Tools that Think for Us

Section - A  — Big Data and Algorithms

In March of 2016 a computer named Alpha Go, took another big step towards showing that our new tools are capable of solving more complex problems. It beat the world’s best GO player at that ancient game which has almost an infinite number of moves. This was more difficult than just combing through tons of data like Deep Blue did when it beat the worlds’ best chess player, Gary Kasparov, in 1997, or when Watson beat Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings at Jeopardy in 2011. In this contest, Alpha Go beat Lee Se Dol four matches to one.  It showed that a software program developed at Google could learn from experience and improve its own performance.  

The program was designed to improve itself based upon it’s successes and failures, even in very complex circumstances. That’s what smart humans do, but the machine’s approach was very different.  Another major difference between the machine and human competitors, is that the machine was unaffected by fatigue or psychological pressure.  Lee Se Dol emphasized that difference in his post-match interview. "It is different, there's no doubt. First of all, its not human. It took time for me to get used to its playing style," Lee said."It's not shaken up psychologically and stays focused right until the end," he said.  

It seems that one of the reasons that Lee is such a great champion is his ability to read his opponent and to push a person to his limits. People react when they feel they have made a mistake or if they think they are beginning to lose (see: Trump).  That was not true with Alpha Go.  Observers felt the machine made a strategic error early in the last match, but that didn’t upset it  — it was unaware of it really, since it is not really “aware” of anything, and it never gets “upset.”  As play continued it was able to make the necessary corrections.  

Besides the obvious advantage of computing power, it is this  lack of emotion that is the major difference between people and our machines and tools.  Machines have no prejudices or biases; they just look at the data.  And the data is another big difference.  The start of the new millennium was the time that the term “Big Data began to gain a lot of traction.  People in many fields were realizing that the amount of information that was being produced, and the amount of different factors that computers could collect and analyze, was way beyond what any human mind could keep up with, or make sense out of.  

“Big Data” is now the term for how machines do that job for us.  Big Data is the answer to the problems of being overwhelmed by the five “Vs” of information: Volume, Variety, Velocity, Variability and Veracity.  What many people don’t realize is how pervasive the use of Big Data has already become in our lives, and it will play a much greater role in the future.   It is what every retailer uses to follow what we have looked at, what we bought and then determine what they can sell us next.  It is what every political party uses to see who we may vote for, and how they can try to change our mind.  It is how sports teams decide what players deserve a lot of money.  It is what your insurance company uses to decide how much risk there is in your life. It is what doctors are using to help with diagnoses and treatment.

For several years now I have been trying to persuade my colleagues who do psychotherapy to take advantage of the capabilities of Big Data to improve their diagnostic skills and clinical interventions.  The overwhelming response I’ve received has been that would be one of the most counter-productive and anti-clinical actions anyone could take.  It would remove the element of therapy that is most important to making it work, the “human” element.

I strongly agree with that.  Because what  the “human” element really means is to make a decision based upon intuition, and emotion.  A person’s intuition comes from his or her own experience and that experience is very limited compared to all the data that is complied by a super-computer.  Likewise an emotional decision, which is a major element in almost all human decisions, is very biased as it is based upon that person’s immediate, protective needs, or short-term desires. This is true, even for therapist (imagine that).

Big Data takes the huge volume of data that is feed into it.  Sorts through it all with great speed (velocity). It finds regular, reoccurring patters in the Variety of the data, and can check on the Veracity of those patterns.  It does this with no pre-conceived ideas ( If it had a mind it would be an open mind, but of course, it doesn’t have a mind), and it does it all much faster and more accurately than any person can.

Big Data can find early indications of depression in ways that no clinician can.  In fact it can detect signs of depression even earlier than the person who is becoming depressed. There are examples of machines showing that when a person’s activities show minor changes, that it could either be a good sign or a bad sign.  If a man has been going to Home Depot, or Auto Zone almost every weekend for five years, and then he stops going, it may indicate that he has found a girlfriend who he values more, or he is getting depressed and no longer cares about his home or car as much as he always had.

