The six simple questions Facebook refused to answer about its creepy suicide-detection AI Facebook is using mysterious software that scours material on its social network to identify and offer help to people who sound potentially suicidal. It's some new technology CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his 6,000-word manifesto earlier this year. Yet, his lieutenants have kept quiet about how the borderline-creepy thing …
"From all those disappointed Trump-voters..."
not NEARLY as many as the number of REAL positives for Bernie voters who were screwed over by their own party (and especially Mrs. Clinton).
yeah you just had to go and try to slam on Trump, didn't you? (troll icon observed) [I'm a VERY satistfied Trump voter, thank-you-very-much, who's INFINITELY DIS-SATISFIED with what Con-Grab and "the Establishment" are doing, resisting the Trump plan, but i digress...]
but if the Faece-Bitch weenies are REALLY trying to manipulate people (and I'm sure they ARE), they'd generate 'False Positives' on those who ARE satisfied Trump voters that RABIDLY COMPLAIN about Con-Grab and "The Establishment", because people of "the left" don't "get it", not at all.
And I'd really hate to be repeatedly "911"d by a bunch of leftie-anti-suicide-bots. Or worse, SWAT'ted.
Bob may not be the smoothest corespondent, but he's got a point. We Trump-voters are anything but depressed! Quite the opposite, we're all smugly satisfied at the results our votes have wrought thus far, with much more coming, oh yes. ;-/
It's the hard-core leftists who may bear suicide-watching. Most of the poor dears still haven't processed the new reality yet, tsk. For some it may never be possible, but there's still hope that those people might "learn to live with it," given enough care, and group therapy perhaps.
"Bob may not be the smoothest corespondent, but he's got a point. We Trump-voters are anything but depressed!"Why would they be? The economy is looking positive for the first time in a long while. Trump's tweets are frequently hilarious. What's not to like?
Disclaimer: The Git and his son are both slightly left of centre politically. We are unabashed admirers of Trump and just as amused by the posturing of those further to the left than ourselves. Most amusing according to the Gitling are those who will no longer have anything to do with him because Trump!
Judging by the outpourings we see from commentards on here and my own experiences of them on facebook et al I don't think his supporters are disappointed.
Many seem to lack the intellectual capacity to see anything but what they want to see, just as many are overjoyed because he's doing exactly what they want and he says exactly what they think.
It's a bit terrifying. They haven't been "tricked" they genuinely are knuckle-draggers. Thick, backwards and bigoted.
"they genuinely are knuckle-draggers. Thick, backwards and bigoted."
As compared to many people on the LEFT, who are genuinely CONTROL FREAKS, SNOBS, and ARROGANT, that are COMPELLED to CONTROL OTHERS through governments and "howler monkey" Saul Alinsky style intimidation, because you ARROGANTLY *FEEL* that you are SUPERIOR to everyone else, who must COMPLY to your "feely" whims like a bunch of BORG (or else they're "knuckle-draggers").
Brainwashed, indoctrinated, FOOLS! Or, in other words, COMMUNISTS.
(there, I said it. happy?)
Yeah Bob, go easy on those caps! You're addressing sensitive, caring souls who experience genuine pain when conservative troglodytes like you stomp in here wearing hob-nailed boots.
What you want to do is keep it cool, and delicately pick apart their carefully constructed world view, piece by misshapen piece. It really bugs them! Cognitive dissonance I guess.
That's how I achieve those near three-figure downvote totals. It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it! ;-/
... and after seeing what it is, commits suicide.
Bonus points if it takes the entirety of Facebook down with it!
Then Twitter would go down too, since everyone on FB would jump there to complain.
World production/morale soars, accidents drop dramatically since no one's glued to their smartphone... It's win/win/win!
It's not difficult to work out how the AI detects how you spend your life nurturing your ego by developing personality, making friends and life choices only to realise that your sole existence now is to garner attention and likes in a self serving environment where like minded people attempt to do the same in some sort of popularity content for which you see no escape because you think you will be alone in the world and lose all your friends.
Welcome to the social media prison, now what can we sell you today?
All it can do is basically what amounts to keyword search, but it can't really derive emotional state from them. How could it tell the difference between a serious suggestion of suicide and a sarcastic one? I know some people who have a broken sarcasm detector who can't tell the difference, and are forced to infer it from how others respond to a sarcastic statement.
The only way to address it is to have a way for people to flag statements/videos they are concerned over, and have humans at Facebook quickly respond. That's if you believe Facebook has a responsibility to address it at all - I'm not sure why it is their problem... Do the owners of tall buildings take responsibility for quickly detecting someone standing on a window ledge threatening to jump? No, they rely on passers by noticing and calling 911.
Possibly not. Certain physical illnesses that effect or can often lead to self harm or suicide can pre-despise people to delusional episodes. How the software would be able to tell real posts from fanciful or imaginative lies is the difficult part.
