The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine
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Dumb ideas deserve to be attacked. Ideas that are an affront to practically every positive development that dragged us out from under the rule of the oligarchs of the 19th century and the fear-mongering ideologues of the 20th, deserve to be attacked.
If that hurts the feelings of those who are promoting them, that's unfortunate, but it's the price of admission if you're trying to exert influence in the public sphere.
The problem is that no one is putting forward better solutions. "The left" is now run by educated elites, not the working class, "the right" might not represent the working class, but at least they don't ignore them.
Trump and Co. is exactly opposite of that.
If the working class is holding out for great ideas so long as educated people don't propose them, I think that's an unwinnable game. The ideas that work against the concentration of wealth and power are the ones championed by academia, but they have been dismissed as "commies" not matter how unrelated their ideas are to Marxism, or as "elites" despite the fact that they have very little influence or money compared to the corporate class that just got installed in the White House.
If you don't see better solutions, it's because you're actively avoiding them.
How much time, money, and effort was spent actually educating people so they can make a properly informed decision? Suggesting a new idea is only the first step. Having "unique experiences and depth of knowledge" doesn't mean anything if you can't explain the new idea to everyone else.
Why should anyone listen to your new idea if you aren't explaining it in a language[1] they understand?
[1] http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi...
Not sure exactly what you're talking about but I've long been a proponent of UBI for instance. But new ideas like this aren't being adopting by the mainstream left and probably won't for some time. You never get any progress without a firebrand to sell the message. The mainstream left seems more interested in playing identity politics as a wedge than coming out with a positive action plan.
The fact that you even invoked the term "mainstream left" here makes it perfectly clear that you're more than happy playing identity politics. You speak in terms of political labels, not in terms of mechanisms for solving problems.
Why? The greatest mind in the world might solve poverty tomorrow but unless they can convince the public they may as well keep it to themselves. Let's also not forget that professional thinkers are often incorrect and disconnected from reality. Support for communism was quite high amongst professional thinkers. Not to mention that professional thinkers these days includes the like of feminist studies professors that are about as regressive as they come.
So, yeah. Let's forget that. Because it's juvenile and petty.
PS: You're talking to a feminist and communist. I'm not sure why you'd imagine I'd object as you do to the points you raise. I doubt you've ever read any communist or feminist literature, or that you'd care enough to understand it if you did.
Your the intellectual elitists that Trump voters (and myself) hate. You're influence on the left is why they are losing elections and why there are very few left wing parties I would vote for these days.
But whatever. You're petty and can't avoid identity politics. And I would rather talk about actually relevant ideas, so have a good life.
Statements like this make it sound like you believe that the middle American working class is not capable of coming up with there own solutions, or that there solutions are totally without merit. An even more uncharitable reading would imply that they cannot even enumerate the problems they face.
I don't assume you mean this, but so much of the division we face is due to the otherization that happens on all sides.
Middle America assumes that the coastal elite stopped caring about their problems and proposes actions that have negative consequences for them. This is definitely not intentional on a large scale. However if you look at the state of middle America's economy you can't argue that the is a huge room for improvement and the divide between them and the coast has become a chasm.
Edit. Grammar.
>"The left" is now run by educated elites
The left is under constant and savage attack by the elite ruling classes from all sides, which is why when voters seek out an alternative they are left with the elite's 2nd choice - the far right.
The same dynamics occurred in Weimar Germany, who were, much like the UK/US establishment, both relatively socially liberal and incredibly economically repressive, and vicious towards the 'alternative' left wing (KPD).
It's possible to be the victim of your own desperation, which is just what such people perpetually have been throughout history. Everyone sees that kind of person as a rube, Left, Right, and Center... it's always just a fight for their hearts and minds.
By the way the Right doesn't ignore the working class, but they actively hurt them. I somehow doubt that the working class wants that kind of attention.
> It's possible to be the victim of your own desperation, which is just what such people perpetually have been throughout history. Everyone sees that kind of person as a rube, Left, Right, and Center... it's always just a fight for their hearts and minds.
Yes, and the guy offering a bad solution looks better than the guy offering no solution.
People for whom a self-serving lie (what you call a bad solution) is better than no solution deserve what they get. It's just a pity that the rest of us are along for the ride.
