AI is likely a big ruse to get your data!

I recently wrote this piece on Medium.com ( https://medium.com/@WillmsmithSmith/our-human-physiology-makes-us-intelligent-622b34acc1df ). Essentially it describes the shortcomings of Artificial Intelligence applications that attempt to mimic human intelligence because they lack human emotions and feelings. I thought it was so erudite but then I read this story ( http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-43538178 ) in which a a researcher, who tweets under the pseudonym Elliot Alderson, posted a series of tweets on Saturday stating that the mobile application offered by India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, sends personal user data to a third party.

According to Elliot Alderson “When you create a profile in the official @narendramodi #Android app, all your device info (OS, network type, Carrier) and personal data (email, photo, gender, name,) are sent without your consent to a third-party domain called in.wzrkt.com.” I’ll be the first to admit I should take any claims offered by someone who writes under a pseudonym with a healthy degree of skepticism but the story only caused me to be skeptical of what I had written. Even though I did focus on AI’s shortcomings, because it lacks the physiology that makes human beings “intelligent”, I also gave AI credit for the advances it has made to date along with the applications those advances have enabled.

Within ten years of Claude Shannon introducing the concept of a bit in 1948, John McCarthy introduced the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 1956. AI has been on a bumpy development ride ever since but in recent years it was proclaimed to have made significant advances with “statistical AI”.

AI researchers first thought they would use “logic-based” AI but that became intractable so they switched to “statistical” AI. Regardless of the technique used to produce intelligence, logic-based or statistical, the scope of AI is either:

• Weak artificial intelligence (weak AI), also known as narrow AI, is non-sentient intelligence focused on a narrow task. Apple’s Siri is a good example.
• Strong or general artificial intelligence (GAI) which is a machine with the ability to apply intelligence to any problem, the holy grain of AI researchers.

A few months ago I might have left my characterization of AI at that and just focused on my comparison of General AI and Human Intelligence but the Elliot Alderson post awoke in me a new line of inquiry. “Might it be that AI, regardless of the type, is nothing more than a ruse to,” what I now understand to be a practice, “‘harvest data‘, that can then be sold/transfered to the highest bidder?”

Sure enough, just read this chilling article ( https://www.computerworld.com/article/3035595/emerging-technology/artificial-intelligence-needs-your-data-all-of-it.html ) written by Mike Elgan for Computerworld. Mike has worked as chief editor for Windows Magazine, HP World Magazine, Inside HP, HP World News, The Palm Reader, Palm News, Road Tricks, Portable Life News, Laptop Life, and BuzzWords.

According to Elgan,

“Siri, Google Now, Cortana or Alexa, like other AI applications, work by recording your voice, uploading the recording to the cloud, then processing the words and sending back the answer. After you’ve got your answer, you forget about the query. But your recorded voice, the text extracted from it, and the entire context of the back-and-forth conversations you had are still doing work in the service of the A.I. that makes virtual assistants work. Everything you say to your virtual assistant is funneled into the data-crunching A.I. engines and retained for analysis.”

This was really an eyeopening story for me and certainly cooled-down any thoughts I had of my story being anything close to erudite. I now think my story and thoughts on AI in general have been naive, simply because I thought AI researchers were indeed working to achieve something close to General AI. While I still think the idea that computer algorithms might achieve anything like the biologically evolved intelligence of humans to be unlikely, I now also think that it is not going to happen simply because it was not the intention of those building and offering AI applications for it to happen.

I’ll be doing much more research and writing on this topic in the near future but for now I just had to get my most recent revelation out.

Originally published at neutec.wordpress.com on March 26, 2018.