Non human intelligence is closer than you think!

Nishant Shah's article was published in FirstPost on April 25, 2012.

We were just about to close shop and announce the clear winners who had a landslide victory in the contest, when following up on a clue – a simple mismatch between the number of people who had visited the webpage and the number of votes polled – sniffed up by a colleague, we were suddenly faced with the suggestion that a lot of the votes cast in the contest were by non-human actors.

The first instincts for many of us involved were that an act of deception or fraud had happened. It felt natural, to most of us that when we asked for votes, we were specifically looking for human votes. Our relationship with technologies – digital or otherwise – has been primarily defined through usage. We use technologies so that we can perform an intended task. Especially with transparent and wearable portable technologies, we constantly think of them as disposable extensions which help execute our ideas and actions with efficiency.

In this one-way functional understanding of technologies, we often forget that these technologies are not merely tools. More often than not, the technologies that we interact with and engage with, shape the ways in which we look at the world. This is true even of the simplest of tools – If you have a hammer in your hand, the whole world appears to be a nail.

Within large-scale digital networks this becomes so much more complicated because the lines between human and non-human actors within those networks are very blurred. Our engagement with the network is not merely to use it as a conduit for communication. The network is an intelligent entity. It grows, learns, watches and responds to our different actions. There are actors within the network which can perform actions which might resemble, if they are not exactly the same, as the human actions in the same environment.

In fact, we are often faced with non-human actors – call them bots, scripts, artificial intelligence, or any other name – which are more efficient in performing certain repetitive and recursive actions which are necessary to sustain the network, that the human actor might be unable to cope with.

Think of your favourite social network and realise that there are so many ways by which the interface and the network, aided by a range of non-human actors, are interacting with you constantly to customise and ease your interactions within the network. Anthropomorphised guides give you tours of new applications. Email based bots notify of activity in your network. Sniffers detect your browser, your ISP, your connectivity speed, your browser, your access device, your preferred language, your customised settings, etc. to render the social network legible on your screen.

We increasingly depend upon these transparent workers, very much like the magical servants in Beast’s enchanted castle in the fairy tale about Beauty and the Beast. If you do a measure of who you interact with the most within a network you will quickly realise that what you actually interact with, within a network, is these non-human actors who facilitate your peer-2-peer connections in the digital domain.

And this is not limited to your social networking systems. As we move towards a more intuitive internet that operates through multiple nodes and forms pervasive and persuasive networks of being, we are increasingly living with non-human actors who can mimic life more efficiently in their native environments. The bots that perform edits on Wikipedia entries to clean the language and correct styles are made out of code.

Scripts that relay information about your usage so that it gets logged, tracked and visually presented in Google Analytics are also bits and bytes. The IVR that you use for your financial transactions or indeed the very systems which authenticate your credit card details, without you worrying about fraud is because it is done without human intervention. It is despite these transactions, or perhaps, because of it, that we refuse to think of technologies as sapient.

We often think of ourselves in technology terms and sometimes also Disnefy our gadgets by giving them names and talking of them as almost-human. However, when it comes to questions of actions or doing things, there is a false presumption that the human proposes and the technological does it, despite the contrary evidence that we generally have the technological dictating terms and us following them through within digital networks.

We resolved our small crisis by counting only the human votes. But that resolution is not one that we will be able to live with for long. We are soon going to enter worlds where the non-human actor in the network is going to have equal rights, agency, will and choices, and it will perform actions that will have equal credibility as the human one. If not more.