What's on your weekend reading list? Saturday, March 3rd.

This weekend I'm reading through a very interesting article on the evolving malicious uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/02/malicious-use-artificial-intelligence-forecasting-prevention-and-mitigation). So far, lots of important takeaways, but the biggest one is that we need to be thinking very deeply about how we will contend with a new class of technologies capable of acting at enormous scale.

When I say "acting at enormous scale" I don't mean repeatedly doing the same thing at scale (e.g. payment processing), but I mean making the same class of decisions at scale. For example, telling a system to flag, of a billion photos, which ones depict a certain historical figure (say, Thomas Jefferson) in a positive light.

I've been wrestling with the issue for a few weeks now, ever since a friend -- and someone who makes their living evaluating, placing bets, and writing about complex systems -- described "artificial intelligence" to me as a system (to oversimplify it, you could say the system is a massive decision tree) where the system itself dwarfs by orders of magnitude the sum total of all of the data that could ever be put through that system.

So, back to my example of tasking an AI to determine if, by photo, each of a billion photos depict a historic figure in a positive light. While I'm not sure where this all will take us, it certainly gives food for thought as we look ahead to what social media companies are attempting to do with their platforms, or what entire countries are trying to do with their massive data collection and analysis programs.

What are you reading this weekend?