Four short links: 9 November 2017
Culture, Identifying Bots, Attention Economy, and Machine Bias
- Culture is the Behaviour You Reward and Punish — When all the “successful” people behave in the same way, culture is made.
- Identifying Viral Bots and Cyborgs in Social Media — it is readily possible to identify social bots and cyborgs on both Twitter and Facebook using information entropy and then to find groups of successful bots using network analysis and community detection.
- An Economy Based on Attention is Easily Gamed (The Economist) — Americans touch their smartphones on average more than 2,600 times a day (the heaviest users easily double that). The population of America farts about 3m times a minute. It likes things on Facebook about 4m times a minute.
- Frankenstein’s Legacy: Four conversations about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and the Modern World (CMU) — A machine isn’t a human. It’s not going to necessarily incorporate bias even from biased training data in the same way that a human would. Machine learning isn’t necessarily going to adopt—for lack of a better word—a clearly racist bias. It’s likely to have some kind of much more nuanced bias that is far more difficult to predict. It may, say, come up with very specific instances of people it doesn’t want to hire that may not even be related to human bias.
