that would empower chaos in the near future and probably a Civil war as predicted by Tim Kendall.
This is a serious challenge for societies around the world to agree on what kind of social contract fabrics they want to form and what kind of regulations should be presented in order to maintain and eliminate the data mining and profiling process.
With all these concerns, social media companies and especially Facebook is using the laws to justify their data bulk collection around the word.
Since 2015, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) filed a case against Facebook to hold US-EU data pipelines and stop transferring EU data to the US. But Facebook already used and argues the legal basis of doing that under General Data Privacy Regulations GDPR, Article 49(1)(b): “the transfer is necessary for the performance of a contract between the data subject and the controller or the implementation of pre-contractual measures taken at the data subject’s request;”.
& Article 46(1): “ absence of a decision pursuant to Article 45(3), a controller or processor may transfer personal data to a third country or an international organization only if the controller or processor has provided appropriate safeguards, and on condition that enforceable data subject rights and effective legal remedies for data subjects are available.”.
This means in one way or another, Facebook would use these gaps/bugs in GDPR to revoke and claim their right to collect the data and transfer it to a third party company and still comply with GDPR rules. Let me put it in a simple way that both articles (46) & (49) justify the data transfer due to the data subject/users approved to the platform’s terms and conditions in the first place.
Even with more and more cases presented by DPC against Facebook, still, the cases will lose unless a ground change happens to the GDPR rules itself to drive the desired changes.
The Social Dilemma is talking about the AI algorithms and how social media will play rules in changing individuals behavior, changing the new generations to make them more addicted to those tools, and thus playing to change the social contract by psychologically manipulating the content or not even admit being not able to stop hate speech and the spread of fake news to provide a sufficient level of safety, security, and privacy for the all especially for the young generation.
In the end, fixing problems is not the same as creating solutions, fixing problems will not necessarily give a desired blessed results that we want or dreamed of while creating the right solutions could shift and scale the situation to a better place for all.
Filling 1000 holes in a small wall inside your home during winter would be more fixing problem technique while a replacement is the right approach of critical thinking for a good solution to keep everyone in the house protected from winds and safer places from cold in the long term.
Giving aids to poor people and keep them living in shelters that have bad conditions and catastrophic environmental camps around the world without a proper warm place, is a part of fixing problems, but not a solution.
Religions are not perfect, have many gaps, and came to our world to fix problems, but not as a solution for all humans on earth. Fixing problems by keep saying and spreading the words every day that “we are all one no matter what is your religion, beliefs, race, color, gender, nationality …etc, and no classification or judgments based on that …”.
As the feeling of creating a universe to god/anonymous was, in similar analogy we experienced the same on low coordination by inventing the internet universe, to simply make physically virtual connections between us, store pieces of information, exchange them, and establish transparency and scalability, along with creating operating systems to interact with systematic layers in a way to build many machines, platforms, tools, and frameworks that in its turn helping us to build and develop applications to make our life easier, expand our knowledge, boost our understanding in the matter of existence, the creation of the universe, and to improve our civilization as well to prove how humans are the greatest species so far.
However, all of it not in a perfect way and with many bugs and backdoors in its structure that keep the whole innovation vulnerable and weak against real challenges or threats, and we start thinking and questioning that we may invent something bigger than us and can’t control it.
We will keep fixing our world problems simultaneously and simulationly no matter what happened… unless a miracle does create a new solution, not the same miracle that created us and our universe with many black holes/gaps feasting on everything and vacuuming the universe from its mass the same way of exploding users data online from the internet.
We are gods, and they are us, there is no perfect system, there are no perfect calculations, and anyways, it was not intended to.
Let’s see what will happen in the next couple of years!.
