{"id":7589,"date":"2016-02-21T22:21:06","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T03:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=7589"},"modified":"2016-02-21T22:21:06","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T03:21:06","slug":"welcome-to-skynet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=7589","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Skynet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Take this dystopian science-fiction story, in which a major military power is using machine intelligence to identify potential threats, which it then eliminates using unmanned drones.<\/p>\n<p>The twist of the story is that even a very accurate algorithm can lead to unintended consequences when the actual threat ratio is very low. This is a classic problem known from statistics.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine that out of a population of a hundred million, only 100 people represent a threat, and the algorithm is 99% accurate identifying them.<\/p>\n<p>Which means that out of the 100 threats, it will miss only 1. So far, so good.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, it also means that out of the remaining 99,999,900, it will falsely identify 999,999 as threats even when they aren&#8217;t. So out of the 1,000,098 people who are targeted, onl 99 are genuine threats; the remaining 999,999 are innocent.<\/p>\n<p>OK, improve the algorithm. Perhaps at the expense of having more false negatives, say, 50%, increase the accuracy to 99.99% when it comes to false positives. Now you have 50 of the real threats identified, and you&#8217;re still targeting 10,000 innocent people.<\/p>\n<p>Now imagine that the military power in question somehow convinces itself that this algorithmic approach to security is still a good idea, and implements it in practice.<\/p>\n<p>And now stop imagining it. Because apparently this is exactly <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.co.uk\/security\/2016\/02\/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people\/\">what has been taking place<\/a> with the targeting of US military drones in Pakistan, with the added twist that the science behind the algorithms might have been botched.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.co.uk\/security\/2016\/02\/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-7590\" src=\"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/skynet-courier-detection-via-machine-learning-p12-normal.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"541\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Oh, but a human is still in the loop&#8230; rubber-stamping a decision that is made by a machine, and is carried out by other machines, eliminating possibly several thousand innocent human beings.<\/p>\n<p>As I said&#8230; welcome to Skynet, the dystopian network of homicidal machine intelligence from the Terminator movies.<\/p>\n<p>Scared yet? Perhaps you should be. We should all be.<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=7589' send='true' layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Take this dystopian science-fiction story, in which a major military power is using machine intelligence to identify potential threats, which it then eliminates using unmanned drones. The twist of the story is that even a very accurate algorithm can lead to unintended consequences when the actual threat ratio is very low. This is a classic <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=7589' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-technology","category-5-id","category-12-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7589"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7593,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7589\/revisions\/7593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}