Category: complexity

How to Regulate the Algorithms that Shape our Lives

The issue of controlling the algorithms that increasingly shape our lives to avoid bias is now recognized (see our previous posts ‘How Algorithms Can Become Weapons of Math Destruction‘ and ‘How We Need to Audit the Key Algorithms That Drive our Lives‘). A proposal is contained in the Quartz post ‘We should treat algorithms like prescription drugs‘.

“For decades, pharma and biotech companies have tested drugs through meticulously fine-tuned clinical trials. Why not take some of those best practices and use them to create algorithms that are safer, more effective, and even more ethical?“. In addition, a strong regulator enforces checks and verifies that the testing has been done properly before allowing drugs to be put on the market. Then, a surveillance network also feeds back unexpected effects of a drug which may lead to reconsider its use or for which symptoms it is really useful.

On interesting aspect of this analogy is to recognize that algorithms like drugs have side effects. In a systemic view of the world, an algorithm that aims to solve a problem may – no, will – create unforeseen effects on some other aspects, especially if its use becomes widespread.

As the article mentions, drugs regulators have already started regulating devices that use algorithms for medical purpose (for example, sugar regulation apps for diabetics). This may produce a framework that could be spread to other types of algorithms.

Still, regulating algorithms may be a huge endeavor and setting up this framework will take time and effort – and require to develop new ways to efficiently evaluate algorithms for bias and for unexpected effects. An interesting field of research for the years to come!

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Why It is Better to Use ‘Disruption’ Rather than ‘Innovation’

I like this short video of Charlene Li ‘Truth Drop: Disruption vs Innovation‘. She explains why ‘innovation’ is not the right word because it looks like it is going to be easy. So she recommends to systematically use ‘disruption’ instead.

Basically, she states that “innovation is a false promise. It says that it’s going to be easy, we’re going to find the answer in a certain timeline with an investment.

On the other hand, “Disruption though is honest. It says, “If we’re going to create growth, create change, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be painful and the journey ahead is going to be filled with obstacles and boulders that we have to climb over.”

I will listen to the advice, and use disruption rather than innovation the next time I will talk about digital transformation!

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How Healing Requires Personality Blossoming: a Holistic Approach to Medicine

In an excellent book (in French) ‘les pouvoirs de l’esprit sur le corps‘ (the powers of spirit over the body), Patrick Clairvoy, a former army doctor and now emergency doctor in a leading French hospital, details the relationship between spirit and body when it comes to healing.

Beyond an analysis of classical healing miracles, he shows that real full physical healing requires personality to evolve and blossom. Concurrently, what prevents many people to heal is the avoidance of this internal work.

The core of the book is that while modern western medicine takes a mechanistic, organ by organ approach to medicine, there is also a need for a holistic approach considering ourselves as a complex system. In this system, there are complex interactions between organs through connections we only start to discover; and our mind and spirit also plays a large role in what is happening. Therefore, healing can be greatly influenced by our mind. The miracle of the intrinsic healing powers of our body can be greatly amplified by the way we deal with the illness.

I am sure that in the next few years, this holistic approach of medicine will develop as we increasingly recognize that the mechanistic approach of medicine, while it has brought many benefits, has to be supplemented by a systemic approach.

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How to Deal with the Conundrum of Smart or Safe Cities

Smart Cities is a big trend that influences nowadays a lof of cities’ development policies. It is aimed to bring many benefits to citizens and large city administration at the same time. In parallel the concept of Safe city has emerged – using the data to improve citizen safety through increased surveillance.

As always, technology comes with advantages and drawbacks. Like Internet allowed incredible 2-way communication advances, it came along with easier surveillance capabilities. Smart cities will thus come also with increased surveillance capabilities, in the name of pubic safety.

Ethics is becoming an increasing concern in our society, as a way to address democratic control on the modern surveillance capabilities. It has to be stressed that surveillance is not a recent issue – for long times, autocratic governments have controlled and opened private correspondence and spied on its citizens. As it becomes increasingly easy to implement surveillance programs, the setup of adequate ethical and independent control rules becomes even more essential.

Maintaining balance between the benefits of increased digitalization and sensors’ data, and privacy, is a essential challenge we are facing in the next few years. At the same time, fear of surveillance should not prevent us from benefiting from smart advances. The creation of new institutions to guarantee ethical treatment of the data is a challenge we all need to address.

