*34c3 intro*
Herald: the next talk is Marloes de Valk, she's an artist and writer from the
Netherlands and she's working with lots of different materials and media and at the
moment she's doing an 8-bit game, so the topic is "why do we anthropomorphize
computers and dehumanize ourselves in the process?" and we have a mumble, which is
doing the translation, the talk is in English and we will translate into French
and German. Okay, give a big applause for Marloes!
*applause*
Marloes: Thank you and thank you all for
coming, my name is Marloes de Valk and I'm going to talk about anthropomorphization
and I will approach this as a survival strategy, see how it works and if it is
effective. And when I'm speaking of big data, which is an umbrella term, my focus
will be on the socio-technical aspect of the phenomenon, the assumptions and
beliefs surrounding Big Data and on research using data exhaust or found data
such as status updates on social media web searches and credit card payments.
Oh and now my slides are frozen. Oh my gosh.
Audience: Have you tried turning it of and on again?
Marloes: *laughs* I will in a moment. gosh it's
completely frozen... I'm very sorry, technical staff I have to exit, if I can.
I can't. Help! I have to get rid of something I think, should we just kill it?
That's so stupid yeah.
But they're gonna have a coffee soon and then it's gonna
Yes, force quit... I think I know what the problem is. I'm sorry it's, it's
really not working. All right let's see if we're back.
Okay, okay so sorry for the interruption.
I wanted to start by letting Silicon Valley itself tell a story about
technology, really, sorry about the interruption. So, Silicon Valley propaganda
during our lifetime, we're about to see the transformation of the human race, it's
really something that blows my mind every time I think about it. People have no idea
how fast the world is changing and I want to give you a sense of that because it
fills me with awe and with an extraordinary sense of responsibility. I
want to give you a sense of why now is different why this decade the next decade
is not interesting times but THE most extraordinary times ever in
human history and they truly are. What we're talking about here is the notion
that faster cheaper computing power which is almost like a force of nature, is
driving a whole slew of technologies, technology being the force that takes what
used to be scarce and make it abundant. That is why we're heading towards this
extraordinary age of abundance. The future will not take care of itself as we know
the world looks to America for progress and America looks to California and if you
ask most Californians where they get their progress they'll point towards the bay,
but here at the bay there is no place left to point, so we have to create solutions
and my goal is to simplify complexity, take Internet technology and cross it with
an old industry and magic and progress and big things can happen. I really think
there are two fundamental paths for humans, one path is we stay on earth
forever, or some eventual extinction event wipes us out, I don't have a doomsday
prophecy but history suggests some doomsday event will happen. The
alternative is becoming a spacefaring and multiplanetary species and it will be like
really fun to go, you'll have a great time. We will set on Mars and we should,
because it's cool. When it comes to space I see it as my job to build infrastructure
the hard way. I'm using my resources to put in that infrastructure so that the
next generation of people can have a dynamic entrepreneurial solar system as
interesting as we see on the internet today. We want the population to keep
growing on this planet, we want to keep you using more energy per capita. Death
makes me very angry, probably the most extreme form of inequality is between
people who are alive and people who are dead. I have the idea that aging is
plastic, that it's encoded and if something is encoded you can crack the
code if you can crack the code you can hack the code and thermodynamically there
should be no reason we can't defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever.
This is not about Silicon Valley billionaires
living forever off the blood of young people.
It's about a Star Trek future where no one dies of preventable diseases where life is
fair. Health technology is becoming an information technology, where we can read
and edit our own genomes clearly it is possible through technology to make death
optional. Yes, our bodies are information processing systems. We can enable human
transformations that would rival Marvel Comics super muscularity ultra endurance,
super radiation resistance, you could have people living on the moons of Jupiter,
who'd be modified in this way and they could physically harvest energy from the
gamma rays they were exposed to. Form a culture connected with the ideology of the
future, promoting technical progress artificial intellects, multi-body
immortality and cyborgization. We are at the beginning of the beginning the first
hour of day one, there have never been more opportunities the greatest products
of the next 25 years have not been invented yet. You are not too late.
