In Spike Jonze's science-fiction film Her,
two star-crossed lovers -- an intelligent computer operating system and a man -- embark
on an impossible relationship. Reflecting human-like capabilities,
the operating system personified by Samantha embeds itself deeper
into unsuspecting Theodore Twombly's psyche and life.
Today, thanks to a study published in the
journal PNAS, that future does not seem
so distant. It has revealed that by mining Facebook Likes, computers can suss out our
personality traits better than our nearest and dearest. Not quite
an operating system love story, but surreal enough.
By deploying a new algorithm, researchers from the
University of Cambridge and Stanford University have "calculated
the average number of Likes artificial intelligence needs to draw
personality inferences about you". And they assert that these mean
machines can do it as accurately as "your partners and
parents".
For this experiment, the researchers took a sample of
86,220 volunteers on Facebook who provided access to their Likes,
and who completed a personality questionnaire through a
"myPersonality" app.
The results supplied "self-reported personality
scores" for the "big five" traits of psychological practice.
Namely: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness,
and neuroticism. This data allows researchers
to assess which Likes equate with which traits. For example, liking
"meditation" reveals higher levels of openness.
The next stage allowed the friends and family of users
of the "myPersonality" app to judge the psychological traits of the
user with a shorter version of the questionnaire. In this case, ten
items versus the 100-item list completed on the "myPersonality"
app.
To ensure fairness and accuracy, the researchers corroborated these online
personality judgements with a "meta-analysis of previous
psychological studies over the decades, which analysed how people's
peers and family judged their personality".
The researchers determine that if there are enough
Likes, the computers can gauge a participant's self-reported
personality better than their family or partner.
"Big Data and machine learning provide accuracy that
the human mind has a hard time achieving," says Michal Kosinski,
coauthor on the paper and a computational social
scientist at Stanford. "Humans tend to give too much weight
to one or two examples, or lapse into non-rational ways of
thinking."
Labelling it as an "important milestone", which might
pave the way for more social human-computer interactions, the
researchers acknowledge that the findings show how computers can
unravel a person's psychological traits through pure data
analysis.
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So what does this all mean for human-computer
interactions? According to lead author Wu Youyou, from Cambridge's
Psychometrics Centre, in the future computers could judge our
psychological traits and react accordingly.
"In this context, the human-computer interactions
depicted in science fiction films such as Her seem to be
within our reach," says Youyou.
The team asserts that automated, accurate and cheap
personality assessments could have multiple impacts on societal and
personal decision making. "The ability to judge personality is
an essential component of social living -- from day-to-day
decisions to long-term plans such as whom to marry, trust, hire, or
elect as president," noted David Stillwell, a Cambridge
coauthor.
This research reflects the potential for AI to get to know us intimately
by mining through our data, yet researchers also acknowledge that
concerns over privacy may be stoked as this technology
develops.
"We hope that consumers, technology developers, and
policy-makers will tackle those challenges by supporting
privacy-protecting laws and technologies, and giving users full
control over their digital footprints," asserts Kosinski.
Source Article from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-01/12/computers-digital-footprints-judge-better http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x413/d_f/Fb%20like1.jpg
Facebook Likes help algorithms get to know you like family
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