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

Fancy Tools - 1

1.

This will come as no surprise to any of you but I am writing these words on a laptop computer.  I am sitting at my desk at home but I could be in my office at work, or in a local coffee shop, or in a hotel lobbying Boston, or a hotel lobby in Mumbai, or the airport in Timbuktu.  Most of the world is not at all surprised by this, but my twenty year-old self would have been writing with a pencil in a spiral notebook, misspelling twenty percent of the words.

In a few paragraphs I will cite some research done by Dr. Dietrich Stout, of Emory University, who is a neuro- anthropologist, a profession that did not exist ten years ago.  I first read about his research in a magazine, but when I wanted to learn more I just clicked on a search engine and I was connected to 364,00 references to him in .53 seconds.  I’m sure that none of this is surprising to any of you, but again, when I was in college, way back when the world was colder, the Celtics were champion every year and Bill Russell was paid $100,001 for the season, I may still have received a magazine describing Dr. Stouts’s work.  But to learn more I would have had to go to the library and search through the stacks and hope to find the right anthropological journal among the hundreds of journals in the library.  Now of course, here are thousands of journals, and almost all of them are accessible in .53 seconds, right here where I am sitting.

Clearly, my computer is a tool, a complex, electronic tool that is connected to a power source. One of the distinctive behaviors that have differentiated humans from other species is our ability to make tools.  We are not the only species that can do this, but we have certainly taken this concept further by far than the crow who uses a stick or the orangutan that uses a rock.  Birds can fly, but we have built planes.  Whales can live under water for hours, people can stay under water for months. As far as we know there is no other species that uses calculus. 

We have reached the level of tool development at which tools are totally interwoven into every aspect of our lives. It has become impossible for us to live the lives we do without them.  We live in homes that are heated and cooled.  We move from place to place in cars, boats, trains and planes.  We use tractors to plant our food and huge harvesters to bring in in from the field. There are refrigerated trucks and planes that ship the food all over the world. We have drugs to kill harmful bacteria, and drugs to keep our hearts beating and drugs to relieve pain. Yes, there may be some people who try to live their lives “off the grid,” but it is impossible for them not to be affected by those whose lives are lived on the grid, even if it is just the negative effects of climate change and pollution.

This brings us to Dr. Stout’s work. He has been studying what happens to people’s brains when they learn to use tools.  He is starting at the beginning.  He is watching what happens to the  brains of people when they learn to make and use the first tools that humanoids made 500,000 years ago, which was before our species, homo sapien, emerged. He has been teaching himself and many students how to make stone axes. He is using more sophisticated tools to watch the changes that occur in their brains as they learn. First he used FDG-PET,  fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography, then he used an MRI , magnetic resonance imaging, to explore how learning to make tools improved the brains of our ancestors. 

Dr. Stout and his colleagues have been able to show that learning a new skill, a skill that is difficult to learn and takes a great deal of practice, will produce changes in the brains of people of any age. These are the kinds of changes that once they are learned, give the person an adaptive advantage.  The people who learned to make and use axes had a better chance of surviving than people who didn’t.  These people also learned to show others whom they associated with, their tribe, how to make tools, and that gave the whole tribe an advantage, and so their society changed, along with their brains.

That is what is happening today.  We are all learning to use new tools, and new tools are being invented and created at a much faster pace than they were 500,000 years ago. Obviously, the rate of change is much faster.  We will not wait another few thousand years to turn an axe into a spear, or a car into a driverless car.

The speed of creation of new tools has been greatly amplified because we now build tools to build tools.  In order to build new planes we first write software programs to write software to design the programs to build the planes. We have already built the computers to run the software. Our lives have become so involved with our tools that the most important skill a person needs to live well and prosper is to be able to control the tools.  However, in many ways, it now often seems as if our tools have such a strong impact on our lives that they control us.

Our tools, especially the electronic ones, have greatly accelerated the speed of change, and this will continue to accelerate due to the changes it creates.  The electronic tools we create help us make those tools faster, help us aggregate more data, which helps us find more patterns and create new algorithms, which shows us more options.. These options are communicated at an increasing speed to everyone and anyone who will make use of that information to create new tools.

If they have not already, these tools have changed the way almost everyone on earth lives their lives.  Jobs have shifted all over the world because people who are in company headquarters in New York can know instantly what production is going on in China, how quickly the product can be shipped to Denmark, and how much money will be sent to the bank in London.  Money itself is only an electronic blip on a screen, and can move at almost the speed of light.

This kind of instant, world wide communication has changed how people meet, learn about each other, and in many cases mate and start families.  I have had several patients who have made friends with people thousands of miles apart, sometimes on other continents. Based on virtual communications they have decided they are in love and have left what they considered boring, unfulfilling lives to seek love and romance miles away.

Yes, several have been swindled and fooled and have returned broke and broken hearted.  But I have seen several people who have found what they had hoped for, or at least enough of it to begin new lives.  One woman left Massachusetts for Hawaii, another young woman had a young man come from Alabama, and another woman began a romance with a soldier who was in Iraq.  He came home wounded, had his leg amputated and a prothesis put one, and then they got married.