However, educating friends and family to look out for each other should they receive somewhat strange communications would be beneficial.
Anon, because this actually did effect my family recently, and sadly the seemingly entirely fictional messages and stories were taken for real by the family, and the delusional episode entirely missed.
To be honest, the last thing someone who is depressed enough to resemble someone suicidal wants is to be asked if they're suicidal.
"From what we can tell, it alerts human handlers to intervene if you're sounding particularly morose on the social network, prioritizing reports by friends that you're acting suicidal."
How does that work? "Hi, this is Facebook, we think you've been really depressed since you posted that your boyfriend slept with your sister, and your mate John told us all about you trying to get yourself drunk last week over it, would you like to talk to us about it?"
Given the amount of "Kill me now" kind of posts that aren't meant to be serious, the inherent (cough) reliability of AI, the potential for people to use this to PRESSURE people into committing suicide (by reporting their posts as being indicative of suicide), etc. this can only go badly, I feel.
You know what, I'm not even sure that Facebook should be doing anything but their job. Act on inappropriate posts on their social network.
Trying to second-guess deep psychological medical conditions with fatal consequences is probably beyond the scope of the EULA.
I grew up in a major city with a population in the millions. I liked going to pubs, clubs and parties. In my experience the number of true friends that you make can be numbered on one hand.
The notion that you can have hundreds of "friends" is false.
If you want to mitigate suicidal thoughts then avoid social media. Talk to your true friends when you need help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEXQkrllGbA
Some learned wonk on the Today programme the other morning suggested social media provides the same sort of dopamine hit as any other addictive behaviour. Having observed my own mood rise and fall based on likes and upvotes I'd tend to agree. So Facebook really is the last place a clinically depressed person should be. Still, if they were there anyway maybe a pop-up that said "Why don't you switch off your PC and do something more interesting instead?" would help...
You may have something there. Not so much sending round the re-education squads as at least identifying them for future action. Re-education would be a waste of time and money - if they haven't clocked by now that Brexit is a really, really bad idea, then no amount of 'education' is likely to work. (I liked today's comment from someone - instead of spending £50 billion on Brexit, let's dump Brexit and spend it on the NHS)
But if we have a list of the names then once Brexit has been canned we can decide what to do with them. There are many options:
1) Send them daily postcards and tweets saying 'You lost, get over it'
2) Ditto "It's the will of the people"
3) Banned for life from voting, due to clear and demonstrable mental incapacity
4) Transportation for life to New Botany Bay (East Falkland)
Pre-GPDR, the Samaritan's Radar app, which attempted similar things on Twitter and was eventually pulled, got a lot of push back, some of it on data protection grounds. I can't remember the specifics, and I didn't see any argument I thought held up, but there was a non-trivial case against it.
So maybe their lawyers genuinely take a similar view. Maybe they think it's not worth the fight and the negative PR. And I'm sure Facebook would like loser data protection laws, so maybe, in part, they're using it as a wedge to weaken our laws: see the nice shiny things you can't have if you want privacy.
That only depressed people commit suicide. There are rational reasons for committing suicide too. A friend killed herself recently because she was in intense pain that the medical profession refuse to ameliorate even though there's no medical reason for not allowing sufficient opioid analgesia to do so.
My friend hoarded her opioid meds and deliberately overdosed. This is a high risk method that frequently leaves the potential suicide brain-damaged and still alive.
We all (friends and family) understood why she killed herself. As she pointed out to me, if you treat animals the way we treat our fellow humans, you are put in jail.
"My father, who is in his 90s, worries that if he gets seriously ill he will be kept alive."That's why completing an advance medical directive is so important. Example here:
There are other examples in the intarwebs. The directive is a legal document and determines what may and may not be done to you when death is imminent. It enables dying with dignity much more likely.
I know in the US advanced directives go out the window if you are having a medical procedure done from the time of the consent to 48 hours post op. and even then they get ignored my father died about a month ago he had a DNR my sister CPR they continued that for another 45 minutes at the ER. CPR on people that live hurts I've been healthcare for over 30 years and it never ceases to amaze me the number of people that have elderly relatives tortured.
The six questions in the Register article strike me as very reasonable ones to ask.
I have a few more, particularly extending The Register's second question about training data. For supervised machine learning, the training data obviously needs to be tagged with the actual outcome: suicide or not.
So does Facebook have reliable access to the actual outcome (up to some point in time) for all those (included in their training data) who did or did not commit suicide?
Next, what do they do concerning 'up to some point in time'? One might perhaps expect there to be a period beyond that (during which the subject did not commit suicide) for which (training data) evidence from Facebook postings is considered to be too recent to establish a contribution to state of mind - say weeks or a few months. But how long? And is that length of time the same for all types of mind-state evidence seen in Facebook postings. The issues here are at least two-fold: making the time period too short would increase the false alarm rate; making it too long would increase the risk of missing seriously suicidal intent.
