Monthly Archives: May 2022

The field of AI, thoughts of the wise old woman

<< Boutique Ethic >>

Thinking of what I label as “boutique ethic”, such as AI Ethics, must indeed come with thinking about ethics (Cf. here ). I think this is not only an assignment for the experts. It is also one for me: the layperson-learner.

Or is it?

Indeed, if seen through more-than a techno-centric lens alone, some voices do claim that one should not be bothered with ethics if one does not understand the technology which is confining ethics into a boutique ethic; e.g. “AI”. (See 2022 UNESCO report on AI curriculum in K-12). I am learning to disagree .

I am not a bystander, passively looking on, and onto my belly button alone. Opening acceptance to Noddings’ thought on care (1995, 187) : “a carer returns to the cared-for,” when in the most difficult situations principles fail us (Rossman & Rallis 2010). How are we caring for those affected by the throwing around of the label “AI” (as a hype or as a scarecrow)?

Simultaneously, how are we caring for those affected by the siphoning off of their data, for application, unknown to the affected, of data derived from them and processed in opaque and ambiguous processes? (One could, as one of the many anecdotes, summon up the polemics surrounding DuckduckGo and Microsoft, or Target and baby product coupons, and so on)

And yet, let us expand back to ethics surrounding the boutiqueness of it: the moment I label myself (or another such as the humans behind DuckDuckGo) as “stupid”, “monster”, “trash”, “inferior”, ”weird”, “abnormal;” “you go to hell” or other more colorful itemizations, is the moment my (self-)care evaporates and my ethical compass moves away from the “...unconditional worth of all human beings and the equal respect to which they are entitled” (Rossman & Rallis 2010). Can then a mantra come to the aid: ”carer, return to the cared-for”? I want to say: “yes”.

Though, what is the impact of the mantra if the other does not apply this mantra (i.e., DuckDuckGo and Microsoft)? And yet, I do not want to get into a yoyo “spiel” of:
Speaker 1:“you first”,
Speaker 2: “no, you first”,
Speaker 1: “no, really, you first”.
Here a mantra of: “lead by example, and do not throw the first or n-ed stone” might be applicable? Is this then implying self-censorship and laissez-faire? No.

I can point at DuckDuckGo and Microsoft as an anecdote, and I think I can learn via ethics, into boutique ethics, what this could mean through various (ethical and other) lenses (to me, to others, to them, to it) while respecting the act of the carer. Through that lens I might wonder what drove these businesses to this condition and use that as a next steppingstone in a learning process. This thinking would take me out of the boutique and into the larger market, and even the larger human community.

The latter is what I base on what some refer to as the “ethic of individual rights and responsibilities” (Ibid). It is my responsibility to learn and ask and wonder. Then I assume that, the action by an individual who has following been debased by a label I were to throw at them (including myself), as those offered in the preceding sentence, is then judged by the “respect to which they are entitled” (Ibid). This is then a principle assuming that “universal standards exist” (Ibid). And yet, on a daily basis, especially on communal days, and that throughout history: I hurdle. After all we can then play with words “what is respect and what type of respect are they indeed entitled to?”

I want to aim for a starting point of an “unconditional” respect, however naive that might seem and however meta-Jesus-esque or Ghandi-esque, Dr. King-esque, or Mandela-esque that would require me to become. Might this perhaps be a left libertarian stance? Can I “respectfully” throw the first stone? Or lies the eruption in the metaphorical of “throwing a stone” rather than the physical?

Perhaps there are non-violent responses that are proportional to the infraction. This might come in handy. I can decide no longer to use DuckDuckGo. However, can I decouple from Microsoft without decoupling from my colleagues, family, community? Herein the learning as activism might then be found in looking and promoting alternatives toward a technological ecosystem of diversity with transparency, robustness and explainability and fair interoperability.

“Am I a means to their end?” I might ask then “or am I an end in myself?” This then brings me back to the roles of carer. Are, in this one anecdotal reference, DuckDuckGo and Microsoft truly caring about its users or rather about other stakeholders? Through a capitalist lens one might be inclined to answer and be done with it. However, I prefer to keep an openness for the future, to keep on learning and considering additional diversifying scenarios and acts that could lead to equity to more than the happy few.

