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Beware the Power of Prediction | Carissa Véliz | TED
Beware the Power of Prediction | Carissa Véliz | TED
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Subtítulos (236)
0:04
Let me tell you about the future.
0:06
Predictions are the boxing ring where fights over the future take place.
0:12
As the story goes,
0:14
King Louis XI kept an astrologer in court.
0:17
One day, the astrologer predicted
0:19
that a lady of the court would die within a week.
0:23
When she did, Louis was shaken.
0:26
Either the astrologer had murdered the woman to prove his accuracy,
0:31
or he was so prescient that he could threaten Louis himself.
0:35
The astrologer had to be murdered.
0:37
(Laughter)
0:39
The king ordered his servants that upon his signal,
0:41
they were to throw the astrologer out the window to a certain death.
0:45
You'd be surprised, by the way, by how many seers in history
0:48
have met this fate.
0:50
Some advice to astrologers:
0:51
keep away from kings and heights.
0:54
(Laughter)
0:55
When the astrologer arrived to meet Louis,
0:58
the King asked him one last question.
1:01
"Given your prophetic abilities, tell me, how long will you live?"
1:07
Not missing a beat, the astrologer replied,
1:10
"I will die three days before your Majesty."
1:14
(Laughter)
1:17
And Louis never gave the signal.
1:20
(Laughter)
1:21
Did the astrologer find his answer in the stars?
1:26
I don't think so.
1:27
(Laughter)
1:28
I think he understood the power of prediction
1:31
and used it to get himself life insurance.
1:35
Smart astrologer.
1:37
Even though we tend to associate prediction with knowledge,
1:41
I'd like to invite you to consider the possibility
1:44
that most of the predictions that you encounter
1:46
in an everyday setting
1:48
are closer to the realm of power than that of knowledge.
1:51
It might seem that the days in which we sought astrologers
1:55
and soothsayers to tell us about the future are very distant,
1:59
but often we use AI as the new Oracle of Delphi,
2:02
and tech executives whisper in the ears of our leaders,
2:06
much like court astrologers used to.
2:09
Granted, the technology is different,
2:12
but the political role is not.
2:15
Predictions are often power plays in disguise.
2:18
They justify value-laden decisions under the pretense of facts.
2:24
Better understanding prediction matters more than ever
2:27
because we're relying on forecasting more than ever with AI.
2:31
And based on how we talk about prediction,
2:33
we're being much too naive about it.
2:36
But AI is science, you might think.
2:39
It's cutting-edge technology, right?
2:42
Well, it depends on the kind of AI and how we use it.
2:46
AI can be a great technology to make predictions about molecules
2:49
in the search for new antibiotics,
2:52
but predictions about human beings are fundamentally different
2:56
than those about things.
2:58
Predictions about the weather don't influence the weather.
3:02
Predictions about people influence people.
3:05
Social predictions tend to act like magnets.
3:08
They bend reality towards themselves.
3:11
They affect the reality they purport to predict.
3:17
An algorithmic prediction about future disease
3:20
can make someone's insurance premiums go up,
3:22
leading to worse health outcomes from stress alone.
3:26
Predictions sound like descriptions of the world, like facts,
3:31
but they're not.
3:32
Analyzed closely as assertions,
3:35
they are what philosophers called “speech acts.”
3:38
That is, language that does something other than describe the world.
3:42
When you tell a child to clean up their room,
3:46
you're not describing the state of the room,
3:48
you're issuing an order.
3:49
Similarly,
3:51
social predictions are veiled commands.
3:56
They implicitly tell us how to act.
3:59
For example,
4:00
when a tech executive says that in the future we will use AI
4:04
for everything and everywhere,
4:06
he's trying to get you to act in a way
4:09
that will fulfill his vision of the future.
4:12
You know, the one that happens to line his pockets.
4:16
And when you believe that prediction,
4:18
as if it were telling you something about the future,
4:21
when you give in to the fear of missing out,
4:24
and you go and you buy the AI
4:25
and you contribute to the self-fulfilling prophecy,
4:28
what you are actually doing is obeying.
4:33
Have you noticed how often
4:35
people who make predictions about technology say
4:38
that the future they are describing
4:39
is inevitable?
4:42
That's a red flag.
4:44
Those predictions are designed to act
4:46
as conversation stoppers.
4:48
They're telling you, "Don't question me.
4:50
Just accept what I'm saying as a fact."
4:53
I'd like for this talk to be a conversation starter.
4:57
I hope it'll persuade you to ask more questions.
5:02
Predictions invite manipulation.
5:06
Their power to shape the future creates the temptation to tamper with it
5:11
and benefit from it.
5:12
Take prediction markets.
5:15
The argument for having them
5:16
is that they can be a source of knowledge.
5:19
In theory, markets don't lie.
5:22
If people make bets
5:23
and they stand to lose if they get it wrong,
5:25
they'll try to get it right.
5:26
And by having many people place bets,
5:28
we can harness the wisdom of the crowds.
5:31
But that assumes a very naive view of prediction
5:34
as a quest for knowledge.
5:36
If you consider prediction as a quest for power,
5:39
a very different picture emerges.
5:41
If you have enough money,
5:43
you can use it to influence public perception
5:45
by heavily betting on something.
5:47
Politicians have bet on themselves.
