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

My Mission:

During the last few months I have been reading many of the posts one The Mission.  I read how people are trying to help others find pathways improve their careers, their finances, their relationships, and where they fit into the world.  Most are focusing on short and intermediate time frames.  I am older than most of your readers, almost as old as Bernie, and I am interested in the longer term. I wonder about the lives of my children and grandchildren. 

I read how many of your readers are working hard to create a future that will be different in many ways from how we live now, and hopefully, it will be better. 

My Mission, is to start a discussion about that: where are we going?  What are we creating?  Why? What do we want?  What may be the unintended consequences?

I want help people think with a wider perspective.  What will happen to their lives, to their families, to communities, to the world as a result of all of these changes?

I am proposing to write a series of essays, each 1000 to 2000 words, which highlight the many significant changes that are affecting all of us.  These essays will describe changes in areas such as technology, genetics, families, population demographics, the earth’s environment, sources of energy, and medicine.  Most importantly, I will focus on how all of these areas interact with each other to increase the impact on our lives.

At the end of each essay there will be a few questions for people to consider.  These questions are designed to help people clarify how they want to participate and benefit from the opportunities that are being created.  I hope to be able to stimulate a discussion about how each of us can influences the direction and consequences of all of this change.  The flux will always be with us. We can either be swept up and dragged along by the swift current, or we can take some actions now to control the direction of the river, while we each choose the best ways to steer our own kayaks.

Ch-ch-ch Changes

Things are changing. Many things already have.  The world is being disrupted.  More change is coming, and coming faster. Constant change is now the norm.

As we change the world, the world is changing us, as a species.  The type of tasks we need to survive and prosper are different than they were fifty years ago when I was just facing the world as a young adult.  Everything in the world moved much slower.I had to search for information in places well beyond the palm of my hand. The information I could find then, especially in sciences, was probably less than a third of what there is now.  What I was learning in graduate school about Psychology at that time has mostly been disproven or relegated to the archives of “long ago.”

All of the sciences are completely different than fifty years ago.  So are almost all of what happens during the daily lives of everyone in the developed world: how we communicate, how we work, where we work, how we get food, what we eat, how we spend our leisure time, how find mates, how we create our families, what constitutes a family……. Almost every aspect of our lives has been affected by changes in technology, medicine, and the changes in our biological environment and our social environment.

The result of all of these changes is that the people who do well in the future will require different skills than the ones who are doing well now.  In many ways, they will be different kinds of people.

What will you be doing in ten, twenty or thirty years? What about your children or grandchildren?  Do you know how all of these changes will affect you, and them?  Do you think you will be able to choose the benefits these changes offer while avoiding the dangers?  Do you think you know what is coming or will it all just happen to you, and you will have to struggle to cope?

We are living in an fascinating time, a chaotic time.  Many of these new developments are marvelous and fascinating, but so much is happening so quickly that many people are feeling very insecure. I have been a psychotherapist for over forty years and I have witnessed how, even though in many ways our lives are much easier, there still has been a widespread rise in the amount of stress, anxiety and depression in people all over the world. 

On the positive side, it is clear that more than any other time in history, many people are very aware that there is a lot going on. This is good, but we have to take advantage of this realization. We have to ask ourselves many difficult questions, and they are questions that we will each have to answer for ourselves.  There really is no one best way forward. But if you don’t consider many of these questions, you could be swept away and who knows if you will like where you end up.

That is my Mission: to highlight the impact of some of the many changes in our lives, to make the issues clear, and to ask some questions.  My purpose is to start a discussion so that we can all share ideas and perspectives.  We all hope to build a better future. Let’s create the future we want instead of letting it shape who we become.

* * * * *

1. Hey Gottlieb!

Let me begin with a hypothetical:

It’s sometime around 1885.   You are about to attend a meeting with Gottlieb Daimler and a few of his buddies. He is the guy who constructed what is generally recognized as the prototype of the modern, gas-powered, internal combustion engine.

Let’s get all of those innovators together and brainstorm about the long-term consequences of their new product.  Do they have any idea of the effect it could have?  Is there anything they might do differently if they could see how the world looks today?

The invention of the internal combustion engine was the beginning of one of the great technological transformations of the world. That technology changed the world dramatically in ways that we take for granted today.  Almost all of the those changes are seen as “progress,” but many of the secondary consequences are a bit troubling. 

Here are a few of the obvious changes: 

— There has been a great reduction in the need for backbreaking human and animal labor.  

— The improvement in the transportation of people and goods has totally transformed how people live, work, and relate.  

— People are now spread across the world and still get to wherever they need to go, rapidly and easily.  We have cars, trains, planes, buses, trucks, and boats. 

— We have billions of miles of paved roads to help us get places.  We can live in suburbs or exurbs and still work in cities.

— Internal combustion engines now do our farming, build our buildings, pave our roads, fight our wars and blow our leaves away. 

— There is no part of our lives that has not not been affected, and in may ways made much easier.

Of course, there have been some unintended consequences:

— The burning of fossil fuel has been a major contributor to changing the atmosphere and heating our planet. There is now the possibility that it will cause great harm to many people.

