Facebook has announced plans to create a research laboratory where they will work on creating and bettering Artificial Intelligence. I did not find a single GIF that explained my feelings, so here’s three that try:
If there is one company in all the land that absolutely does not need to have anything to do with Artificial Intelligence, it’s Facebook. I…this can only end disastrously. What am I basing that on, you ask? Well, partly on my semi-paranoid distrust of robots with too many tricks, and partly on what Mark Zuckerberg had to say about the project:
“The goal here is to use new approaches in AI to help make sense of all the content that people share so we can generate new insights about the world to answer people’s questions,” he said on Mashable.
That sounds a lot like a nice, polite way of saying “we want better ways to collect and sell your information” to me. Their project started back in September, with the creation of an eight-person AI team which will research data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in order to create the perfect little snoop for Facebook. The project will apparently have multiple labs, with teams working in New York, London, and Menlo Park in sunny California.
I’m not shocked that Facebook wants to get even better at data collecting. I am a little puzzled at their decision to proudly announce this project not even a month after they got sued for violating user privacy—remember, when we found out Facebook was monitoring and selling information from our private messages?
Maybe they did that for shock value. They certainly need something to keep users interested; even though that Princeton case study was rather hilariously blown to pieces, Facebook is still getting hammered from all sides from competition with other social media sites and mobile based services like WhatsApp or Whisper (whose 3.5 billion user count makes Facebook’s 1.9 billion look paltry).
However, Facebook’s interest in AI definitely stems from the money it could make them. The better Facebook gets at ad placement and targeting, the better the cash flow. It’s a logical step, but I don’t have to like it.
Source Mashable
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