03/06/2017 Click - Short Edition


03/06/2017

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Coming up shortly on BBC News, we will have new Swatch but first it is

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time for Click. -- news watch. Summer is on the way and, well,

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it wouldn't be a British summer without a visit to a good

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old fashioned festival. Known as the Town of Books,

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Hay-on-Wye, in Wales, It's a literary mecca,

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an annual gathering of artists, authors, Daleks and,

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yep, even Royals. It's even been called the Woodstock

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of the Mind by none other than former US President Bill

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Clinton. This year it's the 30th Hay Festival

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and the line-up is pretty stellar. Well, for the second year in a row,

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we've been invited to share some of our favourite experiences

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and show off some really good tech, all in front of a real,

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live audience of actual people. A packed tent waited,

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all that we had to do was wow them! We have robots falling over,

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experiments in haptic feedback and demos in binaural sound,

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but that was nothing compared to the climax -

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a Click-created wavy, shouty game built using

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artificial intelligence. In the meantime, it can't have have

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escaped your attention that around the UK things are getting

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a touch political. As the general election looms, those

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politicians are using increasingly sophisticated techniques in order

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to learn more about us. The advertising reach of Facebook

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has long been an open secret, but now it's something the political

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parties are getting in on too. In fact, both the Trump campaign

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and the Leave.EU groups credited Facebook as being a vital part

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of their electioneering. We know that the personal details

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that you give to social networks allow them to send you relevant,

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targeted content, and it goes much deeper than just

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your basic demographics. There are now data analytics

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companies claiming to be able to micro-target and micro-tweak

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messages for individual readers, If you know the personality

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of the people you're targeting, you can nuance your messaging

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to resonate more effectively What's also emerging is that

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political parties have been using this data to reach potential

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voters, on a very granular level. So who is being targeted

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on Facebook and how? Well, until now, there's been

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nothing around to analyse any of this, but the snap general

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election galvanised Louis Knight-Webb and Sam Jeffers

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to develop Who Targets Me, a plug-in to tell each of us how

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we're being targeted. When you install the plug-in

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for the first time, it asks for your age,

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your gender and your location, and then it starts scouring your

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Facebook feed looking for adverts So once you've installed

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the plug-in, it works in the background to extract

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the whole advert that So it pulls out the headline,

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the subtitle, any related videos, We also get the reaction -

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so how many likes, how many comments, how many shares -

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so we can see which messages Are they particularly

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clandestine messages, are they slightly subversive,

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are they even fake news? But how do data companies get

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the information in the first place? A lot of the quizzes

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you fill out on Facebook or, you know, you open a survey,

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it asks your Facebook Sometimes you'll notice that there's

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a lot of permissions attached and as soon as you click yes,

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all of your data is mined, and it's then sold on to data

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brokers who then, eventually, sell it to the political parties

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for use in their campaigns. Although Facebook says it doesn't

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sell our information on, data brokers can overlay any details

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they mine from the site with other datasets that they have on people

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based on their email addresses. The next step after that of course

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is to find similar users that are using Facebook and then target

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adverts, from that advertiser that supplied the email

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addresses, to those users. There are just some people that

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you don't find on Twitter. The very nature of the fact that

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I can't see your adverts, you can't see my adverts,

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means that this approach had to be It's a first of its kind anywhere

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in the world on this scale, giving us citizens some transparency

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into what we're being shown, Do you think that people wouldn't

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know that certain things are advert A lot of the time people

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are scrolling through Facebook and the adverts fit into this weird

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intersection of friend It's quite easy to miss

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the adverts on Facebook. So far, Who Targets Me

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has some 6,700 users in 620 constituencies,

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and it's rising as On the down side, it's only

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as good as the data it's managed to crowd-source,

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so it isn't necessarily representative, and it also doesn't

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work with mobile Facebook, So we're seeing

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a mixture of two things. We're seeing, firstly, A/B testing,

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which is where I try out two different messages