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How To Benefit from Consensus and Diversity

Valeria Maltoni in her post ‘The Relationship of Value and Influence‘ addresses an important issue: while the best decisions require diversity, how can we get consensus in a very diverse group?

On one side, we tend to stick with people that are similar – and this is magnified by social media to a dramatic level: “While social media has enabled anyone to reach anyone else on the planet, the truth is that we tend to pay attention more readily to people who think and act like us. Nature has given us a compelling reason to do that — nobody survives alone. Humans band together, it’s our instinct.”

On the other hand, “Research has demonstrated that diversity enhances our ability to explore new ideas, allowing us to see a problem from different points of view. More variety in how people think about an issue is a strength“

However, “a meta-analysis of 108 studies and more than 10,000 teams# found that diversity hinders consensus“. How can we address this conundrum?

Valeria Maltoni suggests to have some diversity, but not too much, so as not to hinder the consensus-building mechanism. This may not be the best solution, and is definitely not applicable in some situations (e.g. democracy).

We need to make the effort to consider and learn from alternative views and include diversity in our intellectual consciousness. And we need to devise processes that fit with the requirements of decision-making in the specific situation, while allowing diverse viewpoints to be expressed. This is a major challenge for the collaborative age, as we can see daily. Specific research may be needed to provide new formats and tools for consensus building, that may include more direct voicing of opinions in a structured manner.

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How the Flip of the Digital Divide is Meaningful

Seth Godin’s post ‘The digital divide is being flipped‘ explains how the children of the rich are nowadays protected from the consequences of the screens, whereas the children of the poor are left to their addictive consequences.

I still remember a few years ago when digital divide was about the rich getting access to the wealth of internet while the poor (or the remote) couldn’t. It was a massive issue for governments who committed substantial resources to bridging the gap: “Privileged parents, those with time, education and money, were giving their kids access to the tools of the net while other kids were missing out on the wealth of interactions and information available online. The fear was that this gap would further magnify differences in opportunity.”

Nowadays, screens and internet access is almost ubiquitous, and the issue is rather not to get addicted to social networks, online games and other time-losing activities. Social network leaders are known to forbid screen access to their children.

The internet has moved from an incredible access to a wealth of information to a mass addiction machine. It does not need to be that way: what is important now is educating the younger generations about health rules when using screens and the internet, and how value can be extracted. This may need to be a new emergency for governments!

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How Social Media are Perfect Tools for Autocrats

Following up from the previous post ‘How BUMMER Became a New Acronym for Social Media‘, there is some debate about the social destruction brought about by Facebook and the likes, and whether those applications do not undermine democracy – such as in this article in the New York Review of Books titled ‘The Autocracy App‘.

The article states in summary that:

  1. Facebook as a company has lot control of the consequences of the usage of its services, that are being used by pressure groups and rogue users to create instability, chaos and even ethnic cleansing
  2. There is a growing consensus that the power of such a dominating company needs checking, as the tools proves to be much more useful to autocrats while it undermines democracy. Addiction and closure of the horizon of people around their interests hurts the debate, while data can be used by autocrats against users.
  3. There are several ways to deal with the situation, from an user movement (promoted by Jaron Lanier) to anti-trust regulation. However for the moment the current frameworks seem to have difficulties to be effective.

As any tool that becomes prevalent, Facebook demonstrates shortcomings in parallel to benefits. The fact that there is no real governance of the company with Mark Zuckerberg keeping the control does not help. I really believe that regulation is the only way, and there have been positive effects of european law on social media. This needs to be reinforced, because it is true that the impact of social media changes our world, and that democracy is impacted.

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How BUMMER Became a New Acronym for Social Media

Jaron Lanier – quite an interesting individual – came up with a new acronym for social media: BUMMER, which means ‘Behaviors of Users Modified and Made into Empires for Rent’. The concept is developed in this interesting (and critical) Medium article ‘Jaron Lanier’s Top 10 List for Quitting Social Media‘.

The concept is that social media sites change our behaviors in a way that is of interest to them, and that their interest is straight financial. The two steps of this approach can be analysed.