We're going to take over the world, one robot at a time. It's gonna be an AI that
is able to source create solve an answer just what is your desire. I mean this is
an almost godlike view of the future. AI is gonna be magic. Especially in the
digital manufacturing world, what is going to be created will effectively be a god,
the idea needs to spread before the technology, the church is how we spread
the word, the gospel. If you believe in it, start a conversation with someone else
and help them understand the same things. Computers are going to take over from
humans, no question, but when I got that thinking in my head about if I'm going to
be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines, well I'm gonna treat my
own pet dog really nice, but in the end we may just have created the species that is
above us. Chaining it isn't gonna be the solution as it will be stronger than any
change could put on. the existential risk that is associated with AI we will not be
able to beat AI, so then as the saying goes if you
can't beat them, join them. History has shown us we aren't gonna win
this war by changing human behavior but maybe we can build systems that are so
locked down, that humans lose the ability to make dumb mistakes until we gain the
ability to upgrade the human brain, it's the only way. Let's stop pretending we can
hold back the development of intelligence when there are clear massive short-term
economic benefits to those who develop it and instead understand the future and have
it treat us like a beloved elder who created it. As a company, one of our
greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you're gonna invent,
you're gonna disrupt. Progress is happening because there is economic
advantage to having machines work for you and solve problems for you. People are
chasing that. AI, the term has become more of a broad, almost marketing driven term
and I'm probably okay with that. What matters is what people think of when they
hear of this. We are in a deadly race between politics and technology, the fate
of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the
machinery of freedom, that makes the world safe for capitalism.
These were all quotes. Every single one. not only Silicon Valley CEO speak of
Technology in mysterious ways, let's see some examples from the media.
Our official intelligence regulation, "lets not regulate mathematics" a headline
from import dot IO from May 2016 about the European general data protection
regulation and the article concludes autonomous cars should be regulated as
cars, they should safely deliver users to their destinations in the real world and
overall reduce the number of accidents. How they achieve this is irrelevant. With
enough data the numbers speak for themselves which comes from the super
famous article "The end of theory" from Chris Anderson in Wired magazine 2008.
"Google creates an AI that can teach itself to be better than humans" headline
from "The Independent. The article continues the company's AI
division deepmind has unveiled "alpha go zero" an extremely advanced system that
managed to accumulate thousands of years of human knowledge within days. Microsoft
apologizing for their teen chat Bot gone Nazi stating it wasn't their fault. "We're
deeply sorry for the unintended and hurtful tweets from Tay which do not
represent who we are or what we stand for nor how we design Tay" and then the PC
world article "AI just 3d printed a brand new Rembrandt and it's shockingly good",
the subtitle reads "the next Rembrandt project used data and
deep learning to produce uncanny results". Advertising firm J walter thompson
unveiled a 3d printed painting called "the next Rembrandt" based on 346 paintings of
the old master, not just PC world, but many more articles touted similar titles
presenting the painting to the public, as if it were made by a computer, a 3d
printer, AI and deep learning. It is clear though, that the computer programmers who
worked on the project are not computers and neither are the people who tagged the
346 Rembrandt paintings by hand. The painting was made by a team of programmers
and researchers and it took them 18 months to do. So what is communicated through
these messages is that the computer did it, yet there is no strong AI, as in
consciousness in machines at this moment, only very clever automation, meaning it
was really us. We comprehend the role and function of non-human actors rationally,
but still intuitively approach them differently. We anthropomorphize and
stories about the intelligent things machines can do and force the belief in
the human-like agency of machines, so why do we do it.
I'd like to think of this as two survival
strategies that found each other in big data and AI discourse. George Zarkadakis
in the book "in our own image" describes the root of anthropomorphization, during
the evolution of the modern mind humans acquired and developed general-purpose
language, through social language and this first social language was a way of
grooming of creating social cohesion. We gained theory of mind to believe that
other people have thoughts, desires, intentions and feelings of their own -
Empathy. And this led to the describing of the world in social terms, perceiving
everything around us as agents possessing mind, including the nonhuman, when hunting
anthropomorphizing animals had a great advantage because you could strategize,
predict their movements. They show through multiple experiment- Oh, Reeves and Nass
were picking up on this anthropomorphization and they show through
multiple experiments that we haven't changed that much, through multiple
experiments they show how people treat computers, television and new media like
real people in places even though it test subjects were completely unaware of it,
they responded to computers as they would to people being polite cooperative,
attributing personality characteristics such as aggressiveness, humor, expertise
and even gender. Meaning we haven't evolved that much, we still do it.
Microsoft unfortunately misinterpreted their research and developed the innocent
yet much hated Clippy the paper clip, appearing one year later in office 97.
This survival strategy found its way into another one. The Oracle. Survival through
predicting events. The second strategy is trying to predict
the future, to steer events in our favor, in order to avoid disaster. The fear of
death has inspired us throughout the ages to try and predict the future and it has
led us to consult Oracles and to creating a new one.
