How Computers Know What You'll Do Tomorrow

a 42 here have you ever called a customer support line and heard the phrase this call may be recorded for training and Quality Assurance purposes well the truth is your recorded phone call will most likely never be used for training an extremely small number of calls actually are so why are all these companies recording millions of phone calls on a daily basis data all these recorded phone calls are automatically sent to companies that develop algorithms as soon as you hang up the phone your conversation is being analyzed by computer code one such companies chicago-based mata site mata site and over such companies have developed intelligent machine learning algorithms that analyze billions of phone conversations every single day sent to them directly by large companies Mata sites largest client sends them over 250 million recorded phone calls every day their computers examine what you say how you say it the words you choose and the tone that you use to determine your personality and put you into a group of other people with similar personalities you may for example respond well to hard facts and figures or you may better respond to personal sentiments and compliments you may be short and aggressive with your tone or you may be patient you may be shy sarcastic blunt outgoing within minutes after you first call a call center mata sites algorithm has attached a personality label to your phone number then the next time you call lat or any other company that buys mata site services you are automatically routed to a customer service agent that has a similar personality to yours you are routed to a person that can better tap into your psyche to more efficiently sell you products or to solve your problem quicker the result is shorter more pleasant phone calls for every involved unhappier clients and of course boosted sales for the company this has happened to you hundreds of times over hundreds of phone calls without you ever even realizing it so how do you feel about this should you feel like your trust has been betrayed your privacy invaded well you could do but in reality these are what's known as blackbox algorithms no real humans are listening to your phone call and the data that these algorithms extract and use from millions of aggregated phone conversations isn't even visible to the engineers who create the algorithms it's all just maths your words are first converted into numbers and then transmogrification millions of times by computer software the end result is so obfuscated and so vastly complex that all the people behind the scenes actually see is a black box of billions of numbers that takes phone calls as an input and spits out a personality label as an output nobody is listening in to you complain about that pair of pajamas you just purchased with a tear in the crotch because no one cares and in the end thanks to these algorithms you will be put through to someone who assimilates really well with yourself and you'll probably hang up the phone having had a shorter happier and more resolute full conversation algorithms are not a new thing we have been living by algorithms and using them to enhance our lives for literally thousands of years a simple recipe is an algorithm you take an input that is ingredients follow a set of predefined instructions and if you're good enough at cooking you get an output a tasty meal the ancient Greeks Babylonians and ancient Egyptians all developed their own mathematical algorithms to accomplish a variety of basic tasks and make life simpler but today algorithms define your life like never before in your whole life everything and everyone in it has pretty much already been decided by an algorithm without you even realizing it whether you can get a credit card a loan or a mortgage to buy your dream home has been decided by an algorithm which school you go to or your children go to your exam scores your university degree are all determined by algorithms when you sit down to watch a film on Netflix or Amazon statistics show that you're most likely to watch a film that has been recommended to you by an algorithm but it gets a lot more personal than that since 2010 online dating has been the most popular way for new couples to get together and today the majority of new couples meet online now if you're the type of person who believes in fate and a one true love then maths would like to have a word with you if you met your partner online a series of steps had to happen to lead up to that point both of you in your partner had to first discover and sign up to said dating website or app that most likely happened because you both saw an ad or search listing for said dating service an algorithm whether it was Google's or a nova decided that you based on your search and web browsing history and whether these algorithms have categorized you as an elite single a sugar daddy a lonely over 50 or more of a plentyoffish type of person then you will see an ad or search result for the appropriate dating website at that point in time once you've signed up to the dating website you will be asked to fill out your profile and answer a series of never-ending questions about your personality and whether you enjoy long walks on the beach which is a really strange question because the vast majority people don't live near a beach based on your answers and the words you put on your profile an algorithm will then decide which matches should be shown to you you may then take it upon yourself to flirt with one of said matches and become romantically entangled so then maths not fate has narrowed down a small handful of people from your area out of a few thousand possibilities so maths has decided who you might spend the rest of your life with and the children that you may have so if you think about it today computers are breeding humans now that's trippy you know what else is trippy skill shares online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and so much more Premium Membership gives you a limited access to high-quality classes on must know topics so you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do the work you love if like me you find the power of algorithms and artificial intelligence fascinating then you should definitely watch the skill share