Your actions are just as self defeating as theirs.
thank you for pointing that out better than i could have.
You're just clinically suggestible and have fallen for the "Only I know what you need" line. You might as well be a well-conditioned battering victim.
People sponsored for H1Bs by sweat shops are to educated American tech workers as "illegal immigrants" are to American manual laborers: competitors for the same jobs willing to work under worse conditions for much lower wages.
Or in other words: Yes, but you need good arguments to make me change my mind.
Reminds me of:
"...the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid." -- Chesterton
Keep in mind people voted in part based on a campaign promise to repeal "Obamacare" even when they depended on the ACA for their lives, without realizing they were one and the same. Anecdote does not data make, but there also have been a few prominent examples of families that were broken up when the U.S. citizen portion voted Trump and their relatives were then affected by the travel ban.
There are real economic grievances, no one is saying there aren't. Those grievances were there the election before this one, and the one before that (2008, remember? right now the economy and employment are objectively at their best since at least that time). But there is also an ideological, cultural component, which is ripe for being modulated by propaganda. See e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/its-put... .
1. Public (online) discourse is vulnerable to manipulation by bad-faith actors (and this manipulation is impactful on a geopolitical scale).
2. The events of the US election and Brexit were symptomatic of unrecognized problems and unheard voices.
These ideas can both be true. Frankly, I find the notion that (1) isn't true too far-fetched to believe. It sounds like far too good of a business opportunity.
Running ads is a valuable activity not because every person who sees the ad becomes a customer, but because in aggregate x% of viewers will consider a purchase and y% will become good customers. Cambridge Analytica sounds to me like they're just applying the standard techniques of digital content marketing to a relatively unsophisticated realm (political advertisement).
This is true, but it's not limited to the right.
Just one example, the Washington Post and other liberal papers reported that a Muslim-American Olympian was detained by customs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/02/09...
The fake part? They never mentioned that it happened in December.
Your assessment might hold water except that they also sent back the congressmen responsible for the situation in record numbers.
So, even if I give them that they believed Trump was their champion, what are we to make of the fact that they sent everybody else responsible for the situation back?
> Maybe they were tired of being belittled by metropolitan and coastal elites ignoring those grievances and dismissing them as racists to be ignored.
Yet they bitch, complain and fight when said coastal elites attempt to help things: see Obamacare. Even a SINGLE moderate Republican senator driven by moderate constituents would have made the ACA a lauded national accomplishment and enabled compromise instead of a partisan war.
There wasn't a SINGLE moderate Republican senator in the entire batch. Not ... one ...
You can't fight people when they attempt to help and then complain when they give up and tell you to get stuffed and go die in a fire. And, from what I can tell, the ACA was the breaking point where the left finally threw in the towel that there was any working with the right and that they should simply be left to rot.
> Ok, so people living outside major cities in UK voting against centralization of unaccountable power in the EU and unemployed, politically abandoned industrial workers in the US Rust Belt were just a bunch of idiot rubes tricked by click bait headlines.
Pretty much. Whenever I sit down an talk to people to explain the ACA stuff, I invariably get "Well, nobody ever told me that." Of course they didn't. Most things in the ACA are driven by the fundamental choices that most people agree with. If you agree with no exclusions for preexisting conditions, then you need to amortize the sick over the well. That implies sign up periods and getting the healthy to sign on when they really don't want to. etc.
Unfortunately, that's too subtle an argument to get through a wall of interference of "Obama's a muslim and wants to oppress Christians! They wanna take arrr gunzzzz! Mexicans took all arrr jerbs!"
Second of all, Massachusetts, yes Massachusetts, elected a Republican senator a month before the ACA went to vote, in effect cutting out the filibuster-proof 60-senate seats held by the D's at the time. If a state the last elected an R in the 1940s decided to sabotage this bill, maybe its opposition was more widespread than simply those who "cling to their guns and religion".
Perhaps, but that is a fairly accurate description of the wall of noise that drowns out substantive discussion.
Huxley has been more accurate than Orwell in predicting the future of control so far.
I wish I could send everyone to the Heritage Discovery Center in Johnstown, PA before they were allowed to discuss politics: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g52908-d585662...
They have radio programs, letters, etc. from roughly 100 years ago that are EXACTLY THE SAME RHETORIC as today.
