philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Data privacy, machine learning and the destruction of mysterious humanity

We can think of advances in ad targeting as increases in image resolution.

So where does this increasingly realistic picture of the consumer go from here? This data inevitably has gaps. And while many of those gaps will be filled by better and more varied sensors (mobile data, connected automobiles, Jawbone, Nest, etc.), there’s another tool for filling them in: machine learning.

Data left online and in the real world form anchor points in the photo of you, from which machine learning algorithms can project the rest of your image. And as machine learning models grow in accuracy and sophistication, particularly at companies with an incentive to target ads, so does the interpolated image of exactly who you are.

This is where Facebook and Google are investing huge amounts of dollars. Recruiting directly from the professor pool, these companies are grabbing up the top machine learning minds in the world, such as Facebook’s recent hire of Yann LeCun to lead a new AI lab.

The famous neurologist Viktor Frankl once said, “A human being is a deciding being.” But if our decisions can be hacked by model-assisted corporations, then we have to admit that perhaps we cease to be human as we’ve known it. Instead of being unique or special, we all become predictable and expected, nothing but products of previous measured actions.

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And these echo chambers can reinforce societal problems. This is a concern with Chicago’s crime hotspot targeting model. What happens when a model shits where it eats? Police focus in on a hot spot and generate more arrests there. Those hotspots become hotter. The neighborhood gets less desirable. Education and jobs suffer. Those hotspots become hotter. The model sends more police. And on and on the death spiral goes.

This past year Mark Zuckerberg attended one of the big AI conferences called the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference. This is kind of like David Bowie stopping at your house to catch up on some Game of Thrones with you.

Why’d Zuck go to NIPS? To learn, to recruit, to cozy up to the machine learning community. Because Facebook is invested in the dismantling of its users piece by piece, using data and machine learning, to process humans into a segmentation-ready data slurry that’s more palatable to its customers, the advertisers.

Read the full story here: http://gigaom.com/2014/02/22/data-privacy-machine-learning-and-the-destruction-of-mysterious-humanity/?curator=MediaREDEF