Using AI to predict the Oscars (and maybe even save humanity)

Ten years ago, I wrote a graphic novel about a researcher who used AI technologies to connect huge human populations into a unified superintelligence that could solve all the world’s problems. I gave the book a title Monkey Room because it plays on the old concept that if you put a million monkeys in a room with a million typewriters and let them pound the keyboards for millions and millions of years, they’ll end up producing the complete works of Shakespeare by dumb luck.

In the book, we humans are the monkeys. And the AI ​​that monitors all of humanity’s actions and reactions is the room we foolishly lock ourselves in.

I wrote the book as a cautionary tale warning that the human race could turn into a mindless factory for generating random thoughts (content) that is sucked up by a super-intelligent AI to mimic human thinking without any human values, morals, emotions or sensitivities.

Keeping human qualities “in the loop”.

Now, more than a decade later, I can’t help but wonder if ChatGPT, LaMDA, and other Large Language Models (LLMs) are the first dystopian steps toward building a veritable “monkey room” that will reduce humanity to a resource of fluctuating data indicates that a amoral superintelligence used to do “the real thinking” for us.

Is ChatGPT a step towards a dystopia Monkey Room scenario?

Maybe I’m exaggerating the danger, but these risks seemed so obvious to me in 2014 that I founded a company called Unanimous AI that pursues the opposite mission: to use AI to connect people in a way that strengthens and elevates our collective intelligence while preserving our human values, morals and sensibilities. This mission stands in stark contrast to so many current AI efforts pushing to automate decision making in ways that treat us humans as mere data points, taking our most human qualities out of the loop.

How AI can be used to enhance human intelligence rather than replace it

Like many researchers, I looked to Mother Nature for inspiration and began studying how biological systems enable large populations to increase their intelligence.

It turns out that evolution has wrestled with these problems for hundreds of millions of years and has solved them many times over, enabling a wide variety of organisms (from schools of fish to swarms of bees) to “think together” in ways that significantly reduce population size. smarter than the individual members.

Biologists call this swarm intelligence, and it works very differently from how we humans usually make group decisions.

Instead of conducting polls or voting or building a hierarchy with a “decision maker” at the top, Mother Nature creates real-time systems where all members can push and pull the group in a giant multi-dimensional tug-of-war. This allows them to come up with solutions that are almost always smarter than individuals would have come up with on their own.

For example, bees can make decisions by making their bodies vibrate in unison and respond to each other in a process called “waddle dance,and has been shown to converge to optimal solutions to complex multivariable problems.

“Hive mind” is not a pejorative

Here comes the phrase “hive mindcomes from, but the pejorative context is totally misplaced. In reality, we can learn a lot from swarming birds, shoals of fish, and swarming bees, because they can make remarkably competent decisions without forming a “herd mentality” where one individual is startled and runs off a cliff and everyone else follows.

Herds are asynchronous structures where the impulses of a few initial actors attract many to follow. Swarms are synchronous structures where all members interact in real time, pushing and pulling each other in a system that deliberates and efficiently finds optimal solutions.

Now think about social media, where a single tweet can start a single “like”, which can in turn trigger a cascade of “likes” – talk about a herd mentality. The process is called “social influence bias”, and it is part of the reason why we humans have collectively made such bad decisions over the last decade. We have built a technological infrastructure that amplifies sound in the same way that a single sheep that sees a shadow and is startled for no reason can lead hundreds of others in a stampede nowhere.

The “snowball effect”.

For example a 2013 research study by the Hebrew University and MIT showed that a single positive vote on a piece of content can increase the probability of the next positive vote by 32%, and increase the likelihood that the content will be rated positively overall – after thousands upon thousands of votes – by 25%.

This is called “snowballs,” and it’s basically us humans jumping off a cliff. Guess what? Now we feed the most loved and shared content into AI systems using them to represent humanity. Sound like a good idea to you? Not for me – that’s why I believe we humans have to learn mother Nature and shifting our online interaction model from hats to swarms. It makes groups smarter.

Of course, when I started building a system in 2014, I ran into a very serious problem: we humans haven’t developed the ability to form real-time synchronous systems like birds, bees, and fish do.

So I started developing a technology called artificial swarm intelligence (ASI) I thought it would be possible for networked human groups to think together in intelligent swarms. When I put together a team of engineers and researchers, we had no idea if it would work, but we take comfort in the fact that Mother Nature usually points us in the right direction. Guess what? She did.

Combining thoughts and insights in real time

It appears that artificial swarms really work, enabling networked human groups to combine and produce their thoughts and insights in real time better decisions And smarter predictions and more accurate medical diagnoses And business evaluations. It has even been shown boost IQs. (For more details, see the TEDx talk I gave in 2017 to explain the underlying science while providing examples that have been validated in university studies.)

Of course, saying a new technology works or citing academic papers that prove it works isn’t as much fun as testing the concept at high-profile events where anything can go wrong. At Unanimous, we’ve done this many times in the past, using human groups and swarm AI to capture a wide variety of events from the Kentucky Derby and the super bowl to the Election 2020 – and with great success.

Which brings me to the Academy Awards 2023 broadcast live this Sunday.

For the seventh year in a row, our researchers from Unanimous AI have invited a group of randomly selected “movie buffs” to participate online as real-time swarm intelligence and predict all major categories of the Oscars. If things go as they did in the past, this group of just 20 amateurs will match or surpass most professional film critics.

Again, this is not a vote or poll. These 20 individuals formed a real-time system mediated by swarm intelligence algorithms that helped them bring together the best combination of their individual insights and intuitions. Each prediction runs in about 60 seconds and looks something like this:

The process of predicting the Oscars took about 30 minutes and was done entirely online. It produced the range of results shown in the table below. As you can see, the swarm method gives not only a prediction for each price, but also a probabilistic confidence.

As mentioned, the most likely include movies to win Oscars No news from the Western Frontwhich is expected to win the Best International Film award, and that of Guillermo De Toro Pinocchio, which is expected to win the Best Animated Feature award. And finally, Everything everywhere at once is expected to be the big winner on Sunday evening.

Will all the above predictions be correct? Probably not, but if the 2023 results are similar to previous years, we can expect artificial swarm intelligence to produce a range of predictions that are between 81% and 93% accurate when the results are announced.

Of course, using artificial swarms to increase the intelligence of human groups is useful for much more important things than predicting the Oscars.

For example, the United Nations has used artificial swarm intelligence to help predict famines in hotspots around the world, while other groups are exploring the use of swarms to facilitate negotiations between entrenched parties with opposing interests.

Personally, I hope that all researchers working in AI will work harder to keep people informed, amplify our wisdom and insights instead of reducing us to data points or replacing us with algorithms.

Louis Rosenberg is a pioneering researcher, inventor and entrepreneur in the fields of virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of Immersion Corporation (IMMR: Nasdaq), Microscribe 3D, Outland Research, and Unanimous AI.