[ExI] sanity and connectedness, was: RE: list test

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-07-29 10:31, BillK wrote:
> Face recognition, linked database analyses, Twitter, Facebook, Forums, 
> public criminal records, genealogy, etc. When someone wearing Google 
> Glass looks at you, your past history will be streaming through their 
> screen. When someone from the FBI or NSA looks at you, he will know 
> what you had for breakfast this morning.

The real problem is disambiguation. Many people look like other people, 
many have names that are the same as others, and so on. For example, 
looking for my scientific publications tends to produce results jumbled 
up with other Anders Sandbergs (there are a few of us in academia) - and 
given my somewhat broad interests, it is not at all trivial to be sure 
whether those philosophy papers have anything to do with those 
neuroscience papers... or the theology paper. Clustering algorithms 
exist and work somewhat, but trying them on 7 billion people and X 
trillion subjects is going to be tough.

Whether this matters is the loss function. How bad is it if somebody 
thinks I am a different person? That I work on mechanics? That I am a 
celebrity? Or that I am a terrorist? Handling uncertain noisy data is 
tricky, and we need to learn how to do it as a society when we amplify 
*some* of our abilities. Automatic identification is going to get 
better, but automatic decision-making tends to be fairly rigid and 
brittle (unless at AI-complete levels).

Sanity is to have an open-ended, self-correcting system where stupid 
decisions - whether digital or human - can be detected and corrected.

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University