There are many such patterns that Big Data already has about all of us.  We all have generated data that gets fed into huge data bases that are kept by retail companies, credit card companies, governments, political parties, and who knows who else.  It is not hard to track what we buy, how we spend our disposable income, what books and movies we watch, how much we exercise, what kinds of foods we eat, who we spend time with, and what vices we enjoy.  From all that it is easy to generate what we are about to do next. “People who listen to David Bowie also like David Bryne” is one of the more innocuous examples. If anyone could access the data you have voluntarily complied on you phone they would know much more about you, and be able to make more accurate predictions about how you will behave than you probably could for yourself.

But the main advantage / disadvantage of Big Data is that it doesn’t care. It shows things that are counter-intuitive, or that people don’t want to accept, for example that children who are raised with two parents of the same sex grow up to be heterosexual at the same rate as children of children raised by heterosexual parents, or that Republicans have the same general IQ level as Democrats, or that it’s better to have LeBron on your team than Stephan Curry.

These computer tools we have created will only get better at what they do. As we can see from the GO game, they will improve by correcting their own mistakes. Many more of our decisions will be guided by computer algorithms. This will be true for large scale decisions such as finance, city planning, health care, and elections, as well as individual decisions, such as our choices in music, restaurants, schools, or job fitness. 

Do we want this kind of guidance?  Will we accept it and use it?  Will we even be aware of how much we are being influenced?  How many of these algorithms are made for our best interest, or are the there to promote someone’s profits?

Coming Next:  Section B: But We Are Human

Presentation 2

My presentation will be this Saturday at one of the big convention hotels half an hour away.  I will give my talk in the middle of the afternoon, when most people will be tired and sick of being there. But they have to stay to the end to get their CEUs.

I'd better be entertaining.

The point of my talk is to try to get Psychologists to realize that it is time they moved into the 21st Century.  A great deal of marvelous and exciting scientific work has been done since the turn of the century.  A lot of it is very relevant to Psychology, but not in Psychology.  It has been done in the fields of genetics, brains science, cognitive science, neurology, and even anthropology and architecture.  In addition there have been great leaps forward in computer technology, the collecting of Big Data and using it to find patterns.

This is already being done by companies such as Ginger io and Lyra, among others.

In preparation for my talk I've been bringing up these developments to many of the therapists I know.  They look at me kind of stunned.

What about confidentiality?
What about the centrality of the patient/therapist relationship? They wonder.

To which I answer :

What about the school shootings?  What about the rising suicide rate?  What about bullying?  What about domestic violence?  What about the rise in opioid use and over-doses?

How are mental health professionals really helping to solve these major problems?

What if a lot of these things could be found and prevented with the use of Big Data and computer discovered algorithms?

What's wrong with that?

Can Big Brother really be like a good Big Brother, and be helpful?
What if it is your doctor's office and not the government?

Trust?

Too late.  It's already here.

Out There

I have always been very interested in cosmology -- as opposed to cosmetology, which never helped me very much.  I remember way back, reading about the discovery on the microwave background, in the mid-1960s, by two guys at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson.  It was the first real evidence that there was really a Big Bang.

The two great, almost unanswerable questions have often been of interest to the same people.  They attract me, partly because I always find myself thinking is big terms, and as my wife often points out, I get a bit sloppy with the details.

The two questions are "Where did we come from? -- How did ALL of THIS happen? and What is consciousness? -- How does that happen?

Even twenty years ago most scientists seem to feel that the answers to those questions was out of reach, and would stay that way for a long, long time.  Some even were ready to say that our little minds were not really capable of understanding all that.

Now, their doubts may be still true, but our little minds, or at least the combination of many little minds working with some great assists from wires, chips and 1s and 0s. have been able to come up with some very enticing ideas, and some fascinating possible explanations.  It may be proven at some point that all of these theories are just very clever ways of entertaining ourselves, but the whole process of searching for the answers seems much better and more useful than just walking away, or getting annoyed at the question.