The only difference is that the ethnic slurs have changed. And a Mexican Wall replaces closing Ellis Island.
> If a state the last elected an R in the 1940s decided to sabotage this bill, maybe its opposition was more widespread than simply those who "cling to their guns and religion".
As for Massachusetts sending an R being a rebuttal of Obamacare, I note that Massachusetts didn't repeal Romneycare. And I note that Brown didn't last more than one term even after fighting the single most expensive senatorial election race in history.
I get that you think that the ACA was a good answer, but it is in fact possible to view it as a horrible mess without being deliberately stupid.
A 2000-page bill. "You have to pass it to find out what's in it." People voting on a bill that they never read. Does any of that sound like it might be a bad idea (or at least a bad implementation)?
You fell for a propaganda talking point:
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/the-context-behind-nancy-pelosis-...
People knew quite well what was in the bill and it was on record. The issue was whether there might be unintended consequences and what they would be after the bill was enacted.
Now, will you admit you are wrong and change your stance? Or will you double down to a different talking point?
If someone on HN can fall for this kind of disinformation campaign, what chance does someone with far less access have?
That is: Do you see how your style closes off conversation? Do you see how it results in closed-minded people just yelling at each other? And, seeing that, will you drop that style and have a reasonable conversation with us? Or will you continue to dismiss what others say as "talking points" whenever we disagree with you?
As to your actual criticism of my post: I was in fact unaware of the larger context of Pelosi's quote. That fact does not make ACA any better.
If you think a vote for Paul Ryan is a vote against unaccountable power you are badly deluded.
Forget Paul Ryan. Does the billionaire President of the United States, brought to power (to almost everyone's surprise) by this populist wave, seem especially accountable to anyone? FFS, the man broke the long-standing traditions of releasing tax returns as a candidate, and has utterly failed to even give the appearance of separating himself from his business interests, and his broke working class base doesn't bat an eyelash. They're not looking for accountability. They're looking for someone to blame ("elites", "illegals", "muslims") and for someone to tell them it'll all be OK.
They could be. Or they could have been manipulated into believing that there was a cadre of elitist puppet masters out to get them.
It's obvious that there are issues all across the socioeconomic spectrums, all over the planet. I'm more apt to believe that for the most part that people all over are quite similar, but propaganda triggers and psychometric targeting make it seem like we are light years apart.
1) Sell soap. 2) Let people know about a new movie. 3) Scam people out of their life savings (find people who fall for a Nigerian prince scam). 4) Own devices (phishing). 5) Swing undecided, low-information voters in an election.
The techniques may be quite similar. The consequences, very different.
Ad tech is powerful technology that doesn't discriminate. Large advertising networks do have content policies preventing outright scammers, phishing, and often just things they don't want on their network, but there are always new techniques.
So this is just another example of why we can't have a nice libertarian-inspired Internet like we all dreamed of when the Internet was new. There are always bad guys and gray areas. Any popular service that attracts a large enough audience gets abused and the service providers inevitably end up policing it, so then they start making tough policy decisions about what's okay. (Or if they don't, customers and various interest groups will complain.)
When Obama won, I seem to remember a lot of people around here praising the success of his social media strategy.
So yes, we have an arms race, and those with the best AI will become the power brokers. I like the analogy to high-frequency trading. Neither market valuation nor democratic process are very meaningful when driven by machine learning.
They had to be. Fake news, those sneaky Russians, a white-supremacist deep state conspiracy. It is what happens when people live in a bubble. They can pretend nothing else exists. Facebook posts all come from the same group of friends, those who don't agree are unfriended, and so on. News channel all pump the same reassuring message about an almost certain win and even show a map with all states filled in blue. Until of course the bubble pops then it just becomes too much.
There was certainly a surprise element but I am surprised how surprised some people were and how they overnight went from stoic intellectuals lecturing those Trump rednecks about integrity of our electoral system, and how they better not riot and get angry and agree with the results of the election, to irrational and angry conspiracy theorists.
