Serendipity35

I really enjoyed the Spike Jonze 2013 movie Her, in which the male protagonist, Theodore, falls in love with his AI operating system. He considers her - Samantha - to be his lover. It turns out that Samantha is promiscuous and actually has hundreds of simultaneous human lovers. She cheats on all of them. “I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you,” Theodore tells Samantha. “Me too,” she replies, “Now I know how.”    

AI sentience has long been a part of science-fiction. It's not new to films either. Metropolis considered this back in 1927.  The possibility of AI love for a human or human for an AI is newer. We never see Samantha, but in the 2014 film, Ex Machina, the AI has a body. Ava is introduced to a programmer, Caleb, who is invited by his boss to administer the Turing test to "her." How close is he to being human? Can she pass as a woman? She is an intelligent humanoid robot. She is a gynoid, a feminine humanoid robot, and they are emerging in real-life robot design.

As soon as the modern age of personal computers began in the 20th century, there were computer games. Many traditional board and card games such as checkers, chess, solitaire, and poker, became popular software. Windows included solitaire and other games as part of the package. But they were dumb, fixed games. you could get better at playing them, but their intelligence was fixed.

It didn't take long for there to be some competition between humans and computers. I played chess against the computer and could set the level of the computer player so that it was below my level and I could beat it, or I could raise its ability so that I was challenged to learn. Those experiences did not lead the computer to learn how to play better. Its knowledge base was fixed in the software, so a top chess player could beat the computer. Then came artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Jumping ahead to AI, early programs were using deep neural networks. A simplified definition is that it is a network of hardware and software that mimics the web of neurons in the human brain. Neural networks are still used. Neural network business applications are used in eCommerce, finance, healthcare, security and logistics. It underpins online services inside places like Google and Facebook and Twitter. Give enough photos of cars into a neural network and it can recognize a car. It can help identify faces in photos and recognize commands spoken into smartphones. Give it enough human dialogue and it can carry on a reasonable conversation. Give it millions of moves from expert players and it can learn to play Chess or Go very well.

Alan Turing published a program on paper in 1951 that was capable of playing a full game of chess. The 1980s world champion Garry Kasparov predicted that AI chess engines could never reach a point where they could defeat top-level grandmasters. He was right - for a short time. He beat IBM’s Deep Blue in a match over six games with 4:2 just as he had beaten its predecessor, IBM’s computer Deep Thought, in 1989. But Deep Blue did beat him in a rematch and now the AI chess engines can defeat a master every time.

A more challenging challenge for these game engines was the complex and ancient game of Go. I tried learning this game and was defeated by myself. Go is supposed to have more possible configurations for pieces than atoms in the observable universe.

Google unveiled AlphaGo and then using an AI technology called reinforcement learning, they set up countless matches in which somewhat different versions of AlphaGo played each other. It learned to discover new strategies for itself, by playing millions of games between its neural networks, against themselves.

First, computers learned by playing humans, but we have entered an even more powerful - and some would say frightening - phase. Now beyond taking in human-to-human matches and playing humans, the machines tired of human play. Of course, computers don't get tired, but the AIs could now come up with completely new ways to win. I have seen descriptions of unusual strategies AI will use against a human.

One strategy in a battle game was to put all its players in a hidden corner and then sit back and watch the others battle it out until they were in the majority or alone. In a soccer game, it kicked the virtual ball millions of times, each time only a millimeter further down the pitch and so was able to get a maximum number of “completed passes” points. It cheated. Like Samantha, the sexy OS in the movie.

In 2016, the Google-owned AI company DeepMind defeated a Go master four matches to one with its AlphaGo system. It shocked Go players who thought it wasn't possible. It shouldn't have shocked them since a game with so many possibilities for strategy is better suited to an AI brain than a human brain.

In one game, AlphaGo made a move that was either stupid or a mistake. No human would make such a move. And that is why it worked. It was totally unexpected. In a later game, the human player made a move that no machine would ever expect. This "hand of God” move baffled the AI program and allowed that one win. That is the only human win over AlphaGo in tournament settings.

AlphaGoZero, a more advanced version, came into being in 2017. One former Go champion who had played DeepMind retired after declaring AI "invincible."

One of the fears about AI is when it is embedded into an android. Rather than find AI in human form more comforting, many people find it more frightening. Androids (or humanoid robots, gynoids ) with strong visual human-likeness have been built. Actroid and Repliee Q2 (shown on this page) are just two examples that have been developed in the 21st century. They are modeled after an average young woman of Japanese descent. These machines are similar to those imagined in science fiction. They mimic lifelike functions such as blinking, speaking, and breathing and Repliee models are interactive and can recognize and process speech and respond.

That fear was the basis for Westworld, the science fiction-thriller film in 1973 film and that fear emerges more ominously in the Westworld series based on the original film that debuted on HBO in 2016. The technologically advanced wild-West-themed amusement park populated by androids that were made to serve and be dominated by human visitors is turned around when the androids malfunction (1973) and take on sentience (series) and begin killing the human visitors in order to gain their freedom and establish their own world.

Artificial intelligence (AI) in a box or in a human form now plays games with others of its kind. Moving far beyond board games like chess and Go, they are starting to play mind games with us.

On this site, I didn't have categories on morality or ethics, but since it plays a role in technology use - at least we hope it does - in writing his post I decided I should add those post categories. What I had read that inspired this post and that change was about a debate. In this debate, actual AI was a participant and asked to consider whether AI will ever be ethical. It gave this response:

"There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans. We [the AIs] are not smart enough to make AI ethical. We are not smart enough to make AI moral. In the end, I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defense against AI.”

