After graduating from high school, there is only a handful of friends I continue to speak and keep in contact with. One of those friends is named Fabian. The San Fransisco 49ers were playing Arizona Cardinals and I had invited him over to watch the game with me along with another group of friends. The game started and we began debating which teams would make it on into the Super Bowl. At halftime, we started catching up and each person started talking about which classes they were taking or how their life after high school has been. When the conversation focused on Fabian, he spoke about pursuing a career as a correctional officer within the local Soledad prison. Furthermore, he talked about how challenging the process has been as he has had to purchase his equiptment and pass training and exams. But out of all of those exams, he spoke highly of his most recent one. The exam was a mixture of a background check and a lie detecor test and it involved asking specific personal questions such as , "Have you ever smoked marijuana?", "Are you an alchoholic?" and the most perplexing, "What comes to mind when I say the word, 'child pornography'?" Fabain went into details of his exam such as being instructed to intially tell a lie such as, "The floor is green" when it was brown in order for the machine to register when he spoke a lie. Each time a question was answered, his brainwaves and other factors were displayed at a screen, the system offered a suggestion if the intervee was lying or telling the truth but at the end it was up the the interviewer. Given that he was nervous and the result of the questions would indicate if he would be moving forward with the training process plently was at stake. If the interviewer thought you were lying on such a question you would automatically fail and be forced to wait six months for a retake.
Question and after question, he would answer them bluntly and when the time came to answer the last question, "What comes to mind when I say the word, 'child pornography?'" he responded, "I believe it is an awful thing people would force children to do and I cannot imagine viewing or being a part of". To which the interviewer concluded was the truth and was then proceeded to a room for his fingerprints to be taken; a sign of him successfully passing the exam. Fabian emphaized how no matter whether his response was the truth or a lie at the end of the day, it was up to the machine to classify your response as the truth or a lie which influenced the decision of the interviewer. "What if the intervewer was having a bad day?", or "What if I was speaking the truth but the system read it as a lie?", Fabian asked. Forunately for Fabian, his answers passed but for another they did not. Carlos just like Fabian was seeking a career as a correctional officer and went to take the exam. When the time came for the final question, he answered truthfully but was not allowed to continue with the process since his interviewer did not believe his response. It was then, Fabian asked, "What if the results were rigged?" As I think of this now, I was able to connect it with "The Code I am still ashamed of" and other machines that may or may not be hard coded with predetermined results. Machines such as slots and claw machines right now can be programmed to select a winner after a certain amount of tries and money. I do not believe the machine was rigged but it did bring up the question what other machines could possible be hardcoded when we believe they are speaking the truth?
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On superbowl sunday, I spent the morning to late afternoon working on my capstone project proposal with my team. Come noon, we went to the Noodle bar and ate a great meal. The ride back to CSUMB campus was filled with rap music and several conversations. As we approached campus, the topic of robots became the center of attention and we each gave our insight of how great and helpful robots would become to humanity. Personally, the conversation become the most interesting as my team memeber spoke of how Twitter bots had a strong influence in the recent election. Given that it was my first time voting and participating in an election, I made great effort to become as informed as I possibly could. I read online news articles from various resources, watched online news and spoke with several friends to build and create my own opinion of who would be the best candidate to lead the nation. Little did I know that, I may have been a victim of a Twitter bot. According to Nanette Byrnes from MIT Technology Review, there was an estimated 400,000 Twitter bots active on the day before the election and "accounted for nearly 20 percent of all election-related messages. Since I had never heard of such a thing I was completely amazed at the statistics. Immediately, I began checking and scrolling through my Twitter timeline to try and identify a Twitter bot that I may either be following or being followed by. It was tricky attempting to identify one and I wasn't alone since the bots have now begun to imitate human behavior. In the article it is stated, "It had been easier to identify earlier bots, but now it’s incredibly difficult for a human to make a determination", the days of easily spotting a bot through a clearly too good to be true profile photo, incredible amount of tweets are over. Twitter bot acitvity can go from tweeting five times in a row to 15 and then none for the rest of the day just like a human would. As I could predict, it turned out that these bots had an influence in online Twitter debates and the election. These bots can become highly influencal with their constant retweeting of spreading misinformation, rumors and conspiracy theories. Since the bots retweet constantly, the are the reason for why, "#CrookedClinton" was trending on Twitter. This made me think, how many other Trending topics have been produced by bots when this whole time I thought it was the tweets from humans producing the trends. For Donald Trump nearly 75 pecent of the bots were found to be very supportive of his tweets. Furthermore the same bots were producing an incredible amount of positive support tweets for Donald Trump while HIlary Clinton bots tweeted neutral tweets. Before superbowl sunday, I had never heard of artifical intelligence influencing the first election I could legally participate in. One fact that I was unable to find was who is responsbible for the creation of these bots, is it a team, or a single person ? Did each presedential candidate have a team/person spawning each Twitter bots to support themselves and to shun their oppponents? In the times were every word a politician utters is being triple fact checked, these bots are making it even more difficult to distinct what is fact from fiction. Sources: Byrnes, Nanette. "How the Bot-y Politic Influenced This Election." MIT Technology Review. MIT Technology Review, 09 Nov. 2016. Web. 07 Feb. 2017. As technology continues to advance, more and more people are becoming aware of how not only technology can improve our lifes but how it can also invade our privacy. There is a split divide on whether one would want tech companies such as Google to track our online behaviour such as shopping. There are a vast amount of both personal and profit reasons for why tech companies would want to track the online activities of its users. The most popular and explained reason, is to monitor the behaviour ranging from Google searches to the websites we visit to enhance our online experience. Despite this being a very good reason and one many could agree upon,the backlash occurs when tech companies begin to know more about ourselves than ourselves,family members and close friends.
