Artificial intelligence runs wild while humans dither
Artificial intelligence runs wild while humans dither
Some algorithmic interactions hit a level of complexity
beyond our comprehension
John Thornhill March 6, 2017
As an experiment, Tunde Olanrewaju messed around one day
with the Wikipedia entry of his employer, McKinsey. He edited the page to say
that he had founded the consultancy firm. A friend took a screenshot to
preserve the revised record.
Within minutes, Mr Olanrewaju received an email from
Wikipedia saying that his edit had been rejected and that the true founder’s
name had been restored. Almost certainly, one of Wikipedia’s computer bots that
police the site’s 40m articles had spotted, checked and corrected his entry.
It is reassuring to know that an army of such clever
algorithms is patrolling the frontline of truthfulness — and can outsmart a
senior partner in McKinsey’s digital practice. In 2014, bots were responsible
for about 15 per cent of all edits made on Wikipedia.
But, as is the way of the world, algos can be used for
offence as well as defence. And sometimes they can interact with each other in
unintended and unpredictable ways. The need to understand such interactions is
becoming ever more urgent as algorithms become so central in areas as varied as
social media, financial markets, cyber security, autonomous weapons systems and
networks of self-driving cars.
A study published last month in the research journal Plos
One, analysing the use of bots on Wikipedia over a decade, found that even
those designed for wholly benign purposes could spend years duelling with each
other.
In one such battle, Xqbot and Darknessbot disputed 3,629
entries, undoing and correcting the other’s edits on subjects ranging from
Alexander the Great to Aston Villa football club.
The authors, from the Oxford Internet Institute and the
Alan Turing Institute, were surprised by the findings, concluding that we need
to pay far more attention to these bot-on-bot interactions. “We know very
little about the life and evolution of our digital minions.”
Wikipedia’s bot ecosystem is gated and monitored. But
that is not the case in many other reaches of the internet where malevolent
bots, often working in collaborative botnets, can run wild.
The authors highlighted the dangers of such bots
mimicking humans on social media to “spread political propaganda or influence
public discourse”. Such is the threat of digital manipulation that a group of
European experts has even questioned whether democracy can survive the era of
Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.
It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say we are
reaching a critical juncture. Is truth, in some senses, being electronically
determined? Are we, as the European academics fear, becoming the “digital
slaves” of our one-time “digital minions”? The scale, speed and efficiency of
some of these algorithmic interactions are reaching a level of complexity
beyond human comprehension.
If you really want to scare yourself on a dark winter’s
night you should read Susan Blackmore on the subject. The psychologist has
argued that, by creating such computer algorithms we may have inadvertently
unleashed a “third replicator”, which she originally called a teme, later
modified to treme.
The first replicators were genes that determined our
biological evolution. The second were human memes, such as language, writing
and money, that accelerated cultural evolution. But now, she believes, our
memes are being superseded by non-human tremes, which fit her definition of a
replicator as being “information that can be copied with variation and
selection”.
“We humans are being transformed by new technologies,”
she said in a recent lecture. “We have let loose the most phenomenal power.”
For the moment, Prof Blackmore’s theory remains on the
fringes of academic debate. Tremes may be an interesting concept, says Stephen
Roberts, professor of machine learning at the University of Oxford, but he does
not think we have lost control.
“There would be a lot of negative consequences of AI
algos getting out of hand,” he says. “But we are a long way from that right
now.”
The more immediate concern is that political and
commercial interests have learnt to “hack society”, as he puts it. “Falsehoods
can be replicated as easily as truth. We can be manipulated as individuals and
groups.”
His solution? To establish the knowledge equivalent of
the Millennium Seed Bank, which aims to preserve plant life at risk from
extinction.
“As we de-speciate the world we are trying to preserve
these species’ DNA. As truth becomes endangered we have the same obligation to
record facts.”
But, as we have seen with Wikipedia, that is not always
such a simple task.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017. All rights
reserved.
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