I have just begun to read Our Mathematical Universe, by Max Tegmark, one of the physics professors at the local tech school. He is trying to make the case, and he admits that it is a bit beyond the usual realm, that the universe is really based on, and governed by, mathematics.

The scary part, and I have not really gotten that far into the book, is that from my own work with people, and trying to figure out why they do what they do, in terms of behaviors, thoughts, feelings, decisions, relationships and all, I have always had thoughts similar to that.

I do not think in numbers, or use beautiful mathematical formulas, but I have always felt that there are so many causes, factors and influences of behavior that a person's actions are really the result of all the combined, interactive influence of all of them, much more than having the person him/herself, make independent decisions.  I can remember way back when IBM was first becoming prominent and computers were beginning to become impressive machines, that I thought if this gets big enough, we could feed all the factors into this thing -- person, place, parents, culture, subculture, birth order, climate, genetics, nutrition, environmental toxins, diet, friends, school --- everything--- then we would be able to predict, with some degree of certainty, given what was happening to him or her, what he or she would do next.

We are not there yet.  But it is coming, kind of, and sooner than later.  And we will probably buy whatever it is they are selling, because that is what they will do with that information.

More of this, much more, later (and later).

Reading and Thinking

Back to work, for now, and chugging away.  But also, at other times reading.
Two interesting articles about what is happening in our times and what is coming soon, are in fairly popular magazines.  The first is an excellent description of the agony of living with chronic, life-long panic and anxiety.  It is the cover story of this month, January/February, 2014, Atlantic.   It is written by the editor of the magazine, Scott Stossel.  He is unflinchingly honest about how anxiety seeps into almost every action in his life.  He talks about the many ways he has tried to cope with it, and how much he still struggles.

For anyone who has  ever had a panic attack I think this would be very helpful reading, unless of course, thinking about anxiety makes you anxious.

Related to that is an article in last week's (January 6, 2014) New Yorker.  It called The Gene Factory, and it is written by Michael Specter. The article is a description of BGI --Beijing Genome Institute, which is a Chinese company that is sequencing the  genes of all sorts of living organisms, from viruses to people with all different kinds of diseases as well as, and this is the new part, personality traits.

The article talks about how China does not have much in the way of what the West considers strict moral or ethical guidelines.  This company is much freer to attempt to find  a genetic basis for cognitive and personality traits that could lead to more desirable citizens. They are gathering the genes of people who test higher on I.Q. tests, or on other tests for creativity.  They are putting down the first steps for something that has been avoided in this country, the quest for designer babies.

On of the frightening differences is that in China it might be the State that is doing the designing more than the parents.  What traits the government may find desirable may be worrisome for the rest of the world.

Of course, China is the country that sends dozens of the children who are projected to grow tallest of to be trained in basketball from a very young age.  The results have not brought many victories.

So many questions about the causes and treatments of human illness, behaviors, and activities rushed through my mind upon reading both of these articles on successive days.  It is clear to me, especially when I deal with people who have always had trouble with such things as panic attacks, that at least part of why it happens to them is that they have some genetic predisposition to be more sensitive and reactive to certain kinds of stimuli, especially social pressures.

But surely, it is much more than that.  Complex behaviors are always the results of complex interactions between a person's physical make-up, the current physical state, their individual history of experiences, which includes their family, their community and their culture.  It is also affected by so many other factors such as nutrition, temperature, stress, interpersonal relationship, past current and projected, and just random events.

Still, with Big Data, and fast gene sequencing machines, as well as comprehensive computerized medical records, academic records, work history, so many trends and interactions and patterns will be found as more people feed all of this data, for millions of people, into machines that compute and compile millions of digits a second.

How much do we want to know about ourselves, our talents our possibilities, positive and negative?  How much would we change?

Of course, we all want to know about everyone else.

In fifteen years some guy will be casting his eye on my granddaughter.  I'm going to want to know who he is.

