Thanks to the information available about you on your social media profiles, artificial intelligence knows more about you than your friends and family. 

According to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scenarios in futuristic movies like Her "seem to be within our reach", as it turns out that artificial intelligence knows a lot more about you than your friends or your family do. 

The study included over 86,000 Facebook users, who voluntarily completed a 100 question long personality questionnaire and allowed an app called "myPersonality" access to their Facebook likes. They were then asked to invite friends and family to complete the same personality quiz about them, and the results showed that the computer was better able to judge the personality of the person than the majority of the people closest to them. 

In total, according to MedicalDaily.com, "17,622 participants were judged by one other friend or family member, while an additional 14,410 participants were judged by two or more friends or family members", and the AI still came out on top. 

Pic via MedicalDaily.com/University of Cambridge

Michal Kosinski, researcher at Stanford and co-author of the study, said that the reason the computer appears to be more successful is that the algorithms rely on Big Data, while humans tend to put too much emphasis on certain examples without any real reason: "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."

Researchers are concerned Facebook and other social media platforms may have too much power to play with

The average Facebook user has 227 likes, a number which is growing all the time, and the more it grows, the more AI has access to information that can help it to assess us even further. While the study’s lead researcher Youyou Wu from Cambridge's Psychometrics Center said "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", they did concede that some assessment is best left to humans rather than machines. 

They did add that they are worried about the amount of data and information that these companies have about their users. Given that knowledge is power, "researchers are concerned Facebook and other social media platforms may have too much power to play with".

Via MedicalDaily.com