Conscious choice by voters in Great Britain has led to ‘Brexit’
a non-binding result that pushes Great Britain closer to exiting the European Union.
What makes the result thought provoking for me is captured
in this chart from the guardian to which I have added an apparent trend line:
Basically, areas where the median age is higher tend to have
voted for ‘leave’, areas with lower median age tend to have voted for ‘remain’;
older people preferred ‘leave’ whereas younger preferred ‘remain’. What this
means is people who have less time to
benefit from the choice they have made have overwhelmed the choice of those who
have more time to suffer from that choice. Is this fair?
One way to make things less seemingly unfair would be to
weigh votes by the expected amount of time people who get the consequences of
their votes. According to the World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN),
the life expectancy in the UK is 81, so someone aged 60 would have a weight of
21 (1 for every year he/she is expected to live) and someone aged 20 would get
a weight of 61. Of course, if the consequences of the choice are only felt for
say 30 years then the younger person’s weight is curtailed at 30.
Sounds reasonable may be?
But the thing is, right from the start, everyone knew each
vote has equal weight. (Sounds fair too, doesn’t it?). Since everyone went into
the game (referendum) knowing the rules exactly, there is no point ranting and
raving.
So why am I?
That has to do with self-driving cars and what people want.
A recent survey aimed at understanding the rules that should be built into
self-driving cars. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/23/self-driving-car-safety-study-pedestrian-crashes)
One of the questions posed was, should a self-driving car
crash itself (risking injury to its occupant) in order to prevent a collision
with pedestrians? Most people agreed, however, they would choose not to travel
in a vehicle with this rule.
If you are driving the vehicle, the choice is yours. If you
are in a self-driven vehicle, the choice is not yours, only the consequences.
The key is to understand that this choice, and many others,
will have to be built into the self-driving cars. The providers of the
self-driving car may print a huge list of rules built in, but chances are it
would be like today’s rules on services which most people acknowledge without
reading, very long and in very fine print.
Different providers could highlight different rules, Volvo is
known to protect its passengers, but doesn’t do so at the expense of others, so
Volvo drivers are not seen differently from drivers of other cars.
What I am getting at is self-driving
cars will force you to be subject to choices/rules you are unlikely to be aware
of.
So what does that have to do with google, apart from them
being one of the contenders for the self-driving car?
It has to do with this being a conscious choice by google
across the board, choices will be made for the human, probably all in order to
make your experience easier, choose what someone or something thinks you might
need/want, why should you make the effort of choosing? Google is heavily
investing in this technology (https://backchannel.com/how-google-is-remaking-itself-as-a-machine-learning-first-company-ada63defcb70#.t47q4x9ie).
CEO Sundar Pichai set the direction: “Machine learning is a
core, transformative way by which we’re rethinking how we’re doing everything.
We are thoughtfully applying it across all our products, be it search, ads,
YouTube, or Play. And we’re in early days, but you will see us — in a
systematic way — apply machine learning in all these areas.”
Basically instead of a series of explicit rules (that could
potentially be listed and ‘voted’ upon like Brexit), the behaviour of the
self-driving cars (and more) would be driven by machine learning, not human
determined rules, and these would not be visible.
And it’s not that the choice of
not taking a self-driving car will exempt you from the choices made by the
machine, unless all reality become virtual or you become a hermit, you will
still have to be a pedestrian at least.
Whether we realize it or not, we
have a choice to make, leave it for too long, the matter may be out of our
hands.
I believe machine learning is a
tool, just like many other tools people in my line have at our disposal to
solve problems, but I wouldn’t want to put blind faith in any single tool and I
put a lot of value in conscious decisions.
After all, whether you are happy
or not with the Brexit referendum results, at least the people who had a right
to vote had a chance to, and the rules were clear. You can rant and rave at
older people (http://www.vox.com/2016/6/24/12023544/brexit-uk-young-voters),
try to get enough people to change their minds for a second referendum (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-labour-referendum-idUSKCN0ZE2L4),
but you wouldn’t be able to do this if the rules were hidden and a machine
pulling the strings based on what it learnt.