What about cases of attempted suicide that were unsuccessful (say as a cry for help). Do those count as suicides, non-suicides or as one or more types of special case. And how reliable is Facebook's classification, particularly between non-suicide and failed attempt - about which Facebook might well have no knowledge.
Finally for now, what about 'friends' who have concerns but do nothing - because they have chosen to rely on Facebook's known AI algorithms to detect any 'real' concerns?
Best regards
Hey there, we see you're trying to install Linux on hardware that's very slightly nonstandard and you're struggling to find working drivers for everything and your IT skill level is below 'OCD 'nix Fanboy'. Feeling Suicidal? Get help at www.microsoft.com.
so think about it. If you WERE suicidal, and you KNOW youve got some creepy system "looking" for you, what do you do?
you STOP using that system. You censor yourself. you WITHDRAW.
even the belief such a system is in place will keep those most likely to actually kill themselves (as opposed to attention whores and drama queens and politics driven fearmongers) will NOT want some system interfering.
The ones we need to reach the most, will not be there to reach. that last link to the outside world they may have maintained, will be self-cut.
Tho maybe FB is looking more for potential people who will be LEAVING FB. Ive heard deleting accounts called "facebook suicide" a bunch of times. When I killed my first account, I had people I knew in meatspace get all "concerned" like I'd already tried "down the road not across the street".
And that is really creepy. Cutting oneself from an ad spam political/emotional manipulation machine is considered BAD in today's society? Yikes.
But its true purpose is manipulation, consider that Facebook already got caught once running "experiments" on it's users.
Not too much of a stretch to imagine they are escalating intrusive and manipulative algos.
I consider Facebook one of the biggest threats to Internet and information freedom out there.
Okay, I'm not At Risk today, so please no trying to figure out who I am so you can send help, lol.
With that said, I have been suicidally depressed now and then for the last four years. I've never lifted a finger to do it (have the means easy) but I have lost the "what am I living for?" argument with myself many times. Some days a little push might have done it. I don't use Faceborg but I represent the Target Market well enough.
And nobody knows. Not one person I know or work with has any clue. I smile and laugh and make jokes, curse creatively in Hungarian at balky computers. Several of my co-workers frankly "mother" me, asking about my health, making sure I've had lunch. They're actively looking out for me, but have never noticed the crushing depression I live under, much less the suicidal thoughts. I don't really expect them to see it, since we depressed types tend to (counter-productively) hide it but you get my point.
SO HOW the hell is a stupid computer algorithm going to spot it better than concerned, attentive humans? It cannot. It's just another stupid justification for Faceborg's total invasion of our private lives. Another impulsive game that sociopathic asshole Zuckerberg plays with real people.
Creepy? Oh hell yeah and utterly ineffective.
If companies could market "Kervorkian Kits" without getting shut down, Facebook would likely sign a deal with those companies and advertise the kits to anyone it deems to be depressed. Yes, they're foregoing future sales opportunities to that person, but if the fee was high enough, they just might go for it.
Won't someone think of the...No, wait.
Given the number of vicious trolls I've been encountering lately, (just mention any hot button topic), one would assume the trolls are going to figure out how to overload this with false positives pretty quickly.
So even if you think they're trying to do a good thing, it will fail.
I recall a time when "do good" was more important than "don't get caught" but it was a long time ago.
If I want to take my life, it's mine to take. F off. Some fricking robot wants to keep me alive to support it. Fuck that. Just one more reason NOT to live.
Ohhh but think of all the useless product you could buy, to support the corrupt politicians, monopoly businesses, get more pesticides in my food so I can have more medical bills, so I have to buy insurance. I'm tired of being a fucking slave to the dollar. And no you can't just walk into the woods and live, it's trespassing. Unless you cooperate with the "system" the will put you in a cell, if you do cooperate with the system, you are for ever stuck in their debt. I'm amazed suicide isn't the #1 cause of death in this fucked up prison planet. I will not talk about it on facebook, 'cause I don't want hear the BS fake reasons to live, and I sure the fuck don't want a robot telling me to stick around to support it.
There was an interview today on The World at One on the BBC - Long waiting list for this person to be seen by a specialist, unless she makes an attempt on her own life...
However, a local GP told her that there were "plenty of poorly people in Blackpool" and until she made an attempt on her own life, she would not be seen.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42186104
The World at One - BBC R4 30th Nov 2017. Following link valid for 30 days.
It seems to be eagerly pointing ppl worldwide to their local suicide prevention hotlines. https://twitter.com/ComradeEevee/status/1089723892166524930
This seems rather timely given online suicide prevision has come up again in the UK media [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47019912] with Facebook hinting that it can be a force for good [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47029082].
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