Because we cannot predict the future in the midst of lives many insecurities, we
desperately crave the feeling of being in control over our destiny, we have
developed ways to calm our anxiety, to comfort ourselves and what we do is we
obfuscate that human hand in a generation of messages that require an objective or
authority feel, although disputed is commonly believed that the Delphic Oracle
delivered messages from her god Apollo in a state of trance induced by intoxicating
vapors arising from the chasm over which she was seated, possesed by her God the
Oracle spoke ecstatically and spontaneously. Priests of the temple then
translated her gibberish into the prophesies, the seekers of advice were
sent home with. And Apollo had spoken. Nowadays we turn to data for advice. The
Oracle of Big Data functions in a similar way to the Oracle of Delphi. Algorithms
programmed by humans are fed data and consequently spit out numbers that are
then translated and interpreted by researchers into the prophecies the
seekers of advice are sent home with. The bigger data the set, the more accurate the
results. Data has spoken. We are brought closer to the truth, to
reality as it is, unmediated by us, subjective biased and error-prone humans.
This Oracle inspires great hope. It's a utopia and this is best putting words in
the article "The end of theory" by Anderson where he states that with enough
data the numbers can speak for themselves. We can forget about taxonomy, ontology,
psychology, who knows why people do what they do. The point is they do it and we
can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity, with enough data
the numbers speak for themselves. This Oracle is of course embraced with great
enthusiasm by database and storage businesses as shown here in an Oracle
presentation slide. High Five! And getting it right one out of ten times and using
the one success story to strengthen the belief in big data superpowers happens a
lot in the media, a peculiar example is the story on Motherboard about how
"Cambridge Analytica" helped Trump win the elections by psychologically profiling the
entire American population and using targeted Facebook ads to influence the
results of the election. This story evokes the idea that they know more about you
than your own mother. The article reads "more likes could even surpass what a
person thought they knew about themselves" and although this form of manipulation is
seriously scary in very undemocratic as Cathy O'Neil author of "weapons
of mass mass destruction" notes, "don't believe the hype".
It wasn't just Trump everyone was doing it Hillary was using the groundwork, a
startup funded by Google's Eric Schmidt, Obama used groundwork too, but the
groundwork somehow comes across a lot more cute compared to Cambridge analytica,
funded by billionaire Robert Mercer who also is heavily invested in all-tried
media outlet Breitbart, who describes itself as a killing machine waging the war
for the West, he also donated Cambridge analytica service to the brexit campaign.
The Motherboard article and many others describing the incredibly detailed
knowledge Cambridge Analytica has on American citizens were amazing advertising
for the company, but most of all a warning sign that applying big data research to
elections creates a very undemocratic Asymmetry and available information and
undermines the notion of an informed citizenry. Dana Boyd and Kate Crawford
described the beliefs attached to big data as a mythology "the widespread believe
that large datasets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can
generate insights, that were previously impossible with the aura of truth
objectivity and accuracy". The deconstruction of this myth was
attempted as early as 1984 in a spreadsheet way of knowledge, Steven Levi
describes how the authority of look of a spreadsheet and the fact that it was done
by a computer has a strong persuasive effect on people, leading to the
acceptance of the proposed model of reality as gospel. He says fortunately few
would argue that all relations between people can be quantified and manipulated
by formulas of human behavior, no faultless assumptions and so no perfect
model can be made. Tim Harford also refers to faith when he describes four
assumptions underlying Big Data research, the first uncanny accuracy is easy to
overrate, if we simply ignore false positives, oh sorry, the claim that
causation has been knocked off its pedestal is fine if we are making
predictions in the stable environment, but not if the world is changing. If you
do not understand why things correlate, you cannot know what might breakdown this
correlation either. The promise that sampling bias does not
matter in such large data sets is simply not true, there is lots of bias in data
sets, as for the idea of why with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves
that seems hopelessly naive, in data sets where spurious patterns vastly outnumber
genuine discoveries. This last point is described by Nicholas Taleb who writes
that big data research has brought cherry- picking to an industrial level. Liam Weber
in a 2007 paper demonstrated that data mining techniques could show a strong, but
spurious relationship between the changes in the S&P 500 stock index and butter
production in Bangladesh. What is strange about this mythology, that large data sets
offer some higher form of intelligences, is that is paradoxical it attributes human
qualities to something, while at the same time considering it to be more objective
and more accurate than humans, but these beliefs can exist side by side. Consulting
this Oracle and critically has quite far- reaching implications.
