Artificial Intelligence in Media and Warfare

• Updated on: 2019-05-04
• Read original article here

Guest Speaker Paco Nathan, "Evil Mad Scientist", and AI expert, will talk about the podcast we'll listen to before the meetup, and help lead our discussion. This summary and the podcast is from him: It’s said that every army is prepared to fight the previous war. In a sure sign that von Clausewitz has been reading McLuhan, heightened ideological conflicts have become a permanent feature of ordinary American life through social media plus its erosion of traditional news sources. Where we stand vis-a-vis the realities of this battlefield probably says more about us than about the nature of the conflicts. The “reading” material for this discussion is a podcast, on The Next Billion Seconds https://overcast.fm/+KYDOOggxc where Mark Pesce interviews John Robb, author of Brave New War. For a quick preview, see an excerpt from Robb’s blog: Weaponized social networks have seized control of the political process from the traditional political parties and their media gatekeepers. They are in charge now and, more importantly, they are rapidly evolving … getting more powerful with each passing day. The gist is that new forms of governance have emerged post-Internet, for which our beloved technocracies in the US and other eminent nation-states are spectacularly ill-equipped to confront. Robb describes open source insurgency as one of these forms of governance which appears to be prevailing now: Movement operates without explicit leadership or platform. Movement has no set strategy or tactics and is open for anyone to participate. Members rally around some populist “plausible promise”. Members innovate attacks, then replicate whichever ones get traction. Successful instances of open source insurgency include: the “Trump insurgency”, the “#Resist movement”, and even the mechanisms for systematic gender bias identified in Wikipedia. More importantly, Robb examines how advances in AI fit into this picture. He describes the form of a “social organism” which has been evolving over the past 10,000 years, much more rapidly than the human beings involved. Now we face technology giants – admittedly, poorly run companies, albeit fantastically wealthy – as “social AIs”, which have become the reigning social organisms. Consider: how has the nature of war has changed over the last 30 years? (In other words, over the last billion seconds?) Our notion of full-scale wars, major conflicts fought “over there”, has effectively become a thing of the past. Instead, weaponized social networks now spread disinformation at global scale, powered by artificial intelligence and immense computing power, and delivered into our homes – or better yet, our mobile devices. In what has become a battle for hearts and minds, victories are now won online, well in advance of what would be perceived as major conflicts. To wit, are we seeing the birth of the first “supranational” entities, moving nation-states? That’s important to discuss, since the rise of social AIs could lead to the worst tyrannies in history of mankind. The authors John Robb and Mark Pesce discuss how Facebook and China (e.g., “social credit system”) are racing to become more like each other, both pursuing the title of supranational. Keep in mind that Social AIs require steady streams of LOTS of data to improve themselves. While China is limited to ~1 billion people unless its “Belt and Road” initiatives obtain, Facebook has access to 3–4 billion. Though the US population represents a shrinking portion of value to Facebook, the social network is gaining 500,000 new users per day globally. That’s a lot of data and a lot of influence – especially for a company which “owns” one of the top three AI teams in the world. Something to think about. Along with that goes the unstated caveat that so many people, at their core, are barking mad.