Psychometrics Tomorrow

Psychometrics depends on the availability of data on a large scale, and so it is no surprise that the advent of the internet has massively boosted its influence. If we had to date the internet, we would probably start at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, with Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web in 1990, in which he linked the newly developed hypertext markup language (HTML) to a graphic user interface (GUI), thereby creating the first web pages. Since then, the web has expanded to make Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” a reality (McLuhan, 1964). The population of this global village grew from a handful of academics in the early 1990s, to a diverse and vibrant community of one billion users in 2005, and to over four billion users (representing more than 50% of the world’s population) in 2020. Thus, within less than 20 years, the new medium of cyberspace came into existence, creating a completely new science with new disciplines, new experts and, of course, new problems. Some aspects of this new science are exceptional. While the science of biology is only 300 years old, and that of psychology considerably younger, both their subjects of study—humans and life itself—have existed for millions of years.

Cognitive Science

My PhD in Psychology (with subsidiary behavioural genetics and computer science) was awarded by the University of London, where I also obtained an MA in Philosophy and took an MSc course in Astrophysics. I was founder of the journal Philosophical Psychology, an interdisciplinary forum for cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This interdisciplinary background unifies my interpretation of developments in the online world and, more latterly, the AI revolution. The Psychometrics Centre, which I founded, initiated a sea change in the development of online influencing and marketing.

The Medium is the Message

But this is not just a technological revolution – it is the beginning of a new era that requires a paradigm for human destiny inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s insight The Medium is the Message.  This should not be left to the tech giants, who cannot avoid the traps that the profit motive sets for them. Instead, it requires a massive increase in academic research in universities. If cognitive science is to be made fit for the digital age, it needs to be reformed. The databases secreted away by the tech giants and large corporations should not merely be a resource that benefits their company profits, but rather something that benefits science and society.

Intelligence in Large Language Models (LLMs)

Intelligence in humans has always been distinguished by our use of language. Without this, we would be no different from all the other beasts. And now, almost everything we have ever learned and still know is digitally recorded somewhere – in books, pictures, films, videos, and audio recordings, as well as all in our email and social network trails and online conversations. This is what feeds the Large Language Models (LLMs) used to train Generative Artificial Intelligence. Nowhere in history has a resource of this scale ever been encountered. The current laissez faire approach to corporate greed is simply not good enough. Governments and international organizations need to intervene. Only then can we ensure that a responsible analysis of the intelligent interactions between humans and bots, algorithms and other AI agents can take place. Generative AIs show unique but often covert moral and social characteristics of their own and are increasingly likely to become our partners in tomorrow’s world.