Through a lens of thinking about consequences of my actions (which is said to be an opposing ethical stance compared to the above), I sense the outcome of my hurdling is not desirable. However, the introduction of alternatives or methods toward understanding of potentials (without imposing) might be. I do not desire to dismiss others (e.g., cast them out, see them punished, blatantly ignore them with the veil of silenced monologue). At times, I too believe that the act of using a label is not inherently right or wrong. So I hurdle, ignorant of the consequence to the other, their contexts, their constraints, their conditions and ignorant of the cultural vibe or relationships I am then creating. Yes, decomposing a relationship is creating a fragmented composition as much as non-dialog is dialog by absence. What would be my purpose? It’s a rhetorical question, I can guess.

I am able to consider some of the consequence to others (including myself), though not all. Hence, I want to become (more) caring. The ethical dichotomy between thinking about universals or consequence is decisive in the forming of the boutique ethic. Then again, perhaps these seemingly opposing ethics are falsely positioned in an artificial dichotomy. I tend to intuit so. The holding of opposing thought and dissonance is a harmony that simply asks a bit more effort that, to me, is embalmed ever so slightly by the processes of rhizomatic multidimensional learning.

This is why I want to consider boutique ethics while still struggling with being ignorant, yet learning, about types and wicket conundrums in ethics , at larger, conflicting and more convoluted scales. So too when considering a technology I am affected by yet ignorant of.

References

Gretchen B. R., Sharon F. R. (2010). Everyday ethics: reflections on practice, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23:4, 379-391

Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rossman, G.B., S.F. Rallis. (1998). Learning in the field: An introduction to qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Rossman, G.B., S.F. Rallis. (2003). Learning in the field: An introduction to qualitative research. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

UNESCO. (2022). K-12 AI curricula-Mapping of government-endorsed AI curriculum.

text | poetry

<< Interruption Mécanique >>

The Sundays. No additional notes are added to the wary honking —overtaking the birds signaling— announcing itself at the grated-open window; earlier my cat dangled, there, clawing the metal mesh 29 storeys high unaware of confinements labeled as courage

The Horns. As the birds triturated my sleep, handing it to leftovers as the coveted sands once of dreams. 

The Birds. As wind alerting waking me, they are reminders of the electronic alarm whistling its way in my subconscious, deworming it of consciousness, bated for bartering my fragmented attention elsewhere but else-where but elsewhere. 

These Sundays.  A sounding elsewhere and atheistically nowhere the tole of commune. 

These Days. I find in it a fellowship with birds, horns and cats. A swirling of sound recipes as cacophonic covenants with hidden agents angled with coalesced invitations . Am I awoken mechanically bewitched?

This Sunday. A disconnected Sunday. It is burningly at stake.


—animasuri’22 

text | poetry

<< Communal Exit >>


There is poetry in strangers
There, for instance, that brown hat
Hanging head down felt a life clinging

Leathery fresh rubbing the train’s inners
Feebly taking a nap verging on arrival
of indigo sleep interrupted by harsh white

Time to rise arriving rails to a halt
raises eyebrows and eyelids and legs
wiping that hint of saliva from the right corner

Our eyes cross and an insinuation of doubt
could there be love is quickly whisked away
by the realism of checking the non forgotten:

I do not know you. Goodbye by averting eyes.
There is poetry in strangers
pedestrian but poetry nonetheless.

—animasuri’22

text | poetry, visual | poem

<< Born into The Unknown >>


The unforeseen mushroom sprouted wing side the salvaged avocado shoot 

Who ever can not seek it sees nothing 

The Hookah-smoking Heraclitus sat as a father of peace on the puss-colored pedestaled mycelial fruit 

The threat of the symbolically unknown curves from the furtive dark, thready soil: fertility points at futures and stories to be told 

life as a potted plant cracks open the wall and espies the impasse of the known 

You are born now, behold. 

—animasuri’22 

perverted note-taking of search functions and autocorrection, imaginatively following a quote assigned to Heraclitus and a mushroom assigned to Absolem.  

text | poetry

<< Quoted Truth >>

#001


“Facts as ornaments

with a core of truth
as winged seeds of truth
whispering half truth

out of some unconscious truthfulness
do not affect the truth
speak a good word for the truth

we will confess the truth
esteemed for soundest truths
until the truth is revealed

esteem truth remote
truth we are immortal
with the utmost simplicity and truth

was to prove the truth
a basis of truth
as truth or justice

Nature and truth
volatile truth
truth is instantly

any truth is better
give me truth ”


A perverted note-taking by animasuri’22 of Thoreau’s truths in Walden and across the Cosmic and Andrea Wulf, A. (2015). “The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World”

text | wondering, The field of AI, thoughts of the wise old woman

<< Critique: not as a Worry nor Dismissal, but as Co-creative Collective Path-maker>>


In exploring this statement, I wish to take the opportunity to focus on, extrapolate and perhaps contextualize the word “worry” a bit here.

