186 - Guest: Michal Kosinski, Professor of Psychology, part 1

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .   The worlds of academia and political upheaval meet in my guest Michal Kosinski, who was behind the first press article warning against Cambridge Analytica, which was at the heart of a scandal involving the unauthorized acquisition of personal data from millions of Facebook users and impacting the 2016 Brexit and US Presidential election votes through the use of AI to microtarget people through modeling their preferences. Michal also co-authored Modern Psychometrics, a popular textbook, and has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in prominent journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Scientific Reports and others that have been cited over 18,000 times. Michal has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge, as well as master’s degrees in psychometrics and social psychology, positioning him to speak to us with authority about how AI has and may shape the beliefs and behaviors of people en masse. In this first part of the interview, we delve into just that, plus the role of social media, and Michal's take on what privacy means today. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.