Can Google Predict Who Will Commit Crimes? | Seth Stephens-Davidowitz | Big Think

Can Google Predict Who Will Commit Crimes?

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Are you a future criminal? You might not think so, says data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, but what do you look like on paper? Have you ever searched something suspicious online? Ever been curious about a dark topic? Just like the film Minority Report, where "future murderers" are arrested before they commit their crimes, we have a similar predictive tool ready-made: Google's search data. People really do search for things like 'how to kill your girlfriend' or 'how to dispose of a body', but as Stephens-Davidowitz points out, it’s not supposed to be illegal to have bad thoughts. Beyond privacy and ethics, data science also backs the idea that you can't predict with any accuracy who will commit a crime, as he says: "a lot of people have horrific thoughts or make horrific searches without ever going through with a horrific action." Data also provides intriguing correlations about who or won't will pay their loans based on a single word used in their loan application, and reveals the questions people in the Bible Belt are too afraid to ask aloud. This kind of data in the wrong hands can leave people vulnerable to discrimination or worse, if society lets its ethics slide. Stephens-Davidowitz is the author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SETH STEPHENS-DAVIDOWITZ:

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has used data from the internet, particularly Google searches, to get new insights into the human psyche.  A book summarizing his research, Everybody Lies, was published in May 2017 by HarperCollins.

Seth has used Google searches to measure racism, self-induced abortion, depression, child abuse, hateful mobs, the science of humor, sexual preference, anxiety, son preference, and sexual insecurity, among many other topics.

He worked for one-and-a-half years as a data scientist at Google and is currently a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times. He is designing and teaching a course about his research at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he will be a visiting lecturer.

Seth received his BA in philosophy, Phi Beta Kappa, from Stanford, and his PhD in economics from Harvard. In high school, he wrote obituaries for the local newspaper, the Bergen Record, and was a juggler in theatrical shows. He now lives in Brooklyn and is a passionate fan of the Mets, Knicks, Jets, Stanford football, and Leonard Cohen. For more info, head to sethsd.com.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: A big question—if anybody’s seen the movie 'Minority Report' where people are arrested for crimes before they actually commit them, just because the data suggests they’re going to commit a crime—is: are we entering this world with so much data available? And there definitely are clues on the internet that people are considering committing a crime. People really do type “how to kill your girlfriend” on Google or “how to commit a murder”. So what should we do with this information as a society? I think we have to be really, really careful. There’s an ethical and privacy reason to be careful; as a society it’s not supposed to be illegal to have bad thoughts.

But I think there’s also a data science reason for this. One of the things that you do see in this data is that a lot of people have horrific thoughts or make horrific searches without ever going through with a horrific action. So it may be that when we have all this data we think we’re just going to be able to figure out exactly who is a risk of committing a crime or doing something bad, but it may be that it’s just really, really hard because a huge percentage of people look really, really bad on paper but never go through with the action.

There is a study of Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending firm. So people can apply for loans, and scholars analyzed what people wrote in their loan application, and whether they paid back their loan. And they found that you could predict whether someone will pay back the loan based on the words that person used in their loan application. So if a person uses the phrase “I promise” they’re much less likely to pay back a loan, because I guess everybody lies, so “I promise” is a clue that you’re not going to pay back the loan. And one of the more striking indicators, one of the single highest indicators you’re not going to pay back the loan, is if you use the word “God” ...

For the full transcript, check out