Big Data Knows You, Better Than You Do

 No Such Thing As A Free Meal 

There are always strings attached, they say. Perhaps this is nowhere  more true than in the human mind, which believes itself to be in charge  of its own conscious decisions when evidence frequently suggests  otherwise. We, humans, tend to at least implicitly believe that we have  “free will”, which is to say the ability to make choices with them being  in some sense intrinsically determined in advance. Tor  Nørretranders is just one of many researchers who has argued (in his  book “The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size”) that  humans have an over-simplistic understanding of their own minds,  analogous to the User Illusion or simplistic mental model that most people have of their computers. 

Pattern Recognition 

The problem is that the brain and the causes of our behavior are  extremely complex things, and the self-aware, reflective human mind is  no more the master of its own fate than the ticking hands of a clock  decide what hour it is. There is, however, a class of technologies which  can examine the complexities of the human nervous system and draw  powerful, predictive conclusions. That class is the intersection between  neuro-imaging scanners on the one hand, and neural networks and other  machine learning systems on the other. An artificial neural network  trained to recognize and predict patterns in brain scans will frequently  be able to predict when you will do or say something, even before you  yourself are aware of having decided to do any such thing. Whereas the  human mind sees itself only through a glass darkly, we could soon be  utterly transparent to artificial minds of sufficient power. 

Reading the Future on Your Friend List 

Move over tea leaves, there’s a new oracular technology in town.  Scanning a person’s brain for patterns of neural activity is unlikely to  tell you anything about what they’ve done in the past, or are going to  do even a few long seconds into the future. While an artificial neural  network can in principle predict the next second or so of your behavior  even better than you can, by studying your own (biological) neural net,  longer-term predictions are more effective when scrying the crystal ball  of social networks. Social Network Analysis is a big deal in  intelligence agencies and elsewhere these days, with an increasing  degree of AI-automation. It is a sobering thought to realize that where  humans barely know their own minds at all, AI can know your mind by  looking directly into the neural machinery underpinning it, by  correlating your neural activity with your behavior, by looking at your  online social connections with others, or all of the above,  simultaneously. 

Morally Neutral Snooping 

That is the world we live in, now. One thing that hasn’t changed in  this age of technological explosion, however, is that technology is a morally neutral tool.  It is neither good nor bad except in the ways that it is used or  applied. AI is so often depicted as a Hollywood plague of killer robots,  and Big Data as Big Brother, that we can easily forget what an  incredible tool of human innovation, progress, and evolution it could  become. Sometimes it is good to have someone know you better than you do  yourself, and that is when that person is a trusted friend. Society and  industry have a responsibility to humanity, to ensure that AI and Big  Data are our very best of friends, and not our opponents in a world of  accelerating change.

Written for Metric Media by Mathew Twyman
Co-published on Metric Media's official website