Duncan's Reflections

This week in Freshwoman Seminar 50, we’re talking about the Internet and politics. My favorite of the topics is Internet voting. It’s an exciting idea: lower costs, better turnout, no ambiguity (a la Florida 2000), and a much more efficient system overall. So what’s the holdup?

Well, security. There are opportunities for fraud, both on the scale of individual votes and in databases of stored votes. In other online fraud situations, like credit card and bank fraud, resolution of the situation is based in a firm understanding of your identity. Voting is supposed to be anonymous, so there’s no record of your vote. This makes sorting out fraud much more difficult.

But what if the vote wasn’t anonymous? What if there was a record in a database somewhere that has your identity attached to your vote? You wouldn’t be able to access the official record (so you can’t sell your vote), nor would anyone else, so for most intents and purposes it would be anonymous. And yet in the case of fraud there would be a record who voted which way, making the situation more easily rectifiable.

But then important information about you is sitting in a database somewhere? Doesn’t that give up a huge amount of privacy? I wonder if there are other debates like this going on *cough* Facebook *cough* Google *cough*. There is already a huge amount of data about you stored in databases, and used in less kosher ways (sold to advertising companies) than the government would use it (do nothing). In fact, likelihood is there’s enough data about you on the Internet to tell who you’re going to vote for. It’s possible that the fact that this data exists is bad, and we should be undertaking efforts to limit the amount of personal information out there. However, I expect that because people are becoming more nonchalant about their personal information being out there, they will care less about voter anonymity in the future. Perhaps this is how online voting will come about.

Hi everyone! I doubt anyone outside of my class reads this (in fact, with what someone in class said today in mind, I doubt anyone outside of Professor Waldo and Dean Smith read this), but if you exist, I didn’t post last week because Columbus Day is a Harvard holiday, so we had no class. But now we’re back and better than ever, moving into artificial intelligence the Singularity.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Singularity, think about it like this: humans manage to create superhumanly intelligent beings. These beings create beings who are even more intelligent and who create beings… I hope you see where this is going. The resulting intelligence explosion is commonly called the Singularity, as it will propel us into a completely new era, one where human intelligence is virtually obsolete.

In class, we had a big debate about whether we could create a superhuman intelligence that was like a human in every aspect. I argue it’s possible (there’s nothing magical about the brain) but it seems like an absolutely awful idea. One person in class raised the point that we worry that more intelligent beings will want to subjugate us, just as we have subjugated all other life on this planet. He continued to ask, “Does that speak to the beings we will create or to ourselves?” Maybe that’s what we fear because that’s what we do. And in that case, why in the world would we want to create a human-like super-intelligence? It would be forging our own shackles. Perhaps more intelligent beings will necessarily subjugate less intelligent beings. But we KNOW human-like intelligent beings do that. Why would we create them? People often try to explore new technological territory by doing something that is familiar with it, but with the stakes this high, we can’t afford to mess up.

Of course, if we’re not creating human-like intelligence, what exactly is “intelligence”? I would define intelligence as the ability for an entity to function on its own, conducting various input-to-output functions that self-optimize as the entity takes in more input. For example, as humans we take in input (stove is hot) and produce output (take hand off stove). In the future, our decision-making functions change to prevent us from putting our hand on the stove in the first place. You could take issue with this definition—indeed, approximately half of class today was spent trying to nail down a definition of intelligence. But I like it. Intelligence in this way is not restricted to things like playing chess or solving math problems. It can apply to social interaction, emotions, literally anything you can imagine that an intelligent being would have to do. It also seems to fit well with ideas of “machine learning”, about computers changing their algorithms based on the input they get.

Of course, this definition opens the door to discussion of free will because if you believe in free will, you probably don’t accept my idea of decision-making, empathy, emotions, etc. as just input-output functions. But they certainly seem to be. The human brain is just a collection of neurons firing, or on a lower level, just a collection of chemical reactions. There is nothing magical about it. Which isn’t to say it isn’t a beautiful piece of machinery, just that it’s deterministic. If you put in some input, you will get a pre-determined output (note again that I don’t think recreating human brains is good—this is just to give an example of a well-known intelligence). So while free will is a white lie I tell myself to make my head hurt less when grappling with decision theory, it is certainly not true and shouldn’t enter discussions of intelligence.

So now we have this definition of intelligence. How do we build God with it? How do we not mess this up? I don’t know, but I believe these will be the most important questions of our generation.

You wake up on a cold winter’s morning. The movement sensors in your bed register that you’re awake. Your water heater starts heating up water for your shower so that it’s hot from the moment you turn it on. Your coffee boiler turns on and starts brewing coffee, just the right strength for how much sleep you got last night. Your car turns on and starts to defrost the windshield. A morning like any other.

This is the Internet of Things at work. While the scenario is a bit exaggerated, it is not too far in the future. But what exactly is the Internet of Things? I would describe it as when our devices connected over the Internet interact very tangibly with the world around us. Our laptops aren’t part of the Internet of Things, but things like the Nest Learning Thermostat are. These devices can act and interact and adapt largely without human intervention. At some point, according to some, they will become so connected that they will form a cohesive platform to be programmed. Imagine the potential. We have to think bigger than the opening scene to this post. We can automate our cars to drive themselves—this is even already being done. No, think even bigger than that. We can leave everything rote and boring to machines, “automating the mundane” to borrow a phrase. Now think even bigger. One lesson I’ve learned so far from the Internet is that when you develop something, it will be used in ways you couldn’t even imagine when designing it. We can’t even begin to understand the potential for the Internet of Things. So I keep an open mind to the idea that it will represent a fundamental way in the way we live our lives, in ways that we can’t grasp yet.

So what is this post? Some kind of fluff popular science piece where I rave about how great some new technology is, even though I don’t really understand it? No (though it’s true that I’ve only scratched the surface of understanding). I’m here to talk about ethical implications. I went to an event last Friday hosted by the Harvard Computer Science Department called “The Internet of Things”. One of the speakers that struck me most was Jim Waldo, Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Harvard. Professor Waldo introduced the trolley car problem, explaining that there was no consensus among the general population: different schools of thought and slight changes to the circumstances change the decisions people think are correct to make about the tradeoff of human lives. And yet, somewhere in Silicon Valley, some designer of self-driving cars is building those trade-offs directly into their algorithms about which lives to prioritize if a crash is unavoidable. Engineers create policy decisions with their work.

It’s not enough to “leave it to the politicians”. Public policy is 5-20 years behind technological development, and politicians rarely understand technology well enough to make informed decisions about its regulation. If we as engineers aren’t thinking about how our technology will be used and abused, no one is.

So if the Internet of Things could represent a fundamental change in our way of life, drawing us ever closer to realizing the dream held oh so many years ago by J.C.R. Licklider of human-computer coupling, we need to be asking questions about how data will be gathered, stored, made secure, and used. What are the answers? I don’t know. Let’s find out.

…you didn’t really think I could make it through a post about the internet of things without some Wall-E reference, did you?