When people hear the name Mark Zuckerberg it is immediately associated with Facebook. Facebook is the largest social network accross the globe. About 85% of of Facebook's 1.86 billion members live outside of the U.S. and Canada. The California based company has offices everywhere from Amsterdam to Jakarta, Indonesia, to Tel Aviv. On Thursday February 16, Zuckerberg released a 5,800-word manifesto that apears closer to utopian social guide than business plan. He described his desired to remake Facebook in a way that counters isolationism, promotes global connections and addresses social ills while also cementing Facebook's central role as a builder of online “community” for its nearly 2 billion users.
Zuckerberg wrote, “our next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community — for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.” One method of implementation to develop this safe social infrastructure is through using artificial intelligence to start making the sorts of judgments that Facebook sometimes bobbles. AI systems could also comb through the vast amount of material users post on Facebook to detect everything from bullying to the early signs of suicidal thinking to extremist recruiting.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is simply intelligence exhibited by machines where research looks any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal. Currently artificial machines are able to successfully understand human speech, compete at a high level in strategic game systems, self-drive cars, intelligently route content delivery networks, and interpret complex data. A neural network is an interconnected group of nodes, akin to the vast network of neurons in the human brain. Today, neural networks are often trained by the backpropagation algorithm in which the algorithm repeats a two phase cycle, propagation and weight update. When an input is presented to the network, it is propagated forward through the network until it reaches the output layer. The output of the network is then compared to the desired output, using a loss function which is a function that maps an event or values of one or more variables onto a real number intuitively representing some "cost" associated with the event, and an error value is calculated for each of the neurons in the output layer. The error values are then propagated backwards, starting from the output, until each neuron has an associated error value which roughly represents its contribution to the original output.
References
- http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-zuckerberg-vision-20170217-story.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_function
Emily, do you think that artificial intelligence is the next big thing that will continue to expand into a larger playing field for corporations?
ReplyDeleteHi, Emily! This is a great post! :) This is a really interesting example of the ethical impacts of computer science. It touches on the question of how much responsibility the creator and custodian of programs has or should have regarding how people use their product, which I think is actually a very significant question in the effects and implementation of computer science in many instances.
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