5:50
In February this year,
5:52
six anonymous accounts earned 1.2 million dollars
5:56
betting for the attack on Iran.
5:59
Some of those wallets were funded hours before.
6:04
Finally, predictions create and then cover up injustice.
6:10
Algorithmic predictions are building this Kafkaesque world
6:15
in which we can no longer contest decisions
6:18
because they're not based on clearly defined criteria.
6:22
If I reject your loan application
6:24
because you don't fulfill a particular requirement,
6:27
that's a verifiable fact.
6:29
If I'm wrong, you can challenge me.
6:32
But if I reject your loan application
6:35
on the basis of a prediction,
6:37
there's no way you can contest that.
6:39
Predictions are never facts.
6:41
Facts belong to the past.
6:44
Predictions are unverifiable, unfalsifiable.
6:47
Since they are about the future,
6:48
they cannot be challenged for being false,
6:50
thereby creating the perfect recipe for hidden injustice.
6:55
Predictions are often unfair
6:57
because they're not based on who people are,
7:00
but on who we think they will become.
7:04
When we predict someone's future as if it was the weather,
7:07
we're treating them with disrespect.
7:09
Too much as things,
7:11
and not enough as agents who have a say in that future,
7:15
who can and should be allowed to defy their odds.
7:19
We're facing some pretty grim predictions
7:21
from some of our most prominent prophets.
7:24
Larry Ellison,
7:25
the chairman of our predictive software company,
7:27
appropriately named Oracle,
7:30
has predicted a modern surveillance state
7:33
in which citizens will be on their best behavior
7:35
because we're being watched all the time.
7:39
But the illusion of a world without crime
7:42
is a world filled with a very different kind of crime.
7:46
Authoritarianism.
7:48
Is that the world we want?
7:50
(Applause)
7:56
What can we do to not sleepwalk into it?
8:00
Plenty.
8:02
Prophets gain their power from people believing them.
8:06
If we decide to defy this prediction instead of obeying it,
8:09
we will choose products that are more respectful of privacy,
8:12
for starters.
8:15
Hannah Arendt wrote that it's pointless to argue with a murderer
8:19
about whether their future victim is dead or alive.
8:22
The only appropriate response is to rescue the person whose death is predicted.
8:29
Well, today's prophets are predicting the death of our democracy,
8:33
and the only appropriate response is to rescue it.
8:38
(Applause)
8:44
In ancient Rome,
8:45
it was illegal to predict the death of the emperor,
8:49
for the very simple reason
8:50
that they ended up with a murdered emperor on cue.
8:53
I'm not suggesting that we do away with prediction.
8:56
I'm going to continue to use my weather app every single day.
9:01
But we need a public debate
9:02
about the acceptable and unacceptable uses of prediction.
9:06
And we're currently not having it.
9:08
Meanwhile, dozens of algorithms are making decisions
9:10
about your life right now.
9:13
It might be that in the case of insurance,
9:16
we might want to make predictions at a population level,
9:19
but not for individuals
9:20
because it creates unfair, self-fulfilling prophecies.
9:23
Plus, if we're being billed according to individualized predictions,
9:27
that means that we’re basically paying for our own way,
9:30
and insurance loses its reason for being solidarity and the pooling of risk.
9:35
It might be that in cases in which fairness matters,
9:38
we might prefer transparent and contestable criteria
9:42
to predictive statistical pattern matching.
9:45
Let me start to bring things together.
9:47
Even though self-fulfilling prophecies are nothing new,
9:51
they are being supercharged by AI
9:53
in ways that make it more urgent than ever
9:55
to think more deeply about predictions.
9:58
First, predictions are never facts.
10:01
They are speech acts.
10:03
Second, they invite manipulation.
10:06
Third, they create and cover up injustice.
10:10
The one idea that I would like for you to take home today
10:14
is that predictions can be weapons of power.
10:18
But they only work if we believe them.
10:22
If Oedipus had laughed off the prophecy that he would kill his father
10:26
and marry his mother,
10:27
instead of completely freaking out about it --
10:30
(Laughter)
10:32
He would have never left for Thebes and made the prophecy come true.
10:37
We turn to prophets because we're anxious about uncertainty,
10:40
but uncertainty is good news.
10:42
It means that the future is unwritten, that it's ours to write.
10:46
And we can face the blank page with creativity, with curiosity,
10:51
with the excitement of a sense of adventure.
10:55
Efforts to predict the future go hand-in-hand with efforts to control it.
11:00
So beware of prophets and prophecies.
11:04
It's only when we acknowledge that we don't know what the future holds
11:07
and act accordingly
11:09
that we can be sure to live in a free society.
11:12
Don't bow to people's predictions as if they were facts.
11:16
Be like Joe Frazier.
11:18
When Muhammad Ali predicted his own victory
11:21
in the 1971 heavyweight championship,
11:24
Frazier took it as a provocation
11:26
and ended up defeating the previously undefeated great Ali
11:30
in the fight of the century.
11:33
So next time you hear a gloomy prediction about the social world,
11:37
don't get discouraged.
11:40
Find the Joe Frazier within you.
11:44
Rebel against tyrannical predictions.
11:49
Let's be brave enough to imagine and fight for a better world.
11:54
Perhaps then all of us can make the future bright after all.
12:01
Thank you.
12:02
(Applause and cheers)
