(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
To now identify children as potential suicide bombers, researchers at Federal University Lokoja in Nigeria are working on artificial intelligence by making machines self-learning.
Welcome to 2018 – the year when AI, or artificial intelligence, takes over for "big data". Let me cite some examples: The Donders Institute in the Netherlands has presented a system that can scan your brain to easily reconstruct images of faces you have seen. But most of us are already using, more or less consciously, artificial intelligence through, for example, Apple's Siri and Google's Gmail. The latter reads your email and is happy to suggest reply options. Google also tracks your searches and sends you relevant ads. And companies like Amazon and Netflix monitor our preferences and suggest appropriate purchase products or series / movies to watch.
Totalitarian? In Oslo at the Partner Forum in December, Technology Council Director Tore Tennøe pointed out – during a debate on George Orwell's book 1984 – that Orwell was wrong about where the future totalitarian social system would come from. So it is not the Soviet, but the United States, more specifically the San Francisco hippies, who have created today's new surveillance – the West Coast's Facebook, Google and others.
The Economist shows that annual investments in artificial intelligence have increased as many as 26 times from 2015 to 2017 – to now over 180 billion kroner. The giants buy small, promising startups, compare Google's takeover in 2014 of the small English AI company Deepmind for 4 billion. Ten years ago, ExxonMobil and General Electric were the world's largest companies – now Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are the largest.
We are many who become addicted to Google.
And Google? We are many addicted to Google's search engine, mail system (Gmail), smartphone (their Android), video site (YouTube) and soon GooglePhotos (which scans and groups faces), payment system (GooglePay) – and maybe one day Google (Alphabet) self-driving car Waymo.
Back to Partner Forum, called "Breakfast with Bernt": Professor Bernt Hagtvedt still thinks – how ironic is he really? – that today's students are thoughtless and spiritually lazy. He pointed out that the totalitarian Orwell described, as much as changes your thinking habits, beyond monitoring and control. If not exactly why 2 + 2 = 5, as in the novel, but "big data" combined with AI will provide management opportunities that both commercial and political forces will have strong interest in. For with new monitoring technology, new legislation also follows. As the Norwegian Data Protection Agency's Bjørn Erik Thon told the audience in the auditorium: PST now wants to collect data in huge quantities to presumably be able to prevent criminal activity mens it is planned. Yes, to move the limit of crime so that yourself thinking wrong being illegal, is not very similar to what Orwell predicted about the future of 1949.
But with increased monitoring, one follows cooling effect: People get scared to comment by phone and email. According to Thon, statistical surveys confirmed this effect following the Snowden disclosures about the United States' massive surveillance of its own population. In Europe, such a widespread intervention in private life is still at odds with human rights: the idea is that if one is constantly monitored, one's ability to think independently goes beyond that. It produces a democratic deficit.
At Berkeley in San Francisco, during my studies in the 1990s, "neural networks" were something completely new in artificial intelligence. Scientists in cognitive sciences and philosophy tried to emulate the human way of thinking. My philosophy teacher – no hippie anymore, he drove a Porsche – had a theory of machine learning based on Chinese spaces and characters, of patterns and programs that were followed, but without understanding or drawing.
At that time, the conference called "Neural Information Processing Systems" attracted a few hundred people – in December 2017 appeared to the entire 8000 audience, including a number of investors and talent scouts. Google was behind the conference, which presented hundreds of surveys.
But today the forecast in The Economist is that the Chinese will take over where the hippies started. China is investing heavily in artificial intelligence – for example, in companies such as Alibaba and Baibu. In China, today, two million people also work with surveillance and rank publicly citizens according to their behavior both online and in public. In other words, Orwell's perverted surveillance community has long since become a reality.
But will our human intelligence be controlled by the artificial? Dan Nixon of the Bank of England documents at least that the use of smart-
phones and new social media are leading to one distraction which reduces your work ability by 10 percent. And with an average phone and web check every three minutes, the constant interruptions create a habit of – or indeed a desire for – distraction. We lose the ability to stay focused and to think clearly.
"Machine learning" may well apply to humans.
