Machines are Watching

Article

I know a lot of people already know about this, but I thought it was an interesting topic to put up for discussion.

Even if you did know that machines watch you surf the web, by the time you found out it was already too late.  The technique called machine learning “affects the kind of Internet advertising you see on Amazon.com, but most people don’t realize that is the underlying technology” (livescience).  The ads we see online are often put up by machine learning systems to “learn” how people use the Internet.  By comparing your activity with other users, the “agent” targets what ads you are most likely to respond to.  Then, every time you click on an add, the host site (usually Google or Facebook) charges the advertiser.

So how do machines learn?  They start out at the level of a child and have to learn more to progress further in “intelligence.”  For example, the article mentions that “like school children learning arithmetic from a teacher, some agents can use simple examples and feedback to learn how to approach more complicated information.”  Other agents rely on experience: using the responses from their past “decisions” to deal with similar situations.  What is most important to notice is that these machines figure out the patterns in the data they receive.  The downside to teaching a machine to learn is that they are doing so based on a model of human learning.  This causes some issues because we don’t fully know how the human brain works.  So for now, these machine learning programs can only process a limited amount of information. 

So, what does this mean for us?  It probably means that advertisers are going to get better and better at reading the individual’s wants, so that everyone is constantly being barraged online by things they really want.  It took decades for advertisers to hone their methods to personalize ads, but machines are already able to do it faster and more efficiently.  When the technology is perfected, consumers’ only option will be to “just say no.”  Watching a commercial for something is awful, boring, and frustrating.  Ads placed on websites are hardly notices because you’re focusing on whatever else you’re doing.  If you do click on those, you certainly don’t feel like you’re saying “yes” to purchasing something, but you totally are. 

I’m sure other (and much creepier) implications can be drawn from this too.  It presents a great “Big Brother” opportunity for everyone from the ad agencies to the government being able to monitor what has become a pretty crucial part of our consumer culture: what we want.  Professionals can build complete personality profiles based on what ads you respond to, and who knows who they would be willing to sell those to?  Anyone?

SR/3 - eXistenZ

eXistenZ is a movie that challenges the distinction between actual and virtual existence.  It begins by introducing a new game, eXistenZ, and the woman who designed it, Allegra, who someone (later revealed to be a realist) tries to assassinate just as they are starting to play the game.  Allegra and her appointed body guard Ted go on the run and eventually play eXistenZ to make sure it didn’t get damaged in the shooting.  The whole movie can be organized by levels of reality.  It begins in what the audience first believes to be reality, but we find out later that it was the first level of the game transCendenZ (the "real" game they were playing that is revealed at the end of the movie).  Then there is the sort of in between level Ted and Allegra go through before they actually start “the game,” when they are in the gaming store receiving their new identities.  The second level occurs when Allegra and Ted port in to play eXistenZ (the game in the first level of “game reality,” set at a trout farm that harvests mutated amphibians for components in the game pods).  They have a series of adventures within the game, all surrounding the theme of game designing and the realist underground movement.  eXistenZ is full of betrayal and double agents, and Allegra and Ted are stumbling around blindly the entire time because there are not really rules or even free will to a certain extent.  Ted has an outburst at one point when they are on the trout farm about how little free will there is in the game, and Allegra responds by saying “like real life, there's just enough to keep things interesting.”  The final level of the game transCendenZ is a sort of combination of the other levels: it has the setting and antagonism towards Allegra of the first level mixed with the characters and vocabulary of the second level (the realist underground movement).  Finally, the characters all “wake up” from playing the game transCendenZ and are discussing it when the final scene culminates with Ted and Allegra shooting Nourish, who is the “real” game designer.  The movie ends with Ted and Allegra pointing their guns at the man who played their waiter while he asks them if they’re still in the game.

