The Threat of Identity — How AI Will Make You Irrelevant
AI revolution coupled with Automation will create a Global useless class, comprising billions. From the ostensibly benign laboratories, a menace will emerge which will threaten the Human identity. Algorithms will decide if you are eligible for a job or an insurance grant or are a potential suspect for crime.
What do you envisage when you hear the word ‘Algorithm’? Though I’m not a telepath, I can be quite sure that most of you are imagining a stream of ones and zeroes in green, hurtling across a black background. If I got you right, don’t blame yourself. For most of us, the understanding of the exotic and arcane concepts — like Algorithms and AI (Artificial Intelligence) — comes from science fiction, and sci-fi novels and movies have left no stone unturned to create sensation and excitation, misguiding their viewers/readers in the process.
The reality is different. Algorithms are a set of methodical steps to count probabilities and find the solution of a given problem. Electronic devices simple as a Calculator to sophisticated as a Supercomputer function on Algorithms. The variance comes from complexity and type. An Algorithm employed by Google will be radically different and more complex than the one used by a private school owner.
The phrase ‘AI Revolution’ invokes a similar mental image — centurions of malicious robots trying to enslave and exterminate humanity. But like Algorithms, AI Revolution is also falsely interpreted. In reality, AI is the imitation of the human intelligence in a computer, while AI Revolution is just a fancy way of implying the predominance of Algorithmic Models in various economic and industrial sectors. This leaves one wondering: where did these misinterpretations come from? Once again, thank Science Fiction. Movies like The Terminator or The Matrix have warned humanity from the day when rebellious robots will gain consciousness and selectively hunt down humans. For laypeople, that’s the easy and fun way of summarizing these abstruse concepts. The real threat, however, will not be spontaneous. It will be subtle but pernicious.
Now that we’ve brushed aside the misconceptions, we can follow a clearer pathway. If you use social media platforms excessively, you might have gotten a glimpse of how Facebook or Google gather your information. Has it ever occurred that you thought of — or searched for—buying a product and ended up seeing it on your Facebook wall? Or have you been suggested videos by the platform that resonate with your propensities? Perhaps funny, or maybe satanic? That’s an algorithm at work. Facebook is a trillion-dollar corporation, but almost the entire business is managed by a non-human entity. The flesh and blood humans comprise a tiny clique, mostly handling the security issues and thwarting the sporadic breach attempts into the data. The true boss is an Algorithm.
Similar is the case for Amazon, Alibaba or any other herculean enterprise. The number of data bits collected from the billions of users worldwide is in trillions at a minimum — a mind-bogglingly gargantuan number. All of this information is far beyond human comprehension. The deliberate assortment and analysis of this massive data are impossible for any human mind, or the collaboration thereof. This is where the Algorithms come in handy. They receive the data, analyze and classify it accordingly so that it can easily be tracked back when necessary.
Does something sound alarming? All of this data is concentrated in the hands of a single corporation and can easily be misused, like for disseminating propaganda or fanning conspiracy theories. Though there is rigmarole security at work, data misuse is still a formidable danger. The real threat, however, is of identity.
Down goes the identity
In his 2015 thought-provoking bestseller Homo Deus, Israeli Historian and Philosopher Yuval Noah Harari extensively surveys the modern ubiquitous creed: Humanism. According to Harari, in 21st Century, a single Humanist package pervades the globe — from elections to education all the way to arts, everything is evaluated through the Humanist lens. Humanism essentiality advocates for individuality by arguing that every individual possesses a real, immutable and static ‘inner essence’ that imbues the universe with meaning. The judgment of right and wrong is done based on its impact on the individual. This is why homosexuality is no longer a crime in most countries, and women are not disenfranchised. Humanism argues that our ‘essence’ is inherently infallible. True, it is enshrouded in multiple layers of fake-news and empty propaganda, but deep inside, it is pristine. If accessed, our ‘essence’ can provide the truest answers to our mundane dilemmas: Who to vote for? What to buy? What to value? And so on.
