AI Analogies with us humans — Crime, House Price and Education

My MMAI classmates and I recently did an AI model to find the correlation strength between crime rate and house prices, the number of construction permits issued in Toronto, and we got these obvious & expected results: “ High crime rate drives investments away from areas”, and “Higher education rates (bachelor degree or higher) increases the prices”.

After giving a thought, I wondered what could be done with this model to reduce crime and improve neighborhood wellness. Then a second question came into mind “ Crime is something so old, why it still exists, and what drives people to commit it?”

To provide deeper insight I would need to understand how individuals behave and why they prefer crime rather than working. To dig deeper into that, I borrowed some concepts from Yuval Harari’s book “Homo Sapiens”, Richard Dawkins, and a recent Lex Friedman podcast with prof. Risto Miikkulainen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY_LEa9xQtg).

First, we need to understand reinforcement learning and its analogy is pretty simple. Imagine that I have a goal. If I take a good decision, you are rewarded (food, money, happiness,…) (Positive Reinforcement). The opposite might happen. If I take a bad decision, then I will not receive the reward or I might be scolded (It happens more than we imagine).

Binary Reinforcement Learning

Next, we need to understand evolutionary algorithms and how that is related to humans (or any live being). These algorithms (“piece of codes”) are bioinspired(“ mimic live beings”), they learn from their environment and own experiences and pass on their information to the next generation. These algorithms usually need a goal, so you can evaluate which individuals are more suited for a task.

If you imagine that a task is composed of minor steps then we might not have an exact measure of the goal. If we can reward each individually each step then we might achieve our goal more precisely. Take human “A” and “B”, their initial steps are different and they are rewarded differently as well. Both of them do not hit the main goal 100% but they are closer to it.

Rewards by steps for different actions with a common goal

If “A” for some reason train two different individuals regarding only the two initial steps we would have “Ab” and “Ba”:

Crossover between “A” and “B” generating two new individuals

By looking at the two new individuals that learned from the previous humans, we can see that “Ba” is the best mixture of “A” and “B”, however “Ab” did worse than its previous “Parents”

If we consider only survival as our ultimate goal (“simplistic but true”), we have two secondary goals that find means to survive and generate kids more adaptable to the current and maybe the future scenario.

Money was the alternative that we humans organized ourselves to split our tasks and exchange our effort (work, farming, trading,…). Since we look for a means to maximize survival, we are consequently looking to maximize money, which nowadays is one of the most effective (but not necessarily fair) to provide means to survive.

Next, we need to understand some aspects of crime.

My first thought about the crime is that it goes against survival because you might get killed, or go to jail and both decrease your survival rate (or so we thought).

Then we need to bring my two initial premises which say that “a higher crime rate leads to a decreased house prices”:

and “Lower Education Level leads to lower house prices”:

Higher house prices mean that you can afford better houses, therefore you earn more money. Higher education level has a higher probability to get a better job and be rewarded with more money, and consequently get a better house.

So the answer seems to be straightforward, we need better education to get better jobs and be better rewarded (easy huh!? not so much).

Several questions highlight the loophole in my previous statement such as:

• What are the challenges for anyone to get a good education?
• How long does it take to have this skill set?
• Is it guaranteed that having a better education will lead me to more money?
• What is the payback of the investment you made into education versus the return on money?

The following image shows that we might need around 16 years to get a higher education level (from Primary School to 5 years Bachelor Degree), and 11 years to get the Basic Educational Level (Years are approximate and serves only as an illustration).

Investment in education vs Expected return

Higher education level usually costs a lot and depending on the country you are living in, you might not get access to it. With a basic education level, you are less likely to getter a higher-paid job ( there are exceptions and outliers to this but I will not discuss it).

This leaves another option:

What if I don't invest my education or I don't have full access to it.

Now we have the worst-case scenario, you don't have access to proper education, but you still need money to survive. What do you do?

Does crime pay?

Depending on the country you live in and its policies, crime might be an alternative for earning money, without requiring any investment in education, even if there is a risk to those around your or to yourself. Please do not misinterpret this. I am not justifying that crime is right, I am just showing that it an option for several people that did not have the means. Also, there are people that have the means and education and still commits crimes (maybe another topic for the next post).

So, What does this have to do with reinforced learning and genetic algorithm?

If your goal is to survive through money and:

• Crimes might give you the money you need(rewards yous),
• Risk regarding your survival is bearable (neither punish properly nor high enough to drive you away from it)
• You can commit a crime without having a formal education (return rate with little investment in education.

With all these conditions we have a favorable environment that drives away from studies and reinforces crime. If this cycle is repeated in a community, then this behavior is indirectly transferred to others as something common.

So, what the solution to solve the crime issue and improve neighborhoods? Better high educations with more accessible prices.

Was that possible in the past? Maybe.

Is this possible nowadays? Yes, if we explore remote learning and improve the internet infrastructure for people then we might have a different future where people would have at least access to a quality higher education.