> most clearly with pro-Trump campaigners and programmers who carefully adjusted the timing of content production during the debates, strategically colonized pro-Clinton hashtags, and then disabled activities after Election Day,”
That was interesting. The most visible example is probably "Fake News" it was a term appropriated and used to label mainstream media like CNN, NBC, NYT and WaPo. It had gotten to a point where Washington Post sent out an explicit request for everyone to please stop using that term because it has been taken over so to speak.
> According to Bloomberg, the Trump campaign sent ads reminding certain selected black voters of Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘super predator’ line. It targeted Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with messages about the Clinton Foundation’s troubles in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.’”
One thing I noticed Hillary organized a Jay-Z concert. I guess she heard that Black people like rap and paid Jay-Z to throw the n-word at them a few times. What an awkward way to connect. A while back I managed to find a speech Trump gave to a mostly Black community and he didn't do half bad. It was a very small gathering. It was probably never going to be a community that would vote for him as a block like they did for Obama. But at least he tried to talk about inner cities, inequality, crime, safety, jobs, education.
> Political analysts in the Clinton campaign, who were basing their tactics on traditional polling methods, laughed when Trump scheduled campaign events in the so-called blue wall -- a group of states that includes Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and has traditionally fallen to Democrats.
I think there is a bit of the oscillation happening. Trump went from an arrogant stupid idiot to this super cunning and smart villain who used those evil AI bots to win. Why didn't Hillary try that same software and those same bots? Guessing by implication is because her campaign was honest and they played by the rules.
They'll bitch till they're blue in the face about how it's unfair that just because they want people like them to succeed they're called racists.
I wonder what they think racism is if not that?
You mean the people from the Middle America? Well it helps to live there for a while. I did for a about 10 years. You know what most people there don't think when they first wake up? That's right, racist thoughts. They think about getting groceries, hopefully kids did their homework, when the bills are due, why Steven is being a jerk at work and so on. They don't yawn and stretch thinking "I hope all the people with certain skin pigment different than mine fail!".
> they want people like them to succeed they're called racists.
I have never heard anyone say "I want people like me to succeed" based on race. Maybe I wasn't hanging out with a bad crowd. But I've heard them say "I want to succeed" or "I want my children to be successful" is that racist? I am an immigrant, is it wrong to say "I want immigrants to succeed". Am I racist now? Oh oh.
> always find it funny when people say they're tired of being called racists.
I am wondering. How do you expect people to respond when they are called racists. Let's imagine you walk down the street. Someone turns a corner wearing that stupid Trump hat, you yell out "You racist!". What would be a realistic positive outcome from that?
Or that I wander the streets calling people racist?
Besides what does the term "people like them" even mean"? Are we referring to immigrants vs citizens, nationality, religion, political party? People from different groups big and small will unsurprisingly want other people from the same group to succeed. Are you sure it is all about the skin color and them all thinking one is superior than other? I gave an example about immigrants. It could be programmers. Or some religious organization. Same with people from a country and so on. Are all those instances of racism?
Wouldn't you say that the accusation of racism is rather serious and racism is a serious topic and not just something to be used when we disagree with things? I think it is. And because of that it is important to be very precise and sure when using it. Otherwise we are just mocking it and reducing its value.
> Or that I wander the streets calling people racist?
But the equivalent is to wonder around the internet and throw that term around. And I am sorry, I didn't mean to single you out specifically, I wanted to talk more to wider audience (since it is a public forum as well) because I have seen this happen too many times. Some here, the media, Reddit, relatives, friends, at work and so on.
I call specific people racist, when they do racist things.
Entertainingly, they're always horrified and offended, even if 5 seconds before they've been telling a story about how Indian woman have loose vaginas since they're all whores.
Your response leads me to believe you've been called racist, but couldn't internalize what exactly it was that you'd done wrong.
It sounds impressive, until I looked at the actual study[0], which uses simple linear or logistic regression on 100 features obtained by low-rank approximation of an m users × n Facebook-likes matrix via plain-old singular value decomposition (SVD)[1], as shown here: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802/F1.large.jpg
I don't know how anyone could call this "groundbreaking," considering that lots of people in Silicon Valley have been using matrix factorization to predict consumer behavior and make recommendations for a couple of decades, give or take.
I stopped reading at that point.
The article probably means the study was groundbreaking, not the mathematics. This is fairly common in science. The novel nature of the study may come from unique applications of existing technique, or applications of existing techniques to previously unavailable datasets. Focusing on the mathematical techniques used as an assessment of what is "groundbreaking" is a short-sighted way to approach it.