— Easy, rapid travel and big machines have allowed people to live in climates and environments such as deserts, jungles  and mountain tops in a way that has destroyed a great deal of the natural balance between the flora and fauna of our planet,  

— There has been an unmeasurable amount of corruption and a great many wars fought to insure access to the gas and oil needed to run these internal combustion engines.  Many of the poorest and most oppressive countries in the world have become unbelievably rich due to having vast deposits of oil and gas.

— Wars have been fought involving the entire planet, resulting in the deaths of millions of people, mostly due to the more destructive power of the planes, battleships and tanks that have been powered by internal combustion engines.  

No one would think to place the blame for the destruction, corruption and pollution on  the people who designed and built those early engines. They had no way of even imagining what was gong to transpire in fifty, or a hundred years after their spark-plugs began to ignite the fuel in those cylinders.  They were really just trying to find something that was stronger, easier to care for, and more dependable than a horse or an ox. 

But perhaps, if there was a way of trying to consider the long-term possibilities, some small revision may have been made the could have kept many of the strengths while avoiding many of the difficulties.  A man named J. J. Étienne Lenoir tried, in 1858  to make an engine using hydrogen as fuel.  Perhaps we should have stuck with that.

Today, we are in the early stages of many such transformational technological creations. Due to the interactions of science, technology, entrepreneurship, and rapid communications, many of these new creations are appearing at once.   We are developing digital technology, nano-technology, and quantum technology.  We are making amazing advances in genetics, engineering, medicine , brain science, robotics, virtual reality, and human/machine combinations. We are working on new, clean sources of energy that will be necessary to keep all these things operating   We are also seeing huge migrations of people who are blending together to create new communities. This is leading to large shifts in the values, expectations and behaviors of everyone, all over the world.

We have the opportunity to use many of these advances in communications and technology to anticipate, in ways that no one possibly could have back in 1885, what the consequences of all of these changes could possibly be. Since we are at such an early stage in so many of these advances we should try to use our new powers of analysis and prediction to help us make choices of what we want to achieve and how we want to use it?  

How can each of us determine which parts of this new world we want in our lives?  We have learned that we cannot depend on governments or corporations or any institutions to be watching out for our best interests. We have to be able to watch over them. 

There will be scientific studies, algorithms and protocols to direct us, but we need to be sophisticated enough to understand them and know what they are designed to do. The hope for the future is that we will gain more freedom and prosperity.  These changes will affect our lives and the lives of future generations, Now is the time to choose, and we need to choose as wisely as possible.

That is why I am writing this series of essays.  They will contain descriptions of many of aspects of our lives which are rapidly changing.  At the end of each section will be questions 

i hope you ask yourself, and discuss with your family and friends. I hope you will add your comments here.  It should help you decide, as much as possible, which of all of the new possibilities you want in your life, and which ones would lead you away from the kind of life you hope for. I hope you will pose your own questions.  The more people who are involved, the more successful we will be. We should all be part of the process of making the new world a better place to live in, and one in which we can all live there together, in peace, with freedom, prosperity, health and happiness.

Questions:

1.   How much time do you spend on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Linked-In, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube,Tumblr, Instagram, etc)?

Do you control it, or does it control you?

Are you getting what you want more than you are bothered?

How many apps do you have to help manage your other apps?

Can you stay away?  FOMO?

2.   If you are experiencing some strange physical symptoms, would you rather have your diagnosis be determined by a your personal doctor? a Watson computer? or a combination of the two?

Which would your doctor prefer?

How old is your doctor?

3.  How much different will our lives be in 2045, the year I turn 100? There are many predictions you can look at: Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Michael Bess, Steven Kotler, many VC people, as well as Mad Max. Many others such as sci-fi writers or corporate think tanks.

What are some of the things we do now that will amaze people in 2045?

That we:

— Let humans drive cars and fly planes?

— Eat food that comes directly out of the ground or the ocean?

— Work more than fifteen hours a week?

All of these questions, and many more will be discussed in the weeks ahead.

Please join me by pushing the green heart and adding a comment in the discussion.

The short answer

"A Mister Richard Fader from Fort Lee New Jersey writes:".......(most of you probably get that, right?)

Anyway, more than one of the questions I received was from far away and it asked, simply, if I thought that there would ever be a time when the people of the world would get along better, and that greedy, power-hungry people would no longer have such a strong influence.

I replied:

I do think that, overall, the world has become more civilized and there is really less torture, fewer huge wars,     and more are  people getting along better. I don't know if you have a chance to read Steven Pinker's 

"Angles of Our Better Nature" but he makes a good case for that.

Yet, it is obvious we are not close to the great wave of human harmony.  I think the global climate change has 

put pressures on countries to fight for basic resources that are becoming more scarce.  
That is a lot of what underlies the problems in the Middle East and northern Africa today. 

I also think that technology has made life so much more efficient that it is becoming more difficult 
for people to find meaningful work, if they can find work at all.

Until those problems are solved in a manner that gives everyone a chance to survive and have a 

decent, but not decadent lifestyle, there will be fighting and trouble.

Take good care of yourself.