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with the same group. I see which one gets

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the best reaction and then We're also seeing targeting,

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which is where I pick a particular demographic of people,

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and then I send a message So, for example, it might be

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young people targeted The data from Who Targets Me is also

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being poured over by analysts One aspect of their research

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is collecting dark posts, ads which are here one day

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and gone the next. It gives us the ability to create

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a respository of those dark posts. So if promises are being made

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on Facebook, in ads which will disappear the day after you use

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them, we should be able to go back to those after the election,

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look at them, evaluate them and maybe discuss them

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in the cold light of day. And the irony is that,

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as we demand more transparency from public bodies, the whole basis

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of political propaganda could be on the brink

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of a revolutionary change. What's interesting, I think,

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about the new environment is the potential for using paid

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advertising and other techniques to create individual propaganda

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bubbles around individual voters. And that's not about controlling

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the market as a whole, but it's about using smart targeted

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which, in a sense, creates such a compelling and overarching

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information environment for individual people that that

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in some ways constrains what they do I think that's why some academic

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commentators and others are beginning to think some of this

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is a bit spooky. But politicians aren't the only ones

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with Facebook on their minds. The social network was one of many

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topics on the very large brain of national treasure and tech geek

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Stephen Fry. I met up with him after he gave

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a lecture at the Hay Festival highlighting how he thinks the world

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is being changed by social The very current conversation

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is whether Facebook and platforms like them should actually

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be considered publishers? Should they take responsibility

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for what ends up on the site? They are aware there

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is a problem, a serious problem. If 80%, some people

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have said, is the... You know, in proportion of people

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who get their news from Facebook rather than from mainstream media,

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then surely it is incumbent upon someone who is providing 80%

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of their news sources to make sure that those news sources

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are not defamatory, blatant lies, propaganda,

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the wrong kind of, I would posit there that a publisher

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is responsible for all the people They are employed by that publisher

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and Facebook is clearly not that. So do we need a third

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definition, a third thing? I think there is a median sort

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of definition that it's not beyond the wit of lawyers

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of the right kind to find that. Your presentation was a warning that

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people should prepare for the changes that are coming,

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for example, artificial I said that it was a sort

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of transformation of You know, it's an obsolescence

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of certain types of job, but that doesn't mean forced

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redundancy of millions of workers. I mentioned one of the pleasing

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things about AI and robotics, and that is what's known

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as Moravec's paradox, that what we're incredibly bad at,

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as individuals, machines tend to be Complicated sums, rapid

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and incredible access of memory from a database of a kind

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that we could never do, sorting and swapping

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of information and cataloguing But things we can do

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without even thinking, like walk across the room or pick up

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a glass and have a sip of water, But that's fine, because we don't

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want them to do that for us. Where it gets difficult is in medium

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sort of service jobs, I think. Well, you could go the etymological

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route, and you could say Legere is read and inter, interleg,

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and that's pretty good, actually, Just being able to see connections

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in things and people are talking about the moment that we arrive

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at AGI, artificial general intelligence, and that's

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when the various types of pattern recognition, you know,

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numbers, data, you know, certain faces and things like that,

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they all come together so that they can be intelligent

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across these different things. If you've got an artificial

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intelligence that's good at that and another one that's good at that

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and another one that's good at that and you get enough of them,

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and then you put something on top that goes, "Oh, you want to know

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about a language problem, Surely, just a collection

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of specialists of intelligences under one umbrella is

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a generals intelligence. It doesn't have to be

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a breakthrough, it just has to be I think that's very likely

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to be the way it goes. It's reward is similar

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to our reward system It's tryptophan and serotonin

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and endorphins of various kinds that reward us and then we have a pain

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system to deter us, and there's nothing to stop us

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giving that to a machine. Stephen, thank you so

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much for your time. Thank you for having

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us at your place. That is it for this short carte of

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Leg. The full-length version is an eye player. You can follow us on

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Facebook for loads of extra content as well.

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