For example, many (probably most) studies in astronomy/astrophysics aren't developing and applying new mathematical techniques as part of the studies. I think folks would agree that detection of exoplanets via radial velocity wobbles is groundbreaking. But that's "just" application of classical mechanics. The groundbreaking nature was the instruments with high enough precision to make those measurements and the teams who thought up the idea and made the observations happen.
That being said, I'm not really qualified to assess the novelty of the study which is the subject of the article. But one should certainly look at more than just the tools used.
[0] For example, the Netflix $1 million competition in 2007 was won by a team that used an ensemble of methods, including a form of matrix factorization, to predict which movies people would like: http://www.netflixprize.com/assets/ProgressPrize2007_KorBell... -- and using matrix factorization wasn't a new idea back then either.
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/edit/
This is the first reported case of these techniques being used to influence an election, but that doesn't mean it's the first time it was used to influence an election. It's very likely that Obama's campaign used similar techniques, considering it was staffed by Google/Facebook/Twitter data scientists who were certainly familiar with these techniques. It just appears in the press now because the Trump campaign & administration leaks like a sieve.
And learning SVD if you start at zero background in required maths, especially if nobody is exactly telling you what to learn and how to learn it and how to use it (yes I'm stereotyping the word 'psychologist' heavily here) could plausibly take "years". I'm doing maths and while I had first encounter with eigendecompositions during the 1st year linear algebra (which remarkably many students find hard), I think it wasn't until the 3rd year when we covered SVDs in their full theoretically detailed glory in the class.
Lots of "groundbreaking" stuff involves 'simply' applying techniques developed elsewhere to new problem domains. There's still some low-hanging fruit left for applied maths and statistics.
However, I don't know enough about this particular area to really say if the statement of "groundbreaking" are really warranted, but that could be one plausible defense of the claim.
edit. Edited to apply to your edit.
Ithere were a ton of brexit bots on twitter and in comment sections, they later started working for trump, and are now working for le pen. some stuff about it here - https://heatst.com/world/how-russias-twitter-bots-and-trolls...
> Broadly speaking, Trump has two categories of support on Twitter. Alt-right trolls, and Russian bot accounts
Whether they actually fit this description, I do not know, and I make no claim either way.
And somehow managed to overcome the constant "fact checking" by major cable networks, the Post, NYT and generally a large majority of the established media. Let's be serious. The narrative is ridiculous, but even if we were to take it at face value the cure is worse than the disease. Basically voters can no longer be trusted with making up their own mind in a democracy and they need to be automatically manipulated for the greater good:
> From now on, the distinguishing factor between those who win elections and those who lose them will be how a candidate uses that data to refine their machine learning algorithms and automated engagement tactics. Elections in 2018 and 2020 won’t be a contest of ideas, but a battle of automated behavior change.
I think at this point the losing side needs to accept that they didn't make their case properly ("the other guy is worse" only gets you so far) and stop chasing ridiculous scapegoats. American democracy has endured through secession, yellow journalism and Joseph McCarthy. It will survive Facebook and sentiment analysis bots.
A person's consumption of media will dictate their voting patterns. Someone who reads the Post and NYT will probably vote differently than someone consuming primarily Conservative news and memes on Facebook.
> American democracy has endured through secession, yellow journalism and Joseph McCarthy. It will survive Facebook and sentiment analysis bots.
Many Americans read news exclusively on Facebook. If peoples' political opinions are influenced by their friends', then content on Facebook benefits from a halo of social proof.
Regardless, in a system where media consumption is dictated by what is shared, then content which evokes strong emotional reaction will have a strong sharing advantage. Journalism and McCarthyism existed in an age before ML. If smart algorithms could optimize share rates, then a professional team could gain a lot of influence with highly curated media.
Complete thoughts here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=13649547]
That sounds very much like Noah Chomsky.
The pretext of Media Control is that the general public is a bewildered herd that needs to be kept entertained and divided, less they engage in unwelcome "activism". Namely, democracy.
from article: "Presumably because of its alliances, Analytica has declined to work on any democratic campaigns"
honestly, having an analytics company work closely in both sides sounds a bit ridiculous to me. THAT would be more worrisome
I read that on qz.com but can't find many other sources.
https://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-workin...
