Artificial psycho

New from the "Don't You People Ever Watch Horror Movies?" department, we have: a group of scientists at MIT who have created an artificial intelligence that is psychopathic.

At least that's kind of what it looks like.  The AI, which has been programmed to analyze, understand, and learn from photographs, was then trained on horrific images -- pictures of humans being injured or otherwise abused, obtained from the site Reddit -- and afterwards asked it to interpret Rorschach ink blots.

Here are a few of the responses given by the AI, who has been named "Norman" after Norman Bates from Psycho, and for purposes of comparison, the responses from a control AI that had been trained on a variety of different sorts of images (rather than all violent ones):

Control: a close-up of a wedding cake on a table.
Norman: a man killed by a speeding driver. 

Control: a black-and-white photograph of a baseball glove.
Norman: a man murdered by machine gun in broad daylight. 

Control: a black-and-white photograph of a small bird.
Norman: a man being pulled into a dough machine. 

Control: a person holding an umbrella in the air.
Norman: a man shot dead in front of his screaming wife.

Control: a black-and-white photograph of a red-and-white umbrella.
Norman: a man gets electrocuted trying to cross a busy street. 

The trio of scientists responsible, Pinar Yanardag, Manuel Cebrian, and Iyad Rahwan, don't seem unduly concerned by their creation, although they do point out the hazards of training an AI using skewed input.  "Norman suffered from extended exposure to the darkest corners of Reddit," they said in an interview, "and represents a case study on the dangers of Artificial Intelligence gone wrong when biased data is used in machine-learning algorithms."

[Image released into the Public Domain by its creator, Michel Royon]

What it makes me wonder is to what extent our own brains get co-opted by this sort of thing.  It's often claimed that people who (for example) play lots of violent video games become inured, desensitized, to violence in general.  But maybe it's more than that.  Maybe if we expose ourselves to ugliness, we become more likely to interpret neutral situations as ugly.

Sort of seeing the world through awful-colored glasses.

I saw an example of this, albeit of a milder variety, in my own parents.  My folks were the type that had the television on in the evening whether anyone was watching it or not, and a favorite channel had reruns of the show Cops on every night.  I'm a little puzzled as to why anyone would watch that show to start with -- after all, it's not like the plot varies -- but I noticed that after a time, my parents (especially my mom) started viewing the world as an unsafe place.  People are always waiting to hurt you, she said, and you have to stay on your guard constantly.  I still recall the last thing she told me before I left for a month-long walking tour of England:

"Don't trust ANYBODY."

In England, for fuck's sake.  I mean, it's not like I was planning on hiking across Sudan, or anything.

So what you immerse yourself in day after day does make a difference.  I'm not suggesting that we be Pollyannas, nor to look at the world in the way of Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire's masterpiece Candide ("Everything happens for the best, as this is the best of all possible worlds.")  But it bears keeping in mind that we can bias ourselves by what we choose to watch, read, play, and participate in.

And I do hope they know where the "Off" switch is on Norman.  Because that sonofabitch scares the hell out of me.

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This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

Mass shooters and broken homes

One of the hardest things to get past is the natural tendency to accept something unquestioningly simply because it sounds like it should be true.

It's a special form of confirmation bias -- which is using scanty or questionable evidence to support a claim we already believed.  Here, it's more that we hear something, and think, "Okay, that sounds reasonable" -- and never stop to ask if the evidence supports it.

Or, actually, that the evidence presented is even correct.  I ran into an example of that a few days ago at the site Dr. Rich Swier.  It's a video by Warren Farrell, social activist and spokesperson for the "men's rights movement," in which he makes the contention that there is a single factor that unites all the school shooters -- growing up in a home without a father.

Farrell says:

The single biggest problem that creates school shootings is fatherlessness.  Either minimal involvement with dads, or no involvement with dads.  This often comes after divorce, and the 51% of women over the age of thirty who are raising children without father involvement.  Sometimes it starts with fathers being involved, but after two years of not being married, 40% of fathers drop out completely.  That combination accounts for 100% of school shooters.  Adam Lanza, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz, Dylan Roof.  They're all dad-deprived boys.  We don't see this among girls; we don't see this among dad-involved boys.  The solution is father involvement.  We can start that in school.  We can start that with fathers being involved in PTAs.  Changing the culture, letting men know that the most important single thing they can do in their life is not to be a warrior, outside in the killing fields, but to be a father-warrior.  Be involved not just in PTAs but in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, coaching, in giving up high-paying jobs to spend more time with your children.  

Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?  Moreover, it's hard to think of a reason why we wouldn't want fathers to spend more positive interactive time with their children.  So it's easy just to say, "Oh, okay, that makes sense," and not to question the underlying claim.

Because it turns out that what he's saying -- school shooters are created by fatherless homes -- is simply untrue.  The contention seems to have originated with a Fox News story, and the whole thing took off, despite its simply being factually incorrect.

[image is in the Public Domain]

Now, mind you, there are cases of mass shooters who grew up in dysfunctional, fatherless homes.  Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, was the son of a bank robber who spent most of his son's childhood in prison.  The father of Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland school shooter, died when his son was five, and he was left with a mother who apparently was abusive, and eventually he was farmed out to relatives and friends.  Dylann Roof, the Charleston church shooter, was the product of divorce, and his father was allegedly physically abusive not only to his son but to his second wife.

But consider some of the others.  Adam Lanza, the Newtown school shooter, was the child of a couple who divorced when he was in fifth grade, but his father remained involved.  When Lanza's anxiety and apparent obsessive-compulsive disorder made it impossible for him to attend high school, he was taken out and jointly homeschool by his mother and father.  Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007, was the son of a pair of hard-working Korean immigrants who were "strong Christians" and had sought help for their son, who had shown signs of sociopathy and withdrawal all the way back in first grade.   Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was not the product of divorce, and if anything, his father sounds more stable than his mother.  Neither Eric Harris nor Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters, were the products of broken families, or even dysfunctional ones; nothing I could find (and there are thousands of sites out there dedicated to the tragedy) indicated that either boy grew up in anything but a perfectly ordinary upper middle class home.

So it's not sufficient to say, "Okay, that seems reasonable."  If you have a claim, it better be supported by all the evidence, or it's time to look elsewhere.  I'm certain that the awful home situations of Paddock, Cruz, and Roof contributed to their anger and eventual violent attacks; but clearly this isn't (as Farrell claims) proof that "the cause of mass shootings is fatherlessness," and his contention that 100% of mass shooters were functionally fatherless is simply wrong.

Once again, the situation is that we need to question our own biases.  The cause of mass murders in our society is multifaceted, and admits no easy solution: bullying and the resultant sense of powerlessness that engenders, the difficulty of obtaining consistent mental health services, poverty, child abuse, split families, radicalization/racism/fascist rhetoric, the easy availability of guns, and the culture of glorifying violence undoubtedly all play a role.

Certainly, we should all commit ourselves to doing what we can to remedy any of those problems; but claiming that one of them is responsible for a complex issue is facile thinking.  And as tempting as it is, such oversimplification never leads to a real solution.