We've all been guilty of getting a bit carried away with social media when we're drunk, but now Facebook are thinking about putting together a program that will stop you from putting stuff out there when you've had a few.
It would be handy if this was already in place, given the time of year and all, but according to Wired, Facebook's Yann LeCun is very serious about making this new addition to the social media giant a reality.
LeCun oversees the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab and is a researcher at New York University, and he envisions the Facebook of the future as having a sort of digital assistant that "would tap you on the shoulder and say: 'Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?'".
The technology is based on 'deep learning', which powers some of the things that are already in place in Facebook such as face tagging, and as the AI gets better and improves, LeCun envisages that it will be able to "distinguish between your drunken self and your sober self", as well as getting to know more about you so that they can push more relevant content in to your newsfeed (and ads, of course). It will also be able analyse the text you input into your statuses to predict hashtags you might want to use, and so much more.
While that seems a bit creepy, and most people probably don't want some sort of virtual assistant telling them what to do, LeCun sees this more as a way to "mediate your interaction with your friends and also with content on Facebook". So, for example, if someone posts your picture without your consent, Facebook will notify you and you can then choose to protect your data as you see fit.
As it turns out, Facebook aren't alone in this endeavour, as deep learning is becoming a huge part of what Google and Android do, how Skype works, what Microsoft are up to and what Yahoo have planned, so the full interview makes for a pretty interesting (if not slightly perturbing read). We're going off the grid now, though, see you after the apocalypse.
Via Wired