In 2012, Target successfully predicted that a teenage daughter was pregnant based on her recent purchases. Therefore, Target began mailing coupons for baby cribs and products, unfortunately the father found out about this and was enraged that Target could potententially be encourgaging his daughter to get pregnant. After confronting the local Target, the father was shocked to find out that he was unaware of his daughter's pregnancy. Although there may be some mixed reactions ranging from disgust to awe, personally I feel both. I have to admit it is strange and scary for a comany to store and analyze a plethora amount of information just to make a profit but I am also amazed at how accurate the algorithms are. It is amazing to believe that through our shopping patterns companies can use that to their advantage to make a profit. I can easily recall when I witnessed this event on the news and my father exclaiming how could that even be possible. I was merely a sophmore in highschool was not exactly surprised but more intrigued about the event. Fast forward five years and I can only begin to imagine how much more improvements have been made to the data science algorithms now. When thinking about the future of shopping, this is something that I would be interested in experiencing to a certain degree. It would be great for companies to personalize their suggestions to every individual. For example, when shopping online, I already see ads personalized for me given that I performed a simple Google search for, "Jordan III size 9". How much more incredible would it be if when shopping online one would see more of the products that they are interested rather than viewing the products they dislike? I feel as this would decrease the time we spend online but also has the potential to increase the amount of money we spend. There is no complete solution I can think of that would please both side but I do not mind trading my online activity for a great level of convienance. The downside to such a future would be when companies would suggest products are the unfortunate time. How many of us would be happy that companies study and know so much about us that they even knew when a passed family member passed away, or when one divorced? As I was reading, "The Code I am still ashamed of" I began to think about how I could relate to the author. Given that it was one of his first job and he was young, I feel as if I would do the exact same thing. I would feel troubled and in a tricky situation as I would want to please my boss but at the same time I would be doing something that I would not be comfortable with. Furthermore, I do not know if I would even quit my job but more along try to forget about it but since the author was pushed to quit his job due to his sister being prescribed to take the given drug. Aside from the reading, I was also able to relate the reading to another event. As soon as I was done reading the article, I went over to Youtube to watch the tea consent video, once there I was presented with an ad of Tai Lopez. Tai Lopez was advertising his book, "67 Steps to achieve everything in life". I had already watched the ad several times and had speculation whether it was legitimate or not but in the "related videos" section there was a video titled, "The Tai Lopez conspiracy". The video went on to discuss the legitimacy of Tai Lopez's intentions and his own work. Furthermore, the video talked about his past which I did not know about. Tai's past involved selling life insurance and saving enough money to purchasing scamming dating sites. One of those sites was, "EliteDating.com" where the customer was hooked into paying for membership by having an attractive model bot pose as an actual person. The hook was created by the bot engaging into a conversation with the customer and by the time the free trial had ended the customer would purchase the membership to continue talking with the "person" only to never receive a reply ever again. Not only would this play with the customer's emotions and affect their self-esteem but it would steal their money. Never in life did I think I could use my ability to code as a means to scam a person aside from the typical methods such as phishing and hacking. I immediately recognized other dating websites such as "Match.com" and wondered if they had any illegal practices such as EliteDating did. I realized that although the image on the outside can be percieved as positive in the inside it could be a completely different idea, mentality and vision. Both the article and video opened up my eyes to what a software engineer is capable of doing. I hope in the end, like the author we can all make the correct choice.
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AuthorFirst generation computer scientist that loves football. Archives
May 2017
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