To answer such questions, our ‘essence’ must be liberated from the humdrum earthly fetters and be provided with maximum freedom. The proponent of these values is liberalism, and liberalism, Harari argues, is an outgrowth of humanism. Freedom, in short, is an essential determinant of what it means to be human; it is a linchpin of human identity.
The education sector in inclined towards humanism, this is why children are taught to think for themselves. Arts and aesthetics adhere to the humanist values, that’s how we get the mantra of ‘ beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Humanism has been the chaperon of economics, that’s why the doctrine of ‘customer is always right’ prevails. The gravitation of politics to humanism has given way to the slogan of ‘Voter knows best’.
The greatest threat to humanism, Harari argues, emanates from the laboratories. Humanism argues that every individual has an inner essence — a ‘self’ if you will — that provides meaning to every action in the world. Discoveries in life sciences say otherwise. A series of experiments conducted by the Israeli-American Psychologist and Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, concluded that we do not possess a single immutable ‘self/essence’ but a doublet thereof. There are two roughly opposite forces acting within as. These two selves can be thought of as the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘narrating self’. Where experiencing self keeps a moment to moment record of our consciousness, the narrating self identifies the most intense and the ending period of the experience, averages them and rates the overall experience accordingly. Though this experiment provides ample evidence to expostulate the belief in ‘self’, it does not address the real threat: the threat posed by AI.
Harari further adds that Humanism serves as the bedrock for almost every society on the globe. Democratic governments are elected based on the ‘feelings’ of the voters, not based on their rationale. If it were about the wits, illiterates wouldn’t have equal voting rights to scientists and historians. The advancements in the life sciences have shown that the ‘Organisms are Algorithms’. Though the explanation of this clause requires a deep dive in biology and psychology — especially into the origin and purpose of human consciousness — we can briefly describe it as: the factors (genes, chemical and electrical signals) determining the behaviour and emotions of an organism are predictable and manipulative in nature. Given ample data about the organism and enough computer power, its desires and actions can be predicted beforehand and manoeuvred at will. This single snippet is the nail on which the entire topic hangs.
AI is getting ever more productive with the influx of the trillions of bits of data every day. If organisms are algorithms, which is the most probable case, they can be predicted and manipulated. Install enough number of bionic sensors each measuring a specific vicissitude of the body, the entire information about the body and psyche of a person can be known. With enough tricks and artifice, one can easily befuddle a person, but fooling an algorithm that is aware of the nature and concentration of every hormone in your bloodstream is harder — if not downright impossible. Once the Algorithm has gleaned enough data about my voting intentions for the imminent elections, it can easily manipulate my desire.
Suppose I’m a staunch adherent of Humanism and following its tenets, I’ve conducted enough meditation, gotten in touch with my ‘essence’ and got the requisite response i.e. vote for contender A. The algorithm is cognizant of my intentions; it is constantly monitoring my body and sending the data to the headquarters. The tech gurus in the HQ are now aware of my desire which, unfortunately, does not resonate with their predilections. They program the algorithm to tweak my decision. Through memes, articles, passages, photos and videos on my accounts on the mainstream media, the Algorithm is continuously feeding me with empty propaganda. By showing photos where perhaps contender A has been admonished as ‘evil’ and ‘malicious’ or by highlighting the the subte slips of tongue in his speeches, the Algorithm is slowly shaping my entire perspective. My fondness for Contender A is slowly diminishing and I’m mysteriously getting more fascinated by the second candidate, the Contender B. By the demonization of one and the deification of the other, the Algorithm is gradually tailoring my decision.
Election Day arrives. The shenanigans of the Algorithm come to fruition and I neglect Contender A to vote for Contender B. That’s how an Algorithm can veer your desires before you even stop to think of it. This might sound exaggerated and quixotic but, as we’ll see shortly, it has already happened. If humans are whimsically manipulated, the idea of inherent freedom drowns. Democracy becomes obsolete and as the notion of ‘self’ or ‘inner essence’ cannot survive. Humanism founders, and so does the human identity.