I sense “worry” touches on an important human process of urgency.

What if… we were to consider who might/could be “worried”, and, when “worry” is confused or used as a distracting label. Could this give any interesting insight into our human mental models and processes (not of those who do the worrying but rather of those using the label)?

The term might be unwittingly resulting as if a tool for confusion or distraction (or hype). I think to notice that “worry,” “opposition,” “reflection,” “anxiety” and “critical thought-exercises,” or “marketing rhetorics toward product promotion,” are too easily confused. [Some examples of convoluted confusions might be (indirectly) hinted at in this article: here —OR— here ]

To me, at least, these above listed “x”-terms, are not experienced as equatable, just yet.

As a species, within which a set of humans claims to be attracted to innovation, we might want to innovate (on) not only externals, or symptoms, but also causes, or inherent attributes to the human interpretational processes and the ability to apply nuances therewith, eg, is something “worrying” or is it not (only) “worrying” and perhaps something else / additional that takes higher urgency and/or importance?

I imagine that in learning these distinctions, we might actually “innovate”.

Engaging in a thought-exercise is an exercise toward an increase of considering altered, alternative or nuanced potential human pathways, towards future action and outcomes, as if exploring locational potentials: “there-1” rather then “there-2” or “there-n;” and that rather than an invitation for another to utter: “don’t worry.”

If so, critical thought might not need to be a subscription to “worry” nor the “dismissal” of 1 scenario, 1 technology, 1 process, 1 ideology, etc, over the other [*1]

Then again, from a user’s point of view, I dare venture that the use of the word “worry” (as in “I worry that…”) might not necessarily be a measurable representation of any “actual” state of one’s psychology. That is, an observable behavior or interpreted (existence of an) emotion has been said to be no guaranteed representation of the mental models or processes of they who are observed (as worrying). [a hint is offered here —OR— here ]

Hence, “worry” could be / is at times seemingly used as a rhetorical tool from either the toolboxes of ethos, pathos or logos, and not as an externalization of one’s actual emotional state of that ephemeral moment.

footnote
—-•
[*1]

Herein, in these distinctions, just perhaps, might lie a practical excercise of “democracy”.

If critical thought, rhetoric, anxiety, opposition are piled and ambiguously mixed together, then one might be inclined to self-censor due to the mere sense of overwhelming confusion of not being sure to be perceived as dealing with one over, or instead of, the other.

text | poetry

<< I Welcome; as the Ever Child >>

I welcome my child’s doodling; or myself scribbling words: “look daddy your grandson made this”

I welcome a bee making a choreography or a primate swirling in the water: “that will make for a funny gif”

I welcome that bonus for a “job well done” scratching my way through the ceiling: “look honey I have a title, a truck and ownership”.  

I welcome a whale blowing air bubbles in the ocean making ephemeral golden ratio-like shapes while singing their aesthetic anesthetic  song: “oh an audio-video clip to attract most likes”

I welcome the sports person or adventurer reaching the top; breaking a leg; getting that peak: “I want to be just like you one day”

I welcome an AI design writing an artwork: visual, textual, sonic or mathematical. I welcome its poem or painting indistinguishable from that child’s, mine, that expert, that genius: “can I be you, robot, please?”

However, dear, as with Jazz or Mathematics or Poetry or climbing the Everest, or that hill with that tree on top, as your last trip, at the age of ninety two and a half: 

it’s not about the poem, the number, the note, or the right result. It’s the journey, the aesthetic, the laboring, the sweat, the doubt, the insecurity and most of all the dialog

before; the dialog during and the dialog long, long after the tangibles or measurable, the simple analytics of the act; long after the creator is gone

“how are you with that, my welcomed and dearest AI?” 

—animasuri’22 

—— -•

References:

https://thewalrus.ca/ai-poetry/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sorry-math-getting-right-answer-philippe-barbe-ph-d-

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:6930327437612343296?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28ugcPost%3A6930327437612343296%2C6930441990115344384%29

https://www.whyarewehere.tv/people/semir-zeki/#clip-1419

Thank you professor Felix Hovsepian, PhD, FIMA and Philippe B. for stimulating thought and process

text | wondering, The field of AI, Uncategorized

Terms, terms, terms as words, words, words

As a layperson, using my brain’s ‘algorithms’, trying to pattern-recognize the tree from the forest, I wish to share my ignorant “insight,” obtained during my ongoing life-long learning, being confident someone somewhere (perhaps a future me) will find an attribute or two to disagree