The Elephant in the Room

Elephants are incredible, majestic, grand, beautiful & kind. Big too — yes — but we need a new phrase to describe the blatant, ugly truth that people are trying to pretend isn’t there. I read yet another article today, about data privacy, from the New Yorker. It was so biased it warranted response: “..Facebook became a five-hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar company ..by devising the most successful system ever for compiling and purveying consumer data.”

Mark Zuckerberg had no clue what FaceBook would become!

He didn’t know for years after the first funding round. No one did.

We have no idea whats coming next either.

We’re living in an entirely unprecedented time in human history.

The elephant in the room is how far behind a huge swathe of homo sapiens truly are, from the Zuckerberg’s. Its the truth that Trump & Brexit are political results of our ignorance epidemic. And don’t think it’s just the Harvard elite that get ahead, with money for tuition and a privileged lifestyle. I was a broke single mother-of-two who put herself through university for the second time, studying artificial intelligence (AI), arguably at the perfect time. I had no money. I had no parents either. You could also argue that I was lucky to be born in a country that provides student loans and tax credits but it was mainly that I simply had the resolve to step up. I went back to university because I needed to secure my children’s future. I had no idea AI was about to explode the second I graduated.

I do read though. Not books — I never have time for paper, but if its online I’ve been consuming it since 1996 when I got my first Windows PC and email address, with modem. It was [email protected], named after my almost 10lb son (we were in Germany at the time).

I read profusely. Part of my job at NVIDIA is to stay ahead of the AI revolution, reading 10 papers a week and countless articles. My Chrome browser page has eight tabs of papers I need to compress into 5 minute versions that can be easily digested, even by beginners.

I’ve been using the internet since the 90’s. My children were born in this era and I talk to them, so they know as much as I can teach them. They know right from wrong, they know compassion, they have perspective, because I run an online charity powered by social media. It has zero costs. Forget 15% of donations making it to third world countries, we send 100%. There’s no excuse in this era, for anything less.

I read, I share, I listen, therefore I know.

Even when Cambridge Analytica had my data and was sending subliminal and in-my-face posts to my newsfeed — even then — there was no way I would vote for Drumpf. Obviously I couldn’t anyway — I’m British — but Drumpf was clearly the wrong choice. Unfortunately he is representative of the larger problem; uneducated masses unable to make up their own minds, bigotted, unable to see the bigger picture.

What opened my eyes was spending time studying astrophysics. I’m no genius by the way. Anyone can study anything if you put your mind to it, especially if you have the passion. And I fucking love astrophysics. I hated the lab work though. Either way, education is so important.

Giving kids choice is key to success. Teach them as much as you can, let them try as much as they can. Eventually they’ll find something they love, something they excel at. They’ll be happy and on an upward spiral.

Its never ok to judge. Its never ok to be unaccepting of anyone’s beliefs but its also never ok for anyone to force opinions on others. We have free speech and an open internet. Yes — the world has a trillion grey areas but — big picture — we’re all just learning. And we now know that democracy doesn’t work when people are ignorant.

I’m proud that someone somewhere in our wonderful part of the planet thought to enact GDPR. While its fluffy in parts, its a great start. And it affects everyone. Because the internet affects everyone. Even the maasai askari who use it to ask me where they can get solar lamps & more mobiles!

Cambridge Analytica taught us a big lesson in how NOT to act and Facebook are altering their policies, their behaviour as a result. This is how we learn; reinforcement learning. We receive a negative reward, we adjust our behaviour, we try again, to maximise our goal, to converge to an acceptable solution, while the environment continues to change.

“..if there is demand for greater privacy then competition will arise to offer it”. I’m all for that. I pay a stack of money each month for Sky services, so why do I still have to put up with fast-forwarding or waiting-on-mute while shitty adverts cut into my viewing. The BBC nailed that decades ago. I’m more than happy to pay a TV licence in return for no ads (despite little choice of channels) so why don’t I get that same service from Sky? They should learn quickly that players/agents who don’t make the cut, get eliminated. Survival of the fittest. I won’t wait much longer with Netflix et al.

Life is about optimisation, doing our best. The problem with privacy is not about optimisation per se, its about optimisation of the laws surrounding its abuse. The New Yorker article is about the US, a country barely 250 years old, a child in civil-societal respects and its jurisprudence is now starting to bite. AI will continue to disrupt and thats a good thing. If you don’t adapt, you get left behind. Bryan Johnson has a great take on this here. Whether “there are thirty thousand closed-circuit surveillance cameras on the streets of Chicago” — or London is not a problem, unless you’re doing something bad! Unfortunately a lot of those bad agents are also voting for governments too, and they far outweigh the good agents. Obama was a good agent. The entity of the European Union was a good agent. My Mother was a good agent, but our outdated policies killed her too, before her time.

What our global society needs is “big picture” oversight, big enough to overcome all bias and account for all variance, but free from insidious methods such as China’s!? We have a few versions in the higher echelons but we need them at ALL levels. Then, when we do fuck up, its not catastrophic, because —hey, we’re not perfect creatures, that’s part of what defines us. We learn from our mistakes. AI studies bias, especially in the area of AI 4 Good. Remember that the article I refer to is biased to the US and refers to historical incidents when most of the world was biased against women too: “The right of privacy ..” Douglas [a man] concluded, “is a powerful deterrent to any one who would control men’s minds.”

My career is researching the big picture of AI, how it affects everything, everyone. And I’m qualified because I also have the big picture of society from my charity work, the big picture of successful parenting, the big picture of watching the world via internet, including the Overview Effect. I have the honour of working directly with NASA, ESA & The SETI Institute on the Frontier Development Laboratory, a project I helped establish. I see the Big Picture & planetary-scale education is not an easy problem, but its necessary. And the internet helps — a lot! AI has made it even easier. Never before have we shared so much, open-sourced so much and provided entire university courses for free. Never before could you harness the power of a supercomputer from your bedroom. We (society) optimised and we did it fast, because we have to. If we don’t, we get left behind. Luckily agility is the keystone to most tech companies, the ability to learn from mistakes, to fail, to move on. DeepMind is currently going through a painful stage right now, learning and adjusting its behaviour within UK healthcare. Unfortunately, each mistake puts a delay on AI assisting us with personalised medicine, the very thing we lack and thousands more die every year, including my Mother.

Every single person connected with the self-driving car industry is constantly learning and evolving today, driven by competition and the need to optimise the RTA death rate. AI is about optimising our lives. What comes with that is a small sacrifice of privacy. But we must also educate, guide, teach people to be more transparent. As Louis Menand states “kids are always yelling at their parents and siblings, which suggests that there is something primal about the need for privacy, for secrecy, for hiding places and personal space”. Kids are yelling because they want to push the boundaries and do stuff they’re not supposed to. I left my kids alone in the house for a Halloween party once, they ended up throwing pumpkins all over the street and nearly setting a quilt on fire in the sleepover den they’d built! I learn from that too.

Kids need guidance, so do uneducated adults. This class includes racist, sexist, all the folks we cover in our Codes of Conduct. It also covers older kids who’ve never been given proper guidance and love. My daughter is dedicating her life right now to that cause. Education includes compassion, in the absence of real love. We’re failing big time in that respect. There are as many bad voters out there as there are bad parents but education can eliminate them in one generation. There will, of course, always be the “Pollak and Martin’s” to attend to, but overall, I look forward to the technological future of sharing and caring, and I’ll post that on Facebook right now.