I'm Banned From Medium ($)

Society managed by artificial intelligence is not intelligent.

Norman identifies: “Man jumps from floor window.”

Dave: “Open the pod bay door, HAL.”
HAL: “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
— the computer HAL attempting to kill Dave,
from 2001, A Space Odyssey

Artificial Intelligence

This post is ostensibly about being banned from the blogging platform Medium, but its more interesting implications are about artificial intelligence.

I’ve been peripherally involved in A.I. since I developed algorithms to “intelligently explore” the quantum mechanical states of magnets for my PhD in quantum physics. In order to understand the behavior of these systems you must essentially “poll” the parts of them that are most representative of the whole because the whole itself is too large to examine. This is similar to the way voters are polled in order to get a sense of how the larger population is thinking.

Artificial intelligence is essentially a set of tools for figuring out what’s happening based on a limited amount of information. For example, an artificially intelligent chess-playing algorithm considers a number of probable outcomes a few moves into the future for a variety of possible moves. It doesn’t bother to look at all possible moves and it can’t look all the way to the end-game for every possibility. A.I. systems are inference systems.

This is similar to censorship algorithms or, in this case, the disbarment algorithms at Medium. I cannot be sure, and Medium does not inform us, but it’s most likely that Medium’s algorithms consider the frequency and combination of various suspicious words along with reader observations.

As the authors of suspicious words are systematically excluded, the readers are selected, trained, and encouraged to further enforce the ideological direction that the A.I. system is created to enforce. The readers are themselves being programmed. If the readers and censors are not trying to limit the system’s errors, then the combination of computer direction and human entrainment leads to greater extremes. This is similar to what happens when authoritarian governments enlist members of their populations to spy and inform on one another.

Norman identifies: “Man is shot dead.”