I also read that boots on the ground were begging for resources and refused because what they were seeing did not fit the models - thats bad analytics no matter how you wash it. especially since the same models predicted landslide wins over Sanders where she had lost.
Well a big part of the campaign was delegitimizing the establishment as "fake news" that is in bed with Hillary. Combined with a bombardment of headlines that confirm their biases, targeted by personality, it could have a big impact.
This would've been far less effective if CNN wasn't caught red-handed cheating at the debates, then lying about it afterward. In my view, we need news with less opinions and more facts, better sourcing, and more complete coverage and no rumors allowed.
Then again, I think the CS Monitor was founded more or less to confront the original plague of yellow journalism and somehow they've vanished without a trace from Google News, which always tries to feed me the clickbait versions of every story, despite the fact that I don't click on those.
So maybe the real problem here is that the market has spoken and people prefer junk food news? A depressing thought :/
Trump administration continue to delegitimize mainstream news, and call it "fake news".
The media didn't give Trump free publicity because they love him; a lot (perhaps most) of that coverage was negative. It was good for ratings, though, and I think that's something Trump understood and took full advantage of. The long term consequences of this is that it was a contributing factor to Trump winning the primary and later the general election, but also many progressives and independents that previously saw the media as a benign entity have adopted the default assumption that every news article is either a veiled advertisement, a stunt to raise viewership, or propaganda with some motive other than informing the public.
(I think the Trump supporters and Tea Party types have mostly already believed this, so whatever they think of the media being pro-Hillary, it's something they believed all along; nothing changed there.)
This puts a large proportion of the public in the awkward position of wanting to know what's going on in the world, but having no reliable source of facts since the major players have largely disqualified themselves. Hence the rise in fake news, but fake news is just a symptom of a general lack of trust (deserved, in my opinion) of the so-called mainstream media.
And so, the media join a long list of important institutions that are perceived by many (including myself) to either be in decline or have somehow gone off the rails, including Congress, the court system, the police (in some areas), intelligence agencies, higher education, the democratic process, the major political parties, the financial services industry, unions, and so on. I know it's practically an American tradition to believe that society is falling apart and that we're on the verge of catastrophe, but still, it seems like we've got more things than usual coming apart at once and no obvious fix for any of them within reach. I would have felt a little better if Clinton had prevailed, but still there's a lot of problems I'm concerned about that are deeper and have been around a lot longer than the election of president Trump.
Does your use of "their" mean that you think your own side of politics isn't exactly the same?
Many of us, myself included, have worked on technologies that were meant to profile and manipulate users. Many more of us worked for companies who did this or did similar things through traditional means (eg, psychologically manipulative ads). We've not only allowed, but encouraged technology to have a manipulative and addictive relationship with users. We took the paycheck and played red team against humanity. (This is common -- red team is sexier than blue team, and has an easier time of it, pretty much in any field.)
So, personally, I think it's time we spent some of our effort undoing that damage and playing blue team.
I don't know what that looks like in full -- though I have some ideas -- but I do know that allowing the weaponization of psychology against humanity to continue unabated will end in disaster.
In some ways, that's the struggle of the 21st century: will technology serve the public or enslave it.
"Red team" and "blue team" are referencing offensive and defensive teams using standard security lingo. In this case, red team is trying to manipulate and control the public. As another commentator pointed out, it's a little unclear what blue team even should be doing.
I avoided just saying "help people avoid manipulation", because the implementation of a defensive strategy might be self-directed manipulation overriding the other manipulation you're exposed to, as it's not necessarily possible to avoid manipulation entirely. (Or even a deairable goal, as you might want to adjust your existing habits.)
My main point was that we need to start developing defensive tactics and strategies, because the offense dominated present situation will end in catastrophe.
If the primary tools of offence are making use of addictive technology and manipulation, the defencive move is making technology available to help people overcome addiction and give direction to their own lives.
As you say, self directed manipulation, and I would add introspection. Maybe FOSS tools for cognitive behavioral therapy.
* Allowing people to intentionally program themselves, as a means of overwriting and weakening offensive programming. In some ways, this cements the status quo, but in others, it allows your interest in "human values" (eg, wanting to be able to converse with family who disagree) to effectively fight back against centralized radicalization.
