Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 15, 2019

A Harvard professor says artificial intelligence is not ready to take over corporate marketing; Michael Schermer describes his concept of constructive conspiracism; A quadruped robot that can climb ladders; The US patent office is hiring an AI expert; and a Steem essay exploring the vulnerability of the human mind to manipulation

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1. Don't Turn Your Marketing Function Over to AI Just Yet - Discussing the working paper, Soul and Machine (Learning), Harvard's Tomomichi Amano says that artificial intelligence (AI) has a fundamental lack of human insight which limits its capability to replace people in marketing initiatives. Amano says, "You can’t do something in business, collect the data, and then expect machine learning methods to spit out insight for you." He suggests that if AI is ever going to be able to do this, it needs to integrate domain specific knowledge that is currently possessed by managers. At present, Amano suggests that the volume, diversity, and complexity of data that would need to be incorporated into the models are so huge that it is not economically feasible to produce a model that can produce context specific insights across the entirety of a firm. Another challenge is the conflict that frequently occurs between personalization and privacy, where privacy restrictions limit the AI's capability to learn about the consumer. This is not to say that AI is useless for marketing, however, researchers are currently working to understand the reasoning behind purchases - known as "attribution", and also to gain knowledge about specific market segments. For the time being, though, businesses need to depend on managers for insights, and managers need to be realistic in their expectations for AI. This HBS working paper was previously covered in Curating the Internet: Business, leadership, and management micro-summaries for October 5, 2019.


2. The Danger Is Real: Why We’re All Wired for ‘Constructive Conspiracism’ - In this essay, Michael Shermer discusses his new, downloadable course, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories. For this work, he cataloged a number of similarities among conspiracy advocates, and noticed a phenomenon which he adapts from Jared Diamond's concept of constructive paranoia. Diamond's concept says that sometimes paranoia is rational, because it promotes avoidance of large numbers of low-likelihood risks where the collective likelihood of encountering one of those risks isn't so low. Similarly, Shermer's concept is constructive conspiracism. In this view, Shermer points that people in general have a tendency to prioritize loss avoidance over realizing benefits, and that believing in conspiracies is a low cost/low effort way to match real world results with these priorities. If it turns out that an alleged conspiracy is false, little harm is done, but on the rare occasions when a conspiracy is true, believers may be able to escape negative consequences. As a result, when people see a pattern that could be a conspiracy or could be random noise, we are all primed by evolution to presume that the pattern has some sort of agency behind it.


3. Quadruped Robots Can Climb Ladders Now - Cats and dogs can climb ladders, but they have trouble with them when the ladders are vertical, especially if the cats are unable to use their claws. Most quadruped robots have trouble with all ladders, because they have no way to grab the rungs. This quadruped, however, has grippers and algorithms that let it climb a vertical ladder. Caveats are that the training was done on this particular ladder, and it failed five times before it succeeded.
   
   Here is a video:

Patent Office Seeks Help From AI - Last month, the patent office posted a job for an artificial intelligence (AI) expert to advice the CIO. The goal is to speed processing of patent applications. The agency received 643,000 patent applications in 2018, which is an increase from 619,000 in 2014. The agency is also continuing its deliberations on whether an AI system can be named as the inventor on a patent. The patent office expects to fill the posted job by next week. h/t Communications of the ACM

STEEM Exploring the Human Mind: Are we manipulable? - Persuasion - In this essay, @ideas-abstractas discusses a concept known as the third person effect. Starting from a debate over whether mystical seeming events in evangelical churches are evidence of the divine or evidence of manipulation, the essay moves on to describe how the mind can be manipulated through this third person effect, which is the tendency of people to think of ourselves and the people who we know closely as invulnerable to persuasion, leaving just the amorphous "others" as victims of charlatans and con-men. According to the essay, the tendency to believe that others are vulnerable to a particular message is greater when we don't like the person transmitting the message or when the message is vague, unclear, or generic. (A 10% beneficiary setting has been assigned to this post for @ideas-abstractas.)

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