For one it dehumanizes humans by asserting that human involvement through hypothesis
and interpretation is unreliable and only by removing ourselves from the equation,
can we finally see the world as it is. The practical consequence of this dynamic
is that it is no longer possible to argue with the outcome of big data analysis
because first of all it's supposedly bias free, interpretation free, you can't
question it, you cannot check if it is bias free because the algorithms governing
the analysis are often completely opaque. This becomes painful when you find
yourself in the wrong category of a social sorting algorithm guiding real-world
decisions on insurance, mortgage, work border check, scholarships and so on.
Exclusion from certain privileges is only the most optimistic scenario, so it is not
as effective as we might hope. It has a dehumanizing dark side
so why do we believe. How did we come so infatuated
with information. Our idea about information changed radically in the
previous century from small statement of fact, to the essence of man's inner life
and this shift started with the advent of cybernetics and information theory in the
40s and 50s where information was suddenly seen as a means to control a system, any
system be it mechanical physical, biological, cognitive or social. Here you
see Norbert Wiener's moths a machine he built as part of a public relations stunt
financed by Life magazine. The photos with him and his moth were unfortunately never
published, because according to Life's editors, it didn't illustrate the human
characteristics of computers very well. Norbert Wiener in the human hues of human
beings wrote, "to live effectively is to live with
adequate information, thus communication and control belong to the essence of man's
inner life, even as they belong to his life in society" and almost
simultaneously, Shannon published a mathematical theory of communication a
theory of signals transmitted over distance. John Durham Peters in speaking
into the air, describes how over time this information theory got reinterpreted by
social scientists who mistook signal for significance.
Or at Halpern in beautiful data describes how Alan Turing and Bertrand Russell had
proved conclusively in struggling with the Entscheidungsproblem that many analytic
functions could not be logically represented or mechanically executed and
therefore machines were not human minds. She asks the very important question of
why we have forgotten this history and do we still regularly equate reason with
rationality. Having forgotten this ten years later in '58, artificial
intelligence research began comparing computers and humans. Simon and Newell
wrote: the programmed computer and human problem solver are both species belonging
to the genus 'information processing system'.
In the 80s, information was granted an even more powerful status: that of
commodity. Like it or not, information has finally surpassed material goods as our
basic resource. Bon appetit! How did we become so infatuated with information?
Hey sorry *sighs* yeah, this is an image of a medieval drawing where the humors,
the liquids in the body were seen as the the essence of our intelligence in the
functioning of our system. A metaphor for our intelligence by the 1500s automata
powered by Springs and gears had been devised, inspiring leading thinkers such
as Rene Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. The mind or soul was
immaterial, completely separated from the body - only able to interact with the body
through the pineal gland, which he considered the seat of the soul.
And we still do it, the brain is commonly compared to a computer with the role of
physical hardware played by the brain, and our thoughts serving a software. The brain
is information processor. It is a metaphor that is sometimes mistaken for reality.
Because of this the belief in the Oracle of big data is not such a great leap.
Information is the essence of consciousness in this view. We've come
full circle, we see machines as human like and view ourselves as machines. So does it
work, we started out with two survival strategies predicting the behavior of
others through anthropomorphizing and trying to predict the future through
oracles. The first has helped us survive in the past, allows us to be empathic
towards others - human and non-human. The second has comforted us throughout the
ages, creating the idea of control of being able to predict and prevent
disaster. So how are they working for us today?
We definitely have reasons to be concerned with the sword of Damocles hanging over
our heads: global warming setting in motion a chain of catastrophes threatening
our survival, facing the inevitable death of capitalism's myth of eternal growth as
Earth's research has run out we are in a bit of a pickle. Seeing our consciousness
as separate from our bodies, like software and hardware. That offers some comforting
options. One option is that since human
consciousness is so similar to computer software, it can be transferred to a
computer. Ray Kurzweil for example believes that it will soon be possible to
download human minds to a computer, with immortality as a result. "Alliance to
Rescue Civilization" by Burrows and Shapiro is a project that aims to back up
human civilization in a lunar facility. The project artificially separates the
hardware of the planet with its oceans and soils, and a data of human civilization.
And last but not least, the most explicit and radical separation as well as the
least optimistic outlook on our future, Elon Musk's SpaceX planned to colonize
Mars, presented in September last year. The goal of the presentation being to make
living on Mars seemed possible within our lifetime. Possible - and fun.
