Month: April 2016

Reading Assignment 12 – 12 April

From the readings and from your experience, what exactly is trolling? How does this behavior manifest itself and what are its causes and effects?
What ethical or moral obligations do technology companies have in regards to preventing or suppressing online harassment (such as trolling or stalking)?
Is anonymity on the Internet a blessing or a curse? Are “real name” policies useful or harmful in combating online abuse?
Is trolling a major problem on the Internet? What is your approach to handling trolls? Are you a troll?!?!?

 

Trolling is an interesting internet phenomenon that was given birth by the advent of anonymous interaction on the internet. From these readings, trolling is a remarkably serious issue in some corners of the internet. Before these readings my understanding of trolling was far more innocuous than what Lindy West’s understanding.

In my “youthful, hip” understanding of the internet, trolling is deliberately posting something for the sole purpose of generating an angry response from someone. While that sounds kind of hurtful, I generally see it done in artistic, subtle ways. Many times users like to play the ignorant role and pretend to either be naive or unrealistically extreme in their post to generate some level of frustration from another user.

But what many of these readings had to say seems to blur the line between trolling and outright abuse. When some ignorant, short-sighted, cruel anonymous user noted that Lindy West had no need to worry about getting raped, they weren’t trolling. They were being deliberately hurtful. Their purpose wasn’t to elicit a frustrated response from Lindy. It was to silence and hurt her. Perhaps my understanding of the trolling craze is skewed, and I’m giving internet users too much of the benefit of the doubt, but I see trolling as skillful, innocuous, and funny, but blatant abuse, threats, and stalking are an entirely different criteria. I often laugh when I see on Reddit some crafty user post some delightfully ignorant comment since I believe that person is doing so thoughtfully for the purpose of humor. I liken trolling to sarcasm, and indeed, sarcastic and self-deprecating jokes can often be some of the funniest of all.

What I don’t wish to convey, however, is the notion that I stand for the hurtful and abusive comments people leave on the internet. I do believe that companies have an ethical and moral obligation to do their best to suppress such rhetoric, but I’m also realistic in my beliefs. There’s simply no way that Twitter could accurately and appropriately handle every abusive tweet, even for a day. The burden is on us, as a twenty-first century society, to grow up and think before we post. We need to consciously tear down the wall of anonymity and consider whether or not you would say such things to someone’s face.

But anonymity needn’t be removed from the internet. On the contrary, it ought to remain in tact. I see Facebook’s desire to require a “real ID” to have an account as an admission that it doesn’t believe its users are capable of polite, non-abusive discourse. That’s not the right way to tackle this issue. There are clear and documented cases where anonymity is crucial to the existence of some online accounts, such as Iranian online accounts where Iranians can be arrested for the content they post online. By taking away anonymity, we’d be punishing everyone for the sins of the misguided and ignorant, and while that’s not an unprecedented course of action, it’s certainly not one I’m fond of.

Let’s take a step back now. How important is the issue of online abuse and harassment? (I’m avoiding the term trolling because I don’t believe that’s the issue at heart.) Well, it certainly pains me to think that some people can’t enjoy social media because they choose to put powerful and controversial ideas online. People say that if you can’t handle the criticism, then you should just get off of the internet. Well that’s certainly a pretty near-sighted absolute (and only a sith deals in absolutes). At the same time, I believe that people ought to enter into the internet with a certain level of expectation of the, shall we say, anticipated aggregate IQ level. People are dumb, and anonymous people are worse, but I don’t think this is an issue of national importance. Yes, I’m a troller (in person and online), but I’m not the abusive, hurtful brand that many of these articles describe, nor do I plan to take many of their words to heart.

P.S. Imagine this: Mr. Krabs posts a bold new plan for the Krabby Patty. He wants to make a vegan derivative, but someone goes to krustykrab.com and posts that Mr. Krabs is a crusty old gnarly crustacean with no business sense and a lifetime member of PETA. Now that doesn’t seem very kind…

Reading Assignment 11 – 5 April

From the readings, what is artificial intelligence and how is it similar or different from what you consider to be human intelligence?
Are AlphaGo, Deep Blue, and Watson proof of the viability of artificial intelligence or are they just interesting tricks or gimmicks?
Is the Turing Test a valid measure of intelligence or is the Chinese Room a good counter argument?
Finally, could a computing system ever be considered a mind? Are humans just biological computers? What are the ethical implications are either idea?

