> If the father of a girl travelling to Syria to join Isil had no idea what she was planning, what hope does her computer have?
Algorithms can tell if you're pregnant before you know it. Wasn't that Target incident also about a father having no idea his daughter was pregnant until the machine learning algorithms indirectly informed him? I can't really trust the article's conclusions if it contradicts these well known events.
This conclusion seems very, very misguided. Literally anyone around can know better what a girl that age is planning than her father. I think the whole article understimates very much the amount of useful information that can computers can infer. Reliable models take time to develop, so intelligence agencies are overwhelmed with false positives, but I'm increasingly confident they will get there. Target is a good POC - though it operated on a much smaller and simpler data sets, it also demonstrated how much interesting knowledge can you get out of the data.
In the large scope of things, terrorist incidents are fajrly rare and committed by a tiny fraction of the population. It will be tough to come up with an accurate way to predict such a rare event.
This article is timely. For all our advances in technology, terrorism remains a social and economic issue. Technology can help us scale a solution, but it can't do it for us.
This sounds like a cop out. The people who flew into those towers were neither poor nor badly educated - so it can't be a social issue. They weren't very religious either (mohammed atta went to night clubs and drank alcohol), so what caused them to act?
Freakonomics had an episode recently "Is there a better way to fight terrorism?" [1] An interesting statistic they note is that occupation is the primary cause of terrorism. Rather than focus on prediction, why not focus on the causes?
Focussing on the cause won't give you the side-effects (or benefits, depending on how you look at it) of installing a surveillance state / building up intelligence for economic advantages etc.
If in today’s world the act of merely "kidding" around on the internet or dropping a suitcase in front of some building, is enough to bring whole cities to a grinding halt, then the terrorist already one.
And because of this, you won't need anymore technology to stop terrorist, but the technology to remove all the fears from peoples minds. Fear and the removal of freedom are the terrorist ultimate goals, they may achieve this in part by killing people, but they also receive a tremendous amount of help by your government of choice which wants to know every little detail about you.
It's a game about visibility after all, many many more lives are lost every day due to illness and hunger than through means of terrorism. But there is no visibility, because spending money on medical research isn't as "effective" as spending it on your military / intelligence budget. Partly due to the lobbyists and partly due to the fact that helping - seemingly "random" - people won't convince your average voter, that you're actually doing something for them. Arguing about how you're protecting their children is much more convincing in the short term.
Sadly, at the moment I don't see any way out of this dilemma, except for some horrible events to take place which will wake everyone up e.g. someone newly elected using the existing surveillance mechanism in their country to install a totalitarian regime along with the mandatory secret police. Which I really hope won't happen.
[+] [-] MaastrichtTreat|11 years ago|reply
Algorithms can tell if you're pregnant before you know it. Wasn't that Target incident also about a father having no idea his daughter was pregnant until the machine learning algorithms indirectly informed him? I can't really trust the article's conclusions if it contradicts these well known events.
[+] [-] nebula|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IndianAstronaut|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Delmania|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaastrichtTreat|11 years ago|reply
[1]: http://freakonomics.com/2015/02/13/is-there-a-better-way-to-...
[+] [-] BonsaiDen|11 years ago|reply
If in today’s world the act of merely "kidding" around on the internet or dropping a suitcase in front of some building, is enough to bring whole cities to a grinding halt, then the terrorist already one.
And because of this, you won't need anymore technology to stop terrorist, but the technology to remove all the fears from peoples minds. Fear and the removal of freedom are the terrorist ultimate goals, they may achieve this in part by killing people, but they also receive a tremendous amount of help by your government of choice which wants to know every little detail about you.
It's a game about visibility after all, many many more lives are lost every day due to illness and hunger than through means of terrorism. But there is no visibility, because spending money on medical research isn't as "effective" as spending it on your military / intelligence budget. Partly due to the lobbyists and partly due to the fact that helping - seemingly "random" - people won't convince your average voter, that you're actually doing something for them. Arguing about how you're protecting their children is much more convincing in the short term.
Sadly, at the moment I don't see any way out of this dilemma, except for some horrible events to take place which will wake everyone up e.g. someone newly elected using the existing surveillance mechanism in their country to install a totalitarian regime along with the mandatory secret police. Which I really hope won't happen.
[+] [-] saeguaiga|11 years ago|reply
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