Facebook knows better
‘That was purely speculative’, you might say. I honestly hope so, but the researches and statistics, I’m afraid, are apprehensive. According to a Pew Research Center report, nearly half of American Facebook users count on the platform to deliver their news. What if the tech pundits decide to steer their users at will? True, there are privacy laws in every country that vow to protect the data of its citizens, but these laws are, at most, malleable. In 2014, Facebook published a detailed report of an online experiment conducted on 689000 users in 2012. Through the process of “Emotional Contagion”, Facebook had successfully altered the emotions and moods of its users with just a few keystrokes. This engendered a massive outcry and many demanded Facebook be dragged on trial. Fiddling the psyche of their users was surely unethical, but not illegal. Therefore, no trial was conducted and no restrictive ban was imposed on Facebook.
This is a firm metric to account for the tech giant’s clout over our data. Facebook Algorithm wields the power to misguide its users. By cherry-picking certain photos and videos, or by changing a few settings here and there, Facebook can easily nudge you through the above-mentioned process.
In another experiment in 2012, two months before the Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney elections, a Facebook researcher Soloman Messing tinkered with the news delivered to two million American users. Messing‘s intentions were benign: by supplanting the sponsored content, funny videos, announcements or photos with hard news, Messing wanted to see if this act can impact the political behaviour of the users. The survey sent after the experiment concluded that the voter turnout at the elections had increased to 67 percent from the previous average of 64. To remind you, the news used in the process was genuine. If an Algorithm can alter our political behaviour just by showing us more news than average, what would happen if it — or its masters — choose a more insidious path? I can’t imagine!
Various studies have firmly concluded that users do not control their Facebook feed, instead, the Facebook feed manipulates the users. This is why a 2-minute Facebook break from studies can amplify into a whopping 30-minute procrastination. Other researchers have found out that with just 300 likes, Facebook can know and predict you more accurately than your spouse. By merely analyzing your facial pattern, an Algorithm can identify your sexual orientation with 91 percent accuracy. Imagine if this information is promulgated in a homophobic country? Every time you like a post or make a comment, take a break to remind yourself about the impact. Your data is not yours; it belongs to Facebook. They decide who can view your posts or whose posts you can view. The Algorithm is getting incessantly accurate in predicting your choices and manipulating your desires. In short, you are hackable.
‘That’s truly terrible… but the computer geeks can surely incapacitate the Facebook Algorithm’, you might think. Well, there’s no clear answer. Yes, they can shut it down immediately or curtail its ambit to the Big Data from billions of users worldwide. But that’s not a likely scenario. Facebook already suffered a derogatory penalty of 5 billion dollars for data misuse under the Cambridge-Analytica scandal in 2019. This left a serious blow to their economy and caused its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to climb to 8th position from the previous 5th in the list of the richest people on the planet. They can’t afford to shut their entire business. The best way to generate revenue is to fixate your users on the platform for as long as possible so that they can be fed with more ads. Facebook employs a humongous Algorithm that uses machine learning (the ability of the AI to teach itself through practice, pattern recognition and data assortment) to improve itself. Various teams contribute to a minuscule fraction of the Algorithm, but no single team is aware of the overall code. Frankly speaking, the Algorithm has gone so complex that it is no longer intelligible to anyone. Not to you, not to me, not to even its creators. If the Algorithm somehow decides to tighten its grip around our data, we might not know it. That is terrible, but it is true. If you have the guts, you can sacrifice your privacy and provide your Facebook data for a personality test here. This might give you an idea of Facebook’s might.