course deep learning and neural networks with Python it's a must watch if you want to create your own powerful machine learning algorithms that can even rival loads of the big tech companies don't know how to program with Python well there are loads of great courses on skill sure to teach you have to be a skilled coder in just a few days Skillshare is also so much more affordable than most learning platforms out there an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month and I don't need no algorithm to tell me that that's good value and since Skillshare is sponsoring this video the first 1,000 people to use the promo link in the description will get their first two months for just 99 cents algorithms have already been running the world's financial systems for over five years now not only do algorithmic systems that use big data to side automatically whether you should be accepted for a credit card a loan or a mortgage but the world's biggest markets the financial markets are today traded almost entirely autonomously by computers traders used to leverage algorithms as a sort of guidance but the final decision on whether to buy or sell stocks bonds options or futures would be made by a human an experienced trader but over the past five years a huge shift has occurred due to rapid advancements in computer processing power and speed today around 80 percent of financial trades are made by black box algorithms thousands of times every second in 2006 only 30% of trades were made algorithmically but the scary part is humans are not making these trades worth millions of pounds the City of London and Wall Street are no longer employing experienced traders they're employing mathematicians and physicists to create algorithms that will make trades automatically every millisecond with no human import or decision process whatsoever trading pits and floors have been emptied of people and replaced with servers generally these lightning-fast algorithms make money or move vast sums of money around in the most cost efficient way but we don't know how they work we just rely on the fact that over a period of time they're more accurate faster and make far less mistakes than humans that's great but the cost of all this is that when an algorithm does go wrong when it does make a mistake not only can it be devastating but we have no way of knowing why or how it happened because they are black boxes we cannot look inside them and so happened in the flash crash of 2010 on May the 6th 2010 always running smoothly when suddenly without warning at 2:45 p.m. all of the world's largest financial markets such as the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones collapsed within seconds a drop larger than that of the infamous Black Monday and The Wall Street Crash of 1929 within a minute over a trillion dollars was wiped from the US and world economies a trillion dollars of money vanished in less than the time it takes to make a cup of tea now when it comes to predicting future trends and events algorithms today are far more accurate than humans in recent years several mathematicians have created algorithms for predicting which films will win Oscars each year just based on their plot and the actors involved these algorithms have been able to predict with between 85 to 100 percent accuracy the winners of all major categories at the past two Academy Awards if humans were to make the same predictions their guesses would be no better than rolling a dice london-based company epic objects has made these predictive algorithms commercial and uses them to consult large film studios on what will make them the most money for their future film releases epic objects machine learning algorithms can accurately predict which film scripts will make that studio money and which will be a flop before they're even made but interestingly they have also computed which film stars are worth hiring this may come as a surprise but one of their algorithms computed that there are only three actors in existence that adds value to a film that is to say their name appearing on the movie poster and credits will increase the box office numbers every other actor in the world makes no difference whatsoever no matter how much of a household name they may be according to the algorithm the only free actors in the world that can make a film more money a Brad Pitt Johnny Depp and strangely Will Smith the algorithm also worked out that there is one actress who is a huge household name but actually causes every film she appears it to make less money for obvious reasons the company refused to say who she is but when algorithms start to be utilized for more serious issues things start to get really controversial one public sector that has dived headfirst onto the algorithmic hype train is the police in most major countries police forces are now trying out sci-fi like algorithms that can do crazy stuff such as predict when and where a crime is likely to happen before it does and the reason police forces are getting so hyped up about these minority report style algorithms is that they work really well using thousands of data points such as the current weather conditions traffic statistics about neighborhoods such as average income social backgrounds and education these algorithms in use by the police today can predict with uncanny precision dynamically where a crime might happen to the minute police use these systems to more effectively allocates their officers to specific areas of a city but this isn't new so-called predictive policing has been used for the past few years now and it's becoming more and more common all the time in fact I talked about it in more depth in a video last year but something is new something even more controversial new algorithms have been recently developed that can calculate any civilians threat score what is a threat score you say well billions of data points are taken into account within seconds obviously this includes a person's arrest records but worryingly it goes a lot more personal limit the algorithm locks as a person's property records education history commercial databases from companies that person has used or associated with and most personally of all their social media network who they're friends with and every single one of their