 

Artificial intelligence (AI), simply put, is the ability for machines to act intelligently. That is to say, if a machine can act intelligently – similar to how a human would act – it has artificial intelligence. There are several varying degrees of AI, ranging from strong AI – the ability for a machine to think like a human and explain how a human thinks – to weak AI – the ability for a machine to think like a human in some small, particular way. For example, there are instances of AI all across our world today. Machines can think and reason like humans in simple ways. Google’s AlphaGo has become extremely proficient at the ancient board game of Go and can behave similarly  to (well, better than) a human, but in only one very specific instance – the game of Go. AlphaGo cannot reason like a human across multiple aspects of life. As Kris Hammond so eloquently put in his article, “I may not want the system that is brilliant at figuring out where the nearest gas station is to also perform my medical diagnostics.”

Given the definitions we have above, AI is simpler to achieve than I previously thought. Machines simply need to reason like humans or give an outcome similar to what a human would choose, and it can be technically deemed as intelligent. But AI in that sense is very different from human intelligence because it is following a very narrow set of rules and generally has no ability to reason well with new, obliquely contextual information. For the sake of the rest of this reflection, I’m going to consider AI to be that kind of strong AI listed above – the ability for a computer to think and reason similarly to a human and apply that reasoning to a wide array of situations.

There have been many interesting developments in the past several years in the world of AI. We’ve seen spotlight performances from IBM’s Watson and Google’s AlphaGo, and there’s been an emerging utilization on software assistants such as Siri and Cortana. So are these kinds of machines proof of AI? No. In the case of Siri and Cortana, they simply use speech recognition software to translate text to speech and generally just perform a Google search. Sometimes they can pull out key words like “send” or “set alarm” and will perform an alternate, hard-coded action. This is not AI, but just a helpful interface to the Internet. Google’s AlphaGo is a little better, but it has such a narrow use, and the way it reasons out a good move in Go would most certainly not help me decide which classes to take next semester (if I had that option… 😥  ). IBM’s Watson is probably the closest thing we have to AI at this point, but even that simply uses sophisticated software to understand human language and perform refined encyclopedic searches.

So how do we know if we have something with AI? Some argue that the Turing Test is a good measure of whether or not something is artificially intelligent. In this test, a human user is communicating through text with another human and a computer, and the identities of both are unknown to the participant. If the user cannot correctly assess who the human is and who the computer is, the machine is said to be artificially intelligent. To me, this is an acceptable measure of intelligence. If we want a machine to be able to reason and judge like a human to consider it intelligent, then the ability to behave like one conversationally is surely a good example of human reasoning. Some argue, though, that the Chinese Room thought experiment refutes this notion. In the Chinese Room, a person, who knows no Chinese and has only English instructions on how to convert English characters to Chinese symbols, could appear to know Chinese to the outside user based on inputs and outputs. I don’t believe this is a sound counterargument, however, for the same reasons why I believe that strong AI is ultimately possible, just not yet attained.

To me, we are all just biological computers. (I will not dare to enter into the conversation of souls, which are unique to humans. The ability for a machine to reason like a human is separate from the soul, in my opinion.) We are all born with a basic set of rules, and we call those instincts. We’re generally unsure of how to control our outputs – we see babies flail and cry unintelligently – but we have the ability to receive inputs and slowly piece together inputs and outputs. Eventually we learn how to balance, walk, and speak. I believe that we could program a machine with a basic set of rules, sensors and motors for inputs and outputs, and the ability to rewrite its own code to adjust. This would give rise to human understanding and a human thought process.

While this is a cursory justification for the possibility of strong AI, I certainly believe it’s possible, just not yet attained in any sort of way. When you reduce what we know and how we act to inputs and outputs, I believe we act similarly to a very sophisticated computer. Needless to say, this is a controversial subject.