Unjust and biased
In her wittingly named book Weapons of Math Destruction, American Mathematician and Data Scientist Cathy O’Neil explores the not-so-great outcomes of the increasing utility of Algorithms. She notes the unjust and prejudicial behaviour of Algorithms through various incidents. The recidivism models employed the Courts in USA label Black and Hispanic males with a higher risk of relapse in crime than the White males. The metrics used by the Algorithms don’t account for their chequered history, financial conditions, educational paucity and, in extension, lack of economic opportunities. A 2013 study of predictive policing by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) concluded that the young Black and Latino men accounted for 40 percent of the stop-and-frisk police checks, even though they comprise a minute 4 percent the population. O’Neil further adds that predictive policing models have been fed with biased data about the Black and Hispanic minorities, which has rendered the Algorithms as inconsistent and biased. They evaluate people through the criminal record of their ‘likes’, not by their personal behaviour. She further writes that the insurance agencies grant health or auto insurances based on your credit score, not on a healthy routine or careful driving. This, apparently, aims to know if you can repay the loans or submit the instalments of insurance on time. O’Neil also gives a detailed account of how for-profit colleges have mooched millions of dollars out of the gullible poor masses through online advertisements, only to grant them a diploma worth equivalent to a high school degree. Erratic Algorithms have jeopardized, and in many cases, caused the suspension of various diligent teachers. In the end, Cathy O’Neil concludes that we are being sorted by Algorithms that we don’t understand. “The era of blind faith in Big Data must end”, she warns.
A look on the bright side
It would be unfair to remain obsessed with the chicaneries of Algorithms and neglect their utility. Artificial Intelligence is being used to ameliorate numerous pervasive global problems and for bettering countless lives. Project Euphonia by Google is actively researching in speech recognition to facilitate people with different medical ailments — like ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) — in communication. Interestingly, Euphonia aims to grant people their lost voices back so that they don’t percept the mechanization of their computerized voices. Verily, an organization devoted to studying life sciences, has deployed AI-enabled eye scanners throughout the world to assist doctors in the diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy, a diabetic disease considered a major reason for blindness worldwide. iWalk is incorporating Artificial Intelligence with prosthetic limbs to fetch the feel and control of real flesh and bone limbs. AI is being used in African Savannah to identify and thwart poachers from mutilating elephants for expensive Ivory. NotCo is fighting climate change by restructuring the molecular arrangement of plant-based organic materials to recreate the taste and texture of meat and milk. Cows emit methane, a greenhouse gas. By providing people with an ideal substitute, NotCo aims to alleviate methane gas emission by cattle. Researchers in Pennsylvania State University have trained an Algorithm to predict major earthquakes a day to a few hours beforehand. The AI is precise enough to differentiate between a foot thump and a seismic wave. This can buy the city administration more time to evacuate the cities and save thousands of lives. Algorithms are, in short, necessary evils.
The… End?
Some might say that this pessimistic perception is abjectly far-fetched, which, sometimes I think, is correct. But let’s remind ourselves that technology is advancing at an astonishing pace. The internet has been here for roughly 40 Years. The 1969 Apollo mission had less computing power than your smartphone. 17 years ago, Facebook didn’t exist. 50 years back, no one could’ve imagined that a non-human mathematical description will blackball candidates for jobs or discriminate minorities by labelling them as potential suspects of crime. Today, all of this is mainstream. Algorithms will not develop consciousness because they don’t need to. With the mere intelligence, they will be able to manoeuvre conscious humans at will. Prominent names in science like Stephen hawking (late), Elon Musk, Sam Harris and Nick Bostrom have expressed similar concerns on multiple forums. Some fear the mayhem of the job market, others reckon the surfeit dependence on Algorithms as a premonition, but all agree that the concentration of our valuable data in the hands of esoteric Algorithms signals dystopia (sort of). AI is blackballing people for job interviews, loan/insurance grants and is discriminating against minorities. When Algorithms can predict and manipulate our desires, the idea of inherent freedom crumbles; dragging the current idea of human identity with itself. To summarize: the biggest threat to democracies doesn’t originate from the wreckage of Iraq or the autocracy of North Korea, but from the ostensibly benign laboratories.
