Forget artificial intelligence. It’s artificial idiocy we need to worry about
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/06/artificial-intelligence-understanding-big-data
(...) there’s no such thing as impartial information any more than there’s a way of measuring someone’s height without selecting a unit of measurement. Every single byte of data on earth was made, not found. And each was manufactured according to methods whose biases are baked into their very being.
When Facebook asks me what I “like”, it’s making the convenient assumption that I feel one of two ways about everything in the world – indifferent or affectionate. When it aggregates the results of mine and a billion other responses, marvellous insights emerge. But these remain based on a model of preference that might kindly be called moronic, and that is more likely to provide profitable profiling for marketing purposes than to transform our understanding of the human mind.