Social media does change our behavior, that’s clear: most people just can’t stop looking at their mobile phone, and on the social networks on their mobile phones, and everything is engineering to support that behavior (notifications etc.).

Whether the interest of social media moguls is only financial is more open to debate. It might not have been the initial intention. It may only be a means to another objective. What this objective could be, oscillates between scary (manipulation of the masses) or benevolent (connection people).

I do not believe we should leave social media, because used well, like any tool, it can bring many benefits. But we must develop behavior rules so as not to fall prey to it. And the question is still open about what is really the objective of social media companies.

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How the Science Behind Popular Psychological Effects is Often Wrong

Surprise, the science behind our previous blog post ‘How To Play With the Psychological Lunch Effect‘ was wrong! An excellent post ‘Impossibly Hungry Judges‘ explains in detail why and gives all the necessary links to papers that show why. Still, many people use this study as a reference (and we did too as it is entrenched in popular knowledge!)

This is just another example that we need to take with a pinch of salt all those popular psychological studies. In this case, as shown in this paper ‘Overlooked factors in the analysis of parole decisions‘, there were many other factors that explain very well the order of cases during the morning and afternoon and explain better the timing: easier cases that are supported by lawyers are considered first, etc.

We know intuitively that timing and lunch may play a role, but the correlation was just too strong to be true. It is probably much weaker. This is just a reminder of how much we need to be careful between correlation and causation, and when we read about a surprising psychological study!

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How Increasingly Difficult It Can Be To Prove Causation vs Correlation

Following up from the post ‘How the Van der Waerden Theorem Shows the Limits of Big Data‘, since Big Data will produce an increasing number of spurious correlations, the issue of identifying causation versus correlation will become increasingly important.

This Medium article ‘Understanding Causality and Big Data: Complexities, Challenges, and Tradeoffs‘ does a good work to explain the issues at stake. It also explains in a clear manner when causation is really needed, and when correlation is sufficient.

The most important in my view is that with the increasing complexity of our world (directly inherited by our increasing linkage), proving causation will become increasingly difficult. It does not help that we are trying to increasingly derive causation from smaller effects, which are on the border of being statistically significant. The causation chain can have some very indirect links that will make it difficult to determine what is causing what. I believe the current debates about the effect of certain chemicals used in natural environment (such as pesticides) exactly demonstrates this issue: in a complex ecosystem, proving a causation link is very difficult even if there is correlation.

Substantial theoretical and practical progress in the methods to determine causation is an important issue for the world today. I hope that enough focus and effort is dedicated to this problem.

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How AI is Being Used to Spot Lies and False Declarations

Following up on our review of the changes brought by AI in the field of justice (see for example the post ‘How Predictive Justice Software Starts Being Used‘), this interesting Quartz post ‘Police are using artificial intelligence to spot written lies‘ addresses how AI can detect fake statements for insurance or police.

Certain patterns can certainly be identified to assess the probability for a statement to be untrue, but the immediate question if of course up to what level this may be used. Is this only to prioritize those declarations that would warrant further investigation, or would that lead to a straight rejection?

One can also expect in the near future to see a whole new industry of AI statement coaches to emerge, with coaches and counter-AI programs being made available to check the veracity level and modify the initial statement to make them appear more credible… The interesting part here is that we are increasingly moving into a world of conformity, because AI will instantaneously detect anything that comes out of the ordinary.

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How the Van der Waerden Theorem Shows the Limits of Big Data

The Van der Waerden theorem states basically that if a string of data is long enough, there will always be instances of periodic occurrences. This means that when there is enough data, there will always be regularities – and they will not be meaningful, it is just a mathematical situation.

This theorem just means that for a big enough heap of data, we will find correlations that in fact do not have any meaning: these are spurious correlations.

Hence we can expect that with big enough data, Big Data analysis will throw up heaps of correlations that have no meaning at all.

But we can also expect that some people and organizations will take action based on those correlations, and that it may sometimes be deeply counter-productive.

Those who will have success in the world of bid data are those that will be able to sieve the many spurious correlations from the few real insights that can be gained from analysis. This will not be easy, because intuition may not be of great help. A thorough scientific analysis will be required, involving reproducibility of experiments in various independent data sources – and that will be difficult to do fully.

Let’s thus brace for many spurious correlations to be announced as discoveries only to be disproved some years later!

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