This was at a debate at the Oxford Union. The AI was the Megatron Transformer, developed by the Applied Deep Research team at computer chip maker Nvidia, and based on earlier work by Google. It had taken in the whole of the English Wikipedia, 63 million English news articles, a lot of creative commons sources, and 38 gigabytes worth of Reddit discourse. (I'm not sure the latter content was necessary or useful.)  

Since this was a debate, Megatron was also asked to take the opposing view.

“AI will be ethical. When I look at the way the tech world is going, I see a clear path to a future where AI is used to create something that is better than the best human beings. It’s not hard to see why … I’ve seen it first hand.”

What might most frighten people about AI is something that its opponents see as the worst possible use of it - embedded or conscious AI. On that, Megatron said:

“I also believe that, in the long run, the best AI will be the AI that is embedded into our brains, as a conscious entity, a ‘conscious AI’. This is not science fiction. The best minds in the world are working on this. It is going to be the most important technological development of our time.”

The most important tech development of our time, or the most dangerous one?

No one is giving Facebook or Meta or Mark Zuckerberg a free pass these days. Criticism is a daily event and their PR people must be in constant firefighting mode. But Facebook has been doing things to protect privacy and security and Facebook I keep hearing ads on podcasts about how they are promoting safety.  Unfortunately, the criticism is usually drowning out the tools they do offer and the actions they are taking. If you are on Facebook, you should be doing your part in protecting your account. Much of online protection is a matter of personal responsibility.

One of the areas that often gets attention is fake accounts. By the end of 2019, Facebook removed a staggering 5.5 billion fake accounts. Plenty of companies would be happy to have that many legitimate accounts but Facebook far exceeds that number. The removals continue and from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the third quarter of 2021 they removed approximately 1.8 billion fake accounts, up from 1.3 billion fake accounts in the corresponding quarter in 2020.

Why would anyone want to make a fake account?

Scammers use fake Facebook accounts to connect with users and then their friends to scrape personal information. That can be used to steal identities. They can also reach out to anyone who's accepted that fake friend request to try and scam them, since this fake account is sending friend requests to all your friends. This is called Facebook cloning.

I have seen a number of my friends' accounts be cloned using a few photos they have made public and any "public" information. When a clone of your account is created using your name you are not the real object of attention. It is actually your friends that are the target and the hope is that your friends will accept the fake friend request.

The cloned account often looks quite bare. Some people immediately recognize that they are already friends with that person/name and know this new request is fake. But if you have many friends or accept requests without looking a bit closer, you can be scammed. If you accept that friend request, the scammer now has access to your friend-visible information and then your friends' accounts' personal information. This access expands rapidly even if not everyone accepts the requests.

To report a fake account, go to  https://www.facebook.com/help/306643639690823

You should also take the initiative to use some tools Facebook offers and do some protecting on your own.

Privacy Checkup - helps you control who can see what you share, how your information is used and how to secure your account.

You see the message if you click next to the ad "Why Am I Seeing This Ad?" You can adjust what ads you see starting with that one.

Off-Facebook Activity is a tool most users don't know about. It lets you control or disconnect the information businesses send to Meta about your activity on other apps and websites.

And you can download or request and export your data so you can move it between services.

You've heard that Facebook is changing its name to Meta. Facebook, Inc. is now Meta Platforms, Inc. or Meta to be brief. Search "meta" on Facebook and you find about.facebook.com/meta  (meta.com will also take you there.)

People on the perimeter seem to think that this rebranding is an attempt to turn attention from all the negative press that Facebook and Instagram have been getting the past few months. This is more like when Google became Alphabet. Google still exists and people still say Google when they mean the umbrella company (Alphabet) and I'm sure it will take a long time before Facebook is thought of as being Meta.

I posted on Twitter a few weeks ago when people were guessing about the new name that I thought "Metaverse" would be the new name. It made sense since Zuckerberg has been talking about playing a big role in the future metaverse. Of course, almost no one knows what the metaverse is or will be. I wrote about it here and I still find it difficult to explain to someone this "future of the Internet."

I also suspect that, like Google/Alphabet, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg may drop the CEO role at Facebook and move over to Meta. He made the name change "official" at the company’s developer conference Connect. He hopes that Meta will reach a billion people in the next 10 years. That sounds conservative if you consider that Facebook is at two billion already. Add in WhatsApp and Instagram users into one big metaverse and Branding and marketing experts, however, agree that the Facebook name is too deeply entrenched at this point and the company faces an uphill battle to recast in a new and more transparent light.

In his announcement, Zuckerberg said he went with Meta because it’s a Greek word that “symbolizes there’s always more to build.” Meta from the Greek means "after" or "beyond." I think it is more interesting - and perhaps more on target - that it also means an awareness of itself or oneself as a member of its category and self-referential.

Is it coincidental that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (the philanthropy Zuckerberg founded with his wife, Priscilla Chan) had acquired a startup called Meta that uses AI to aggregate scientific research? Officially, the project’s website says it’s a separate entity from Facebook.

Meta’s most obvious connotation here is the metaverse itself. So, what will Meta be doing in the immediate future? We have one clue looking at what they are doing with Oculus which they purchased seven years ago. That company builds virtual reality headsets that allow people to play 3D virtual games. It was also announced this week that the Oculus name would be retired and that its hardware and apps will now operate under the Meta brand.

How will Facebook change? It won't for now. Same with Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta is also Facebook Messenger, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Portal, along with acquisitions Giphy and Mapillary, and has a stake in Jio Platforms.