Artificial Intelligence has been quite the buzzword recently. “Artificial intelligence (AI), is broadly defined as the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings.” By intelligent beings it basically means humans … but maybe not all humans.
AI has many levels, from a simple line following robot to language translation. The level we are talking about is the Facebook’s targeted ads and Netflix’s recommendation systems. Right now we are concerned with the one the social media companies are using, broadly called the Recommendation System. Basically it takes your data (age, sex, address, interests etc.) and recommends you stuff like ads and posts(videos, statuses), etc. that you are most likely to react to or buy using AI.
Well how bad could a recommendation system be? After all, all it does is recommend.
Recommendation System example. Source: Medium article
Lets first break down the levels of AI and get to what we are talking about. If you loop deep enough , AI is just math. Statistics to be exact. But it is so complicated and the black box is so huge that it is considered a “mind of its own”.
First lets take an example of the AI which can predict whether an image is a cat or a dog. What the AI does is look at a huge number of cat and dog images and “learns” what a cat or a dog is. After that when you show it a picture it has never seen, it will predict whether the image is a cat or a dog. Here’s a link to the code. This code gives results that are 97% accurate .
#self-awareness #meditation #social-media #vipassana #ai