eXistenZ plays with gender roles quite a bit.  Throughout most of the movie, Ted is presented as hesitant and weak.  He doesn’t want to get a port, play the game, or even kill anyone (which is his job as her bodyguard).  Allegra is always the one to coax him to do something.  Their reversal can be seen throughout the movie, but is especially prevalent when they are discussing and acting with the bioports.  Allegra is the one directing Ted during his “first time” porting in to a game pod, with the movie makers even going as far as having her prime his bioport and insert the game cord into it herself.  Allegra is also the one who pushes them to get together when they realize their game characters “are supposed to have the hots for each other.”  Ted is hesitant and Allegra has to talk to him and calm him down even though she clearly just wants to have sex.  This is a joke poking fun at how girls behave before they will have sex with someone and how the guy always has to reassure them and sort of coax them into it.  Allegra is also the one that kills most of the people in the game (Ted only kills the waiter at the Chinese restaurant).  However, when they exist the game transCendenZ, Ted's character is clearly in control , as he is directing his and Allegra's actions to kill Nourish.  eXistenZ also plays with the line between the virtual and reality. It is impossible to tell after finishing the movie exactly where the game ends and reality resumes, the last line cementing how unsure the audience is whether the characters were back in reality or whether they were ever there in the first place.  The whole point of the movie is that you never know what’s real.  It plays on the human desire to separate what’s real and what’s not by asking you to contemplate whether there is a difference between reality and the virtual if they are indistinguishable.  eXistenZ asks the viewer to examine their own lives to realize that we could all be part of a game and just haven't "unported" yet.  

Neuromancer, 19-24

Neuromancer ends with Case and Molly respectively breaking into the Villa Straylight.  Case finally meets the other AI and gets sucked into his all too real world, where he reconnects with a ghost of Linda.  Meanwhile, Molly has been captured by the only awake member of the Tessier-Ashpool family and Riviera has switched sides.  When Case comes to rescue her, 3Jane decides to join them and help unite Wintermute and Neuromancer.  Thanks to Case’s and the Flatline’s skills, they successfully get past the Turing security measures and unite the two AI’s. 

One question I want to pose about the last section of this novel is why isn’t anyone asking themselves if it’s a good idea to be freeing and merging these artificial intelligence units?  I would even settle for considering any possible effects uniting the two might have.  Even after they find out what Wintermute is trying to do, neither Molly or Case questions the consequences such an action inevitably has.  The end result doesn’t even reassure their actions.  When Wintermute returns to Case one last time after he has been merged with Neuromancer, he says “I’m the matrix,” and in response to Case’s question regarding where that gets him he replies “Nowhere.  Everywhere.  I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show” (259).  Personally, that does not sound very reassuring.  Neither does the other AI unit Wintermute claims to have found.  I am really worried about the future of that world with all of those unregulated AI’s running around (purposeless !).  Have they not seen the movies about how bad that can go? 

Neuromancer, 6-9

The section of chapters 6-9 in Gibson’s book I found the most intriguing was the one that talked about the Zionites.  The people on Zion were “workers who’d refused to return, who’d turned their backs on the well and started building” (101).  They live completely separated from technology except for what they require to survive because they believe that technology can only lead to destruction.  Case describes Zion as smelling like “cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja” (102). 

Why does Case think the Zionites are so strange?   Why would anyone in that future think they were weird?  Because they are so anti-technology.  Everyone in this future world is so wrapped up in technology they can’t even fathom how anyone could live without it, much less why someone would want to.  Most people are either jacked into the matrix or a simstim, and all the youth have some kind of crazy techno-body modification.  The Zionites are an important alternative perspective that Gibson presents in contrast to the majority of the characters he sets up in this world.  They show the reader that it is in fact possible, even in this crazy future world where you can have and be anything you want, that some people see the dangers of living like this.  When Case makes one of the Zionites jack in on his deck, all Aerol will say when Case asks him what he saw is “Babylon” (105).  It is important to raise the question of whether or not living this entwined with technology is okay.