All of this would have been very difficult before 2005, when Facebook began, and helped the world to keep in touch.  There were dating sites earlier than that, Match began ten years earlier, but by 2005 a huge portions of the world was on the Internet.  In 2007 the first iPhone was sold. The world, and our brains, have been changing rapidly ever since.

If learning the skill to make a stone axe changes the shape and connectivity of a person’s brain, what does learning to write computer code do to the brains of young, or old, coders?  Is the shape of my eighteen month old my granddaughter’s brains altered as she learned to take my smart phone and push the right spots on the screen to find Elmo? If getting a ping on the corner of your field of vision every twenty seconds alerting you to some new bit of information, one of which may make you change the entire piece of work you’ve been doing for two weeks because this new piece of information says that three old pieces of information are now deemed questionable, what does that do to your brain? or blood pressure? your emotional stability?

The biggest impact of the rapid development of all of these electronic tools has been on our ability to expand our knowledge about who we are, how the world works , and even the universe that we live in.  Since the beginning of the new millennium more has been discovered and learned in every field of science than had been known in the previous four thousand years.  A research question that could never have been asked thirty years ago can now be answered in a week, sometimes in seconds.  So much of wha I learned in college and graduate school is now considered obsolete, or just plain wrong because so much of it was based on speculation, or the best possible guess, when now we have very clear data.  

It is often pointed out that the warehouse size computers that were used to guide the first moon landing did not have the computing power of an iPhone 5.  If we use all the tools we now have we could solve almost all of the world’s problems such as hunger, climate change, water distribution and disease.  The obstacles that remain are financial and political. We are still searching for tools to help interpersonal relationships, and then to get people to use them.

Many questions keep floating into my consciousness: Is this what we want? How can we choose? How can we adapt to these changes?  What skills will be necessary to live and prosper in this new world?  Who will possess those skills?  What about all the rest of the people?

New Mac

I hope to be posting more now that I have my new MacBook.  I can take it with me everywhere and all the time.  I was not the only one in the store who didn't buy a new iPhone or an iPad, but I certainly was in the minority.  Apple certainly seems to have tapped into whatever is the tempo of the time, or perhaps help create it.

I do not have a Facebook page, partly because I don't want to have to not "friend" clients, and mostly because I don't have any more time.  I waste enough writing these rambling thoughts here, and sending them out to people I mostly don't know.  If I had to be coherent and stay in-touch with the people who really were my "friends" then it would become a burden.

And who has time for Facebook?  Probably many of you do. It's really a generational thing.  For us olders, it takes time away from the time wasting habits we developed before all of this instant technology.  I still get one weekly and three monthly magazines, and that does not include the professional journals.  Those journals are soooo last century.  By the time something is submitted, vetted, edited and published, it is either very arcane to begin with, or has been out on the Internet for months, if not years.

I am also on a couple of professional Lists, and they are full of Chicken Little Psychologists who alert me to every possible threat to the profession, possible ethics violation, acts of Congress that need to be responded to ( and I do), and money trends that rumble through the insurance world, none of which have ever been to our benefit.   But the information is there, and I have to have it.

These lists also alert me to the exciting new developments that are revolutionizing our profession.  Most of them turn out to be clever new words that describe a theory or concept that fell out of favor ten years ago when someone else coined a clever new word for something that had been popular ten years before that. But the information is there, and I have to have it.

I also get many more of my referrals or appointment changes through email, as well as updates from current and former clients -- which I think is helpful and informative, but it takes so much time. I'm not on my computer all day like so many people, because I have to actually sit and talk to people.  So, at the end of the day, or when I get home, I have 150 emails, about ten of which are really informative. But it takes a lot of time. So who has time for Facebook?

I get business because of Facebook.  Those old high school sweet-hearts  seem to pop up just when the marriage is getting very bumpy, and even if nothing actually happens, I hear the phrase "you were talking to HER" much more often in my office now than I ever had in the past.

I know that all of this new "instant" technology has had definite changes in how we think, respond, conceptualize and create.  There is a lot of new research going on trying to determine how all of this "screen time" is affecting developing brains.  And I'm sure it is.

Whether these changes in the brain will hurt the creativity of future generations, as I have already read somewhere, or does playing video games lead to violence or ADHD, the later of which is certainly possible.  It doesn't matter.

From what I saw at the Apple store, being constantly hooked into technology is here to stay, or at least until it is replaced by something lighter, faster and even more omnipresent.

Sitting in silence, staring off into space once was the province of catatonic schizophrenics, but I bet now it will become a luxury, and people will pay $1000 a day to go to some spa in the woods and sit next to a tree, while a highly skilled staff member locks away your iPad for thirty-six hours.

Maybe by next summer I'll have one up and running right here on the Cape.  Make your reservations now.



NB:  The dog is my grand-dog.  She is bigger now and better behaved. Very affectionate, very fast, but a bit skittish.