Big Data 2

Yesterday:  A couple of my patients were talking about how stressful and how constant their jobs were.  Later I met with a few of my colleagues for our annual gathering and we joked about how much money we weren't making.  Most of us can track at least a 20% fee reduction from insurance companies over the last eight years -- beginning long before Obamacare.

Part of the reason work is stressful is the result of how we live in a global economy and many jobs, from running a chain store to developing software to track weather satellites, is often done by teams from all over the world who work together virtually.  That means that someone is always working on it, and everyone is always part of the process, so everyone is "on" almost all the time.  Another reason, and here we begin to get into Big Data, is that costs are tracked all the time too.  Data comes from everyone's computer about who is doing how much of what.  It becomes clear from the data when someone's job is no longer needed, then they can be cut, just like turning off a machine.  It makes it easier because the person who cuts someone else out of the job has no real idea who that person is because they may be working a thousand miles away and not across the hall.

Then because people get cut so easily everyone knows that jobs are not only hard to find, they are hard to keep, so just having a job is a good thing.  That means the employer won't have to pay as much because people want to work, and people know they can be replaced easily, either by someone else looking for work, or else by a machine that won't complain.

Because so many people work in ways that are connected to some kind of electronics, whether it is a big office workstation, a hand-held box scanner or a GPS, all kinds of data about how fast people work, who follows rules, who creates better methods and who creates trouble is monitored and algorithms are developed to pick out the "good" workers and weed out the "bad" ones.

The pressure to get something done seems much more intense than it was ten years ago, and certainly much more than it was twenty-five years ago, pre-email, when you could go home from work and not have constant up-dates.

The pressure is great, but to what end?  Most jobs seem to be help business get get better organized so that they can sell me stuff I don't need and probably didn't ever think I wanted.  Most airplane travelers are business travelers who travel to help businesses run other business to make something, somewhere that someone else will sell to me.  While they are traveling they go to hotels and restaurants and use cars and use business machines to keep in touch and to track how they doing, and how much gets made and sold.

It all seems to go around and round.  It creates a lot of stress, but it gives people jobs so that they can have families and buy stuff for their families, which keeps the businesses going

Now everything everyone buys is tracked and priced and that allows someone to advertise to whoever bought what they did to buy more of it, quicker and maybe cheaper.  Which is good because I just got a $900 sweater for $9.99, and if I buy another I get another one free, but I don't need three sweaters, but I  may some day.

Should we sorry about this?  Should we get off the grid?  Keep all our data private, away from the NSA, and Google and Amazon and Macy's and Walmart and Target, or should we just buy another sweater and keep it all chrunning along?

And it's been three years and the US hasnt started a new war.

Big Data

I'm reading the MIT Magazine.  They highlight 35 innovators under 35, about half my age.  Many of them use Big Data to see trends, make predictions, help the world.  Amazing stuff.

One person has constructed software that predict outbreaks of cholera, another has learned to show traffic patterns that can help reduce fuel consumption and help people shop locally.  Another does genetic screening for recessive diseases.  A pharmacist in Ghana has an app that will tell people if the medicine they are taking is real or fake -- a lot of it is fake in third world countries.  On and on, great stuff.

It was Big Data that led to the new statin drug recommendations -- that half the wold should take more pills.  Now there is a reaction to that.  People don't feel that Big Data captures them, and their individuality.

Psychotherapy does not led itself to Big Data.  That is it's strength.  IT assumes that everyone is an individual; everyone is unique.  And we are.  People respond so much better when they are treated as a special. unique individual.

But Big Data sees things that no individual can.  We are all a contributor and a victim of our times.  We breathe the air and drink the water and eat the processed food.  We think the thoughts that come all the media of the day, and those around us.  Things happen because other things happen.  If you can see what is happening you can help, or prevent other things from happening.

But I'm ME, we all cry out.  None of us exactly fit the profile of who WE all are. We can't forget that.

Very difficult to find the balance. Who to trust.  How to decide what to do.