S/R 2 - Neuromancer

William Gibson’s Neuromancer is a novel chiefly about the future and the technology it holds (along with what ethical and philosophical questions technology like that raises).  The story follows Case, a down and out hacker trying to get killed by living the street life, who gets recruited by a team that is attempting one major hack.  The first team member is a girl named Molly who has had many “enhancements” made to her natural body (like razors that shoot out from underneath her fingernails and mirrored lenses that attach directly to her face around her eyes).  Case and Molly form an alliance to figure out just what their secretive boss, Armitage, is up to.  They find out through their side investigation that Armitage is taking his orders from an AI (artificial intelligence) unit named Wintermute.  Eventually, they find out what Wintermute is trying to do: it is one half of an AI that was unlawfully too smart and independent to exist together under the Turing code of law.  Wintermute was built with the burning need to reunite itself with its brother, Neuromancer.  Wintermute is a ROM construct, meaning “read only memory.”  This AI is very intelligent, but it can’t create its own personality and has to communicate through images of other people.  Neuromancer, on the other hand, is a RAM (random access memory) construct, which allows it to have its own personality.  The team begins their adventure by recruiting the next team members, a legendary hacker named Dixie Flatline whose consciousness has been copied onto a ROM disc and Peter Riviera, a man who is able to project perfectly realistic holograms from his mind.  The book culminates in the chapters where they are finally on their real mission: breaking into the Tessier-Ashpool (the company that created and now houses Wintermute) mainframe to set Wintermute free so he can join with Neuromancer.  The mission is a success, they are all paid, and Molly and Case go back to their separate lives.  Wintermute/Neuromancer comes back to Case one more time, though, to tell him that he has now become the matrix.

One of the most interesting points Gibson addresses in Neuromancer is the people he calls the Zionites.  They are people that worked on a space station and refused to come back down when they were finished.  People from Zion believe that technology leads down the path of destruction, aligning it with the ancient city of Babylon.  They spend their time listening to music dubs, smoking pot, and generally taking their time to appreciate life.  The Zionites are an important contrast Gibson makes to the rest of mainstream society in his future world.  No one else he mentions can even think about living without some kind of technology.  The only bits of technology the Zionites use, on the other hand, are the parts of the space station that keep them alive.  The contrast is especially vivid when the main characters visit the Freeside space station.  While the people on Earth have built their new world around technology, incorporating it into their everyday life, the people on Freeside use technology to recreate what life was like before the big technology boom that changed everything.  There isn’t really a lot of nature left on Earth, but on Freeside there is vegetation and evidence of landscaping everywhere.  They even have a fake sky that “looks” sunny and has a “sunset” and “sunrise.”  The people there are as fake as the scenery.  The Zionites might appreciate the appearance of a place like that, but they would never try to recreate that environment on their space station.  They chose to remove themselves so completely from the situation on Earth because they genuinely believe it will lead its inhabitants down the path of Babylon.  This is such an important alternative perspective in this novel, because Gibson presents society at this date as completely extolling the virtues of technology.  The Zionites are the only ones that took a step back and thought what was happening was wrong.  It appears that removing themselves did help them retain something that the rest of society does not have, whether it is a greater appreciation for life, a lack of dependence on superfluous technology, or the camaraderie that looks so rare back on Earth. 

Apps Culture

While searching for an article to do this week’s blog post, I discovered the Pew Internet article on “the rise of apps culture.”  I found it especially intriguing because it went into so much detail regarding the users of cell phones in general as well as users of wireless Internet and apps.  The article discusses the number of (over 18) adults that use apps in great detail in relation to age, gender, race, education, and income.  The number of apps average users have, how often they download apps, and how often they use those apps are also topics explored in this article. 

I think it says a lot about our culture that 35% of adults with cell phones have apps.  As the purpose of cell phones has gone from voice calls to texting to Internet access and beyond, apps have arrived to flesh out the cellular world.  A whole host of new software has arisen that is designed specifically for your mobile phone.

The part of the article that I found the most intriguing was the section discussing how frequently users downloaded apps.  According to the article, the most frequent apps users were not the 18-24 group (29% of this group user their apps multiple times a day) but 25-34 year olds (44%) and those 35 years and older (44%).  The younger apps users were much more likely to say they used their apps for less than half an hour a day.  This was very surprising to me, because I would have expected younger groups to use apps more often than older groups.  Further down in the article, however, it states that 25 and up adults are more likely to use apps to improve what they are currently doing, finding a place to eat, shopping, and at work.  Young adults are more likely to use them while socializing with friends or while they are at school.  Older adults use apps for more practical purposes, while younger adults use them for more recreational or social purposes.  I think this must be why adults use apps more often during the day.

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