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Who knows you better — mom or computer?
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COMPUTERS analyzing a person’s “likes” on Facebook are better at reading his/her personality than the individual’s parents, siblings, friends and colleagues, and rivaled only by the spouse, according to a recent research carried out by the University of Cambridge and Stanford University.
Released in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the study contains a new algorithm through which researchers have calculated the average number of likes needed for computers to make accurate readings of psychological traits.
“In the future, computers could be able to infer our psychological traits and react accordingly, leading to the emergence of emotionally intelligent and socially skilled machines,” lead author Wu Youyou of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Center tells Shanghai Daily through an e-mail interview.
Wu, a Shanghai native, is a psychology PhD candidate at Cambridge.
She cites “Her,” the 2013 American film that won the Oscar for best original screenplay, as part of their inspiration for the study. The movie explores how a man falls in love with his computer operating system, personified through a female voice.
“Obviously, the computer girlfriend in ‘Her’ is still far from us, but our results show that computers already have some of the key abilities required for ‘Her’ to happen,” Wu says.
The team used a sample of 86,220 volunteers who use Facebook. Each completed a 100-item personality questionnaire and also agreed to provide access to all the times they have clicked “like” on the social networking site. Through the process, researchers established how likes could equate with higher levels of particular traits. For example, liking “Salvador Dali” or “meditation” showed a high degree of openness.
Volunteers were also given the option to have their friends or family members judge their personality through a questionnaire. The computer-generated results and the human judgments were compared with people’s own self-assessments. The result: Artificial intelligence (AI) won over most of their family and friends.
The computer’s artificial intelligence beat a work colleague after analyzing only 10 likes, a friend or roommate with 70, a parent or sibling with 150 and a spouse with 300.
An average Facebook user has accumulated about 227 likes, a growing number that indicates a future when AI can know us better in a short period of time than the closest companions after years of person-to-person contact.
Dr Michal Kosinski, co-author and researcher at both Cambridge and Stanford, says machines have a couple of key advantages that make these results possible: the ability to retain and access vast quantities of information, and the ability to analyze it with algorithms — the “big data.”
“Big data and machine-learning provide accuracy that the human mind has a hard time achieving, as humans tend to give too much weight to one or two examples, or lapse into non-rational ways of thinking,” he says.
Those who are interested in getting their own likes checked for personality can have it done at http://applymagicsauce.com/, a site set up by the research team.
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