Automated Thought Erasure for Cash
AI Engineers come from all walks of life, and the good ones are very skilled at coding, training, and iterating their AI. It's very impressive work to see computer vision and self-driving cars develop so quickly at companies such as Face Plus Plus and NVIDIA.
The people designing the algorithms are just like you and me -- they don't know much outside of their area of expertise, except for maybe a hobby or two and some activism. They spend their time with people that are very much like themselves — they might be from diverse walks of life but they are numbers and code people. And if you haven't debated using Python vs PyTorch, then you ain't in their club.
I have listened to over 100 AI engineers give talks in webinars, do presentations at events online and in the 3D world, as well as respond to aspects of AI research outside of their preferred areas. It was a part of my job between 2015-2020. I got paid to do that. My takeaway is that while the AI community is very good at making cars stop, they aren't very good at understanding how people from other backgrounds think, especially in understanding what people mean when they say something mean.
Most of the AI censors are probably just in it for the job and a chance to get paid to pursue their interest -- AI. However the odds of how interested their coding skills will affect the lives of others who live in different communities with different values is rather low. General platitudes such as "make the world a better place" and "international community is good for the international community" might make it seem the interest is high, but the vast majority probably don't spend a lot of their free time engaging facetime-to-facetime with communities from places they’ve never been to nor heard of. When it's time to punch-out of their AI Censor jobs, it's just like you and me -- off the pub, or go home and take care of the fam. Netflix and Chill. Trump this or Trump that. TACO TUESDAYS!
What could possibly go wrong?
That's where 3rd parties come in. Major SNS companies will sign major deals with groups that claim to have a lot of information on people from different communities. They're Verified Groups! Yay! A recent example is the rise of alternative theories on the COVID-19. Despite being headed by a communist revolutionary who is not a physician and who may have covered up cholera outbreaks in his homeland of Ethiopia/Eritrea, YouTube decided that the World Health Organization would be the end-all-and-be-all for its AI censorship. As a result, if highly trained doctors wanted to tell people about possible alternative treatments on YouTube, they would be shut down. Preventing false information is crucial, but in an outbreak where not much is known about COVID-19, surely having some dissent and discussion in the medical community would be a jolly good scientific way to figure out a variety of possible treatments.
YouTube are not doctors, but they are using WHO’s expert guidelines to help train their AI censorship algorithms which are then turned on to real doctors and eventually silences a bunch of them.
Algorithmically On-Demand Censorship.
Good ol' memory hole. Works every time.
There are other examples I have seen.
Israel is a world leader in AI, and one AI researcher was looking to create an AI Camera program that could spot terrorists by analyzing facial expressions in airports. The idea is that perhaps a person makes certain facial expressions before carrying out a suicide bombing. If these facial expressions could be recognized by an AI camera and processed with a percentage of probability, then it would give airport security advanced time to prevent a suicide bomb from going off. The trade off would be targeted screening by security, but in exchange fewer bombs going off. I can see discussing the issue on both sides.
When this idea was presented to a liberal feminist AI researcher in America, her eyes widened as if triggered by something more than a micro-aggression. "That's racist!" She said.
Why would it be racist? No mention of race was made. But to her, "Israeli AI Suicide Bomber Detector" probably translated to Muslim. And targeting Muslims to her is racist, despite Islam not being race-specific. After hearing about this program, I doubt that the USA AI researcher went and researched suicide bombings and facial expressions and the types of different ethnicities carrying out suicides strikes in and around Israel (I didn't). She most likely walked away thinking of racism from the POV of herself in her own community (like me), not what's going on in Israel. Why? Because she is a busy human who went back to work and then went home to Netflix and Chill.
I hate Netflix. Love Chill.
I am a Canadian living in Tokyo, so I don't know who is right in this situation but what I do know is that these two people — the Israeli Anti-terror AI coder and the US Liberal Feminist AI Coder — are both coding algorithms that may impact our lives. They don't know about each other, and they don't know about you or me but their algos will be flying around the earth's atmosphere, in some sort of cloud wirelessly beaming 1s&0s into connected devices placed somewhere you would never think to look.
I don't trust the experts much because they are so frequently wrong and get promoted afterwards. I do trust my own intuition and can admit to being wrong and consider the internet a place to get information on pretty much anything and accept the risks involved. While the SNS companies continue to employ people who know little outside their tiny bubbles of expertise, expect the random ideas you want to talk about disappear into the memory hole. Why? Because millions of dollars are on the table and if your thought can be eliminated, someone can get paid.
Automated Thought Erasure for Cash!
In a way, it's a way to reinforce everyone into acting the boring normie so that we all just publish photos of pets and food, making the SNS companies corporate friendly for their advertisers to invest in without having to worry about a critical public thinking for themselves.