AIWorries

Fancois Chollet is/was an engineer at Google. In this
[article](https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/what-worries-me-about-ai-ed9df072b704)
he writes about what his fears of AI might be.

> But what if we're worrying about the wrong thing, like we have almost
> every single time before? What if the real danger of AI was far remote
> from the "superintelligence" and "singularity" narratives that
> many are panicking about today? In this post, I'd like to raise
> awareness about what really worries me when it comes to AI: the highly
> effective, highly scalable manipulation of human behavior that AI
> enables, and its malicious use by corporations and governments.

> ...[social network companies can simultaneously measure everything
> about us, and control the information we consume.]{.mark} And that's
> an accelerating trend. When you have access to both perception and
> action, you're looking at an AI problem. You can start establishing
> an optimization loop for human behavior, in which you observe the
> current state of your targets and keep tuning what information you
> feed them, until you start observing the opinions and behaviors you
> wanted to see. A large subset of the field of AI --- in particular
> "reinforcement learning" - is about developing algorithms to solve
> such optimization problems as efficiently as possible, to close the
> loop and achieve full control of the target at hand - in this case,
> us. [By moving our lives to the digital realm, we become vulnerable to
> that which rules it - AI algorithms.]{.mark}

![](images/control-ai.png)

> We should build AI to serve humans, not to manipulate them for profit
> or political gain. What if newsfeed algorithms didn't operate like
> casino operators or propagandists? What if instead, they were closer
> to a mentor or a good librarian, someone who used their keen
> understanding of your psychology - and that of millions of other
> similar people - to recommend to you that next book that will most
> resonate with your objectives and make you grow. A sort of navigation
> tool for your life.

> Here's an idea - any algorithmic newsfeed with significant adoption
> should:
>
> 1.  Transparently convey what objectives the feed algorithm is
>     currently optimizing for, and how these objectives are affecting
>     your information diet.
> 2.  Give you intuitive tools to set these goals yourself. For
>     instance, it should be possible for you to configure your newsfeed
>     to maximize learning and personal growth - in specific directions.
> 3.  Feature an always-visible measure of how much time you are
>     spending on the feed.
> 4.  Feature tools to stay control of how much time you're spending on
>     the feed - such as a daily time target, past which the algorithm
>     will seek to get you off the feed.

![](images/mentor-ai.png)

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