* Collating and rewriting news/information with intentional bias added, but things like dog-whistle phrases removed. Think averaging across a wide set of news to get a "fact sheet", then using something like style transfer to rewrite it in several tones/styles/biases. We can't (and shouldn't) eliminate the spectrum of perspectives, but we can probably clean some of the crap the channels are carrying. The organizational structure to manage that process, though, is a very open question. (My vote is a panel of enemies -- can we get WaPo/NYT and RT and China's people to agree on a system?) Also, people subscribing "across the spectrum" probably are harder to program.
* Education and organization. It turns out people are able to do some of these things on their own, if they know they should. I think there's really a range here -- from basic awareness campaigns to things like organizing trade groups and lobbying for ethical guidelines. Arguably, many of the professional psychologists at places like Facebook are engaged in mass-scale, unregulated psychiatry on non-consenting persons. We should call them out on that.
* Sort of a subpoint of the previous one, but theoretically you can use red team tactics to forcibly inject awareness of red team tactics. The ethics of this are questionable, so I put it last, and mostly to highlight the need to have a real conversation about ethics, guidelines, and organization.
Honestly, I know how to do much of that myself (and would really like to work on it), but "just do it alone" isn't a good solution here because that's just projecting my view on the situation. So my post was partly reaching out to see if other people felt the same and might want to organize. (And particularly people who don't share my views on most issues!)
C'est la vie.
Making them open and not controlled by corporate interests comes way before this.
Silicon Valley spent the last ten years building platforms whose natural end state is digital addiction. In 2016, Trump and his allies hijacked them.
I'm definitely not a Trump supporter (I'm not even American), but if I remember correctly the DNP also had a gargantuan apparatus of traditional media and social networking tools working 24/7 to help Hillary win the election.
I've seen "Fake news" in both sides of every election I followed (Brazil and US since ever and UK in the last 4 years). The big difference now is that, aside from the fact Trump is a scary individual, this time the "big media" side lost. Not that it is any advantage in the case at hand.
DNP is an organic compound used by bodybuilders to make cellular respiration less efficient and therefore increase metabolism. It's quite dangerous :)
And if you think advertisers won't exploit this (and aren't already), well ... that's just precious. Bless your heart.
Advertising (and "public relations") are rooted in propaganda. Which happen to be the titles of Edward Bernay's two classic works on the subject:
https://archive.org/stream/BernaysEdwardPropagandaEN1928153P...
http://www.worldcat.org/title/public-relations/oclc/546945
And it's always been inherently political. Something the advertising industrial support complex, which includes Google, may not wish to admit.
https://archive.org/details/BernaysEdwardL.CrystalizingPubli...
Sleep well.
If you read Bernays, he doesn't have a negative opinion of public relations and advertising, and clearly lays down why they are in fact a service rendered to the public.
It makes as much sense to say: propaganda is rooted in advertising and public relations.
Bernays unabashadly used PR and advertising to vile, vile ends, in his professional heyday.
He seems to have had something of a change of heart late in life, to the point that he advocated licensing of PR officials, in marked contrast to those he held earlier (also mentioned in this obit):
[I]n an interview in 1991, when he turned 100, he said: "Public relations today is horrible. Any dope, any nitwit, any idiot can call him or herself a public relations practitioner." He said he was still consulting with clients and regarded public relations loftily as a "social science."...
Around his 100th birthday, he campaigned unsuccessfully to get legislation passed in Massachusetts and other states that would have required the licensing of public-relations practitioners.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/16/specials/bernays-obit....
Views can change over a lifetime.
> 2. assume the truth of an argument or proposition to be proved, without arguing it.
I remain unpersuaded.
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/begs-the-...
Begs the question is a term that comes from formal logic. It’s a translation of the Latin phrase petitio principii, and it's used to mean that someone has made a conclusion based on a premise that lacks support. (1, 2) It can be a premise that's independent from the conclusion (3) or in a simpler form, a premise that’s just a restatement of the conclusion itself. (4,5)
...
Begs the question is used wrong a lot. It took me about two seconds to find examples of bad usage in the news. Many people mistakenly believe it's OK to use the phrase to introduce a clever or obvious question.