A less extreme version of these attempts to escape doom is what, that with so much
data at our fingertips and clever scientists, will figure out a way to solve
our problems. Soon we'll laugh at our panic over global warming safely aboard
our CO2 vacuum cleaners. With this belief we don't have to change our lives, our
economies, our politics. We can carry on without making radical changes. Is this
apathy warranted? What is happening while we are filling up the world's hard disks?
Well, information is never disembodied, it always needs a carrier and the minerals
used in the technology hosting our data come from conflict zones, resulting in
slavery and ecocide. As for instance in the coltan and cassiterite mines in Congo,
gold mines in Ghana. Minerals used in technology hosting our data come from
unregulated zones leading to extreme pollution, as here in the black sludge
lake in Baotou in China. EU waste is exported to unregulated zones, and server
farms spit out an equal amount of CO2 as the global aviation industry. Our data
cannot be separated from the physical, and its physical side is not so pretty.
And what is happening is that the earth is getting warmer and climate research is not
based on Twitter feeds, but our measurements yet somehow largely has been
ignored for decades. Scientific consensus was reached in the 80s, and if you compare
the dangerously slow response to this, to the response given to the threat of
terrorism which has rapidly led to new laws, even new presidents, this shows how
stories, metaphors, and mythologies in the world of social beings have more impact
than scientific facts. And how threats that require drastic changes to the status
quo are willfully ignored. So does this survival strategy work? This
mythology, this belief in taking ourselves out of the equation, to bring us closer to
truth, to reality as it is, separating ourselves from that which we observe,
blinds us to the trouble we are in. And our true nature and embodied intelligence,
not a brain in a jar, an organism completely intertwined with its
environment, its existence completely dependent on the survival of the organisms
it shares this planet with, we can't help to anthropomorphize, to approach
everything around us as part of our social sphere with minds and agencies. And that
is fine, it makes us human. It allows us to study the world around us with empathy.
The most important thing is that the metaphor is not mistaken for reality. The
computer creating, thinking, memorizing, writing, reading, learning, understanding,
and people being hard-wired, stuck in a loop, unable to compute, interfacing with,
and reprogramming ourselves - those metaphors are so embedded in our culture.
You can only hope to create awareness about them. If there is more awareness
about the misleading descriptions of machines as human-like and humans as
machine-like and all of reality as an information process, it is more likely
that there will be less blind enchantment with certain technology, and more
questions asked about its purpose and demands.
There is no strong AI... yet, only very clever automation. At this moment in
history machines are proxies for human agendas and ideologies. There are many
issues that need addressing. As Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker point out
in the AI Now report, recent examples of AI deployments such as during the US
elections and Brexit, or Facebook revealing teenagers emotional states to
advertisers looking to target depressed teens, show how the interests of those
deploying advanced data systems can overshadow the public interest, acting in
ways contrary to individual autonomy and collective welfare, often without this
being visible at all to those affected. The report points to many - I highly
recommend reading it - and here are a few concerns. Concerns about social safety
nets and human resource distributions when the dynamic of labor and employment
change. Workers most likely to be affected are women and minorities. Automated
decision-making systems are often unseen and there are few established means to
assess their fairness, to contest and rectify wrong or harmful decisions or
impacts. Those directly impacted.... Sorry,
automated... No, sorry.... I'm lost... Those directly impacted by deployment of
AI systems rarely have a role in designing them. *sighs* And to assess their
fairness, to confess and rectify wrong and harmful decisions or impacts, lacks....
lack of methods measuring and assessing social and economic impacts... nah, let's
keep scrolling back.... In any case, there is a great chance of like me bias because
of the uniform... uniformity of those developing these systems. Seeing the
Oracle we've constructed for what it is means to stop comforting, comforting
ourselves, to ask questions. A quote from super intelligence, the idea that it's
smart people by (?)Muchaichai(?) (?)Clowsky(?), the pressing ethical questions in machine
learning are not about machines becoming self-aware and taking over the world, but
about how people can exploit other people. Or through careless, in carelessness
introduce immoral behavior into automated systems. Instead of waiting for the nerd
rapture, or for Elon Musk to whisk us off the planet, it is important to come to
terms with a more modest perception of ourselves and our machines. Facing the
ethical repercussions of the systems we are putting in place. Having the real
discussion, not the one we hope for, but the hard one that requires actual change
and a new mythology. One that works, not only for us, but for all those human and
non-human, we share the planet with. Thank you. That's it.
*applause*
Herald Angel: Thank you, Marloes. Is there any questions? Like, you would have one
minute. *laugs* Okay. So, thank you again. Give her a big applause again,
thank you.
*applause*
*34c3 outro*
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