tweets posts images and videos and even their web searches it uses all this information to algorithmically calculate a threat score about that person similar to a credit score the higher the fret score the more of a potential risk that individual could be to the police or of a civilians so in practice when a call comes to an officer they can tap in that person's name into their in-car computer and the system will instantaneously reveal that suspects threat score before they even arrive on see if they have a high fret score the suspect will be treated far more cautiously the tasers and guns will be at the ready as that person's fret score indicates they are more likely to be carrying a weapon and hence more likely to use it against others when the algorithm gets it right that is currently being trialed by many police forces in the US this kind of social rating system opens up a whole kind of controversial worm's how do you feel like you might be held at gunpoint and potentially fired at after a minor fistfight just because you tweeted five years ago that he fought Hitler had a good dressen's for an evil dictator causing your fret score to skyrocket because of course that must indicate you're some kind of neo-nazi whereas someone who has a clean social history might be treated more compassionately and calmly arrested with no guns involved and this is essentially the glaring issue with algorithms when they are used for life-or-death situations there is no doubt that algorithms are frightening ly accurate in our modern age of big data but what if that tweets you made about Hitler's dress sense was meant ironically sarcastically or satirically and has no real reflection on your general character and empathy towards other humans this is what separates algorithms from humans computers are not yet able to tell the difference between genuine intention and sarcasm or humor and they don't yet fully understand and appreciate the subtleties of human conversation and interaction algorithms are even being used today by courtrooms to mathematically Herman a convicted prisoners punishment how much jail time they will serve and where they will serve it using similar data points as to fret score algorithm is this right one has to ask if a computer is more fair at said sentencing than a human would beep and this is just a tip of the mathematical iceberg when it comes to punishment and law enforcement it's no secret that certain countries have long been collecting vast amounts of data about their citizens phone calls emails photos videos and more thanks to whistleblowers like Snowden but it's how they have been using said data in combination with algorithms that's really powerful the vast amounts of data that the NSA GCHQ and other agencies vacuums up on its citizens such as phone records mobile GPS locations online searches Facebook activity and so much more is sifted through organized and tagged by an algorithm so that intelligence service operatives can just run a simple text search on anybody and see exactly where they have been who they have spoken to and because of the predictive power of algorithms and mass data their systems can even predict what we might be planning to do in the future launching a terrorist attack for example if you have say liked a certain page on Facebook and recently shopped at a certain hardware store and you happen to be friends with someone from a particular country then the automated algorithms that use at the NSA and other agencies may have put you on a watch list even if you don't actually have any negative intentions my god for all the weird stuff I've searched over the years making these videos I would be surprised if I wasn't on every watch list going a study at Cambridge University found that algorithms developed by intelligence services could build an exact character and personality description of anyone including their sexuality political views and ideologies based on the Facebook pages that they have liked could a human do this given the same information no humans don't have access to billions of data points to compare that information against and identify these subtle trends that the algorithms pick up on and even if we did we are computationally unable to process such vast amounts of data but whether this dragnet 1984 style mass surveillance is a good or a bad thing is a highly philosophical question there were four awful terrorist attacks in the UK in 2017 but according to mi5 there were also nine over planned terrorist attacks that were prevented and it's very highly likely that these algorithmically driven mass surveillance systems were at least partially responsible for discovering and stopping set attacks this can only be a good thing right lives have without a doubt being saved without the cost of our freedom privacy anonymity is to trade-off between a lack of privacy and increased state security worth it well that's not for me to decide for you but it's a question we all should consider the more we integrate algorithms into our lives the more our lives are enhanced in many ways we have cheaper airline tickets because the prices are more efficiently calculated by algorithms we arguably find better relationship matches today thanks to our personalities being evaluated rather than whoever smiled at us across the bar we get better shopping recommendations than ever we visit better and more interesting cafes and restaurants thanks to recommendation algorithms we go on better holidays but the dark sides to integrating all these mathematical systems into our lives is that huge decisions that affect us in irreparable ways such as mortgage approvals prison sentences and surveillance have lost their human touch we are now only numbers waiting to be crunched thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video then please click here for me on patreon and I'd like to thank skill show once again for sponsoring this video don't forget to click the link in the description to take advantage of this incredible offer before you're too late

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 363,177

Rating: 4.8733368 out of 5

Keywords: algorithm, computer, code, artificial intelligence, ai

Id: 8dc1cttiu6E

Length: 22min 9sec (1329 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2018