The question being begged is whether "propaganda" is a bad thing in itself. The way I read your argument, you were summoning Bernays to show that since PR and advertising come from propaganda, they're bad by association.
The problem is that it's a mischaracterisation of the concept of propaganda as understood by Bernays, who saw it as what we see today as PR, which is much less controversial than what "propaganda" has come to mean through accidents of history.
Essentially, that argument is akin to saying "PR (today) is bad, because PR (back then) is bad." Ergo, I see that as begging the question, due to equivocation on the term "propaganda."
I'll disagree with your assertions and premises, though detailing why is going to take more time and space than I can devote here. I've been researching the question heavily for the past few months and should, the gods willing, be posting something to https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius ... eventually.
On a slightly meta point I'm starting to notice that a much larger portion of the population is prone to conspiracy theories than I previously suspected. It might be another one of those broken design things. The propensity to see patterns in everything naturally gives rise to conspiracy theory galore.
Using Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and other data aggregators exposes you to manipulation. It can be convenient when it shows you relevant ads and the motivation is clear (money). But by the time you realize you're being manipulated for greater causes, like electing officials to power, its far too late to revert those changes.
At stake is the position of the most powerful man in the world. It has been shown to be possible that a group of skilled programmers / hackers could influence the election. Why wouldn't, say, an expert team be hired to program ML that optimizes a candidate's size of web presence? Cheap price for a lot of political power.
A "weaponized propoganda machine"? Maybe not. But if it's really that easy to game the system, you can't ignore the possibility.
When Trump does the same, with four years of technology advancement, it's "weaponized AI propaganda."
C'mon...
[0] http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world...
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-us...
Not disclosing the campaign affiliation on those articles is illegal. If even a fraction of what this article is alleging concerning how the Trump campaign spent it's money is true, the FEC may have quite a bit to say about it: http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/notices.shtml
I challenge you to find an article describing Obama's campaign analytics with similarly negative tone to this article about "weaponized AI propaganda."
The differing interpretations of two similar scenarios are worth observing, since the variability represents evidence of bias on the part of the journalists writing the articles.
If even a fraction of what this article is alleging is true, the FEC may have quite a bit to say about it: http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/notices.shtml
But the rise of AI threatens all our systems that rely on the inefficiency of an attacker.
The first one to go is trust in the media.
Look at facebook and how it uses big data to manipulate people into spending more and clicking more and posting more and checking notifications more. Even if it means echo chambers. Think about your own experience. Are you more addicted today than, say, 5 years ago?
People think that they make their own decisions but when the best ideas are aggregated then it's you vs an entire big data server farm crunching numbers. Soon your willpower won't be enough, because peer pressure, media stories and even laws will bring you back to increasing their metrics. They can micromanage more and more interactions, get dossiers on everyone, and they will outmaneuver old media more easily every year.
- segmentio
- intercomio
- google analytics
- doubleclick.net
- mixpanel
Privacy Badger detected 0 potential trackers on this page. These sliders let you
control how Privacy Badger handles each one. You shouldn't need to adjust them
unless something is broken.
The domains below don't appear to be tracking you
scout-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com
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fonts.googleapis.com
www.google.com
fonts.gstatic.com https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/id
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https://api.segment.io/v1/p
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https://api.mixpanel.com/track/I'm using Firefox 51.0.1 with Privacy Badger 2017.1.26, NoScript 2.9.5.3 and Adblock Plus 2.8.2.
Edit: OK, so I had doubleclick.net, facebook.com, google-analytics.com and mxpnl.com untrusted in NoScript. After trusting them all, Privacy Badger still reports no tracking, but lists these trackers:
cdn.embedly.com
connect.facebook.net
www.google-analytics.com
fonts.googleapis.com
www.google.com
Mostly I was just worried that Privacy Badger was failing.
Overall this kind of thing very much jibes with Yuval Harari's ideas about liberalism's approaching demise, as forecast in his book Homo Deus.
Edit: A Bloomberg article of note here https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-08/no-big-da...
I know that's vague, but to narrow it down on a previous article there was a picture of an individual reviewing said paper. Someone noted it and linked to the original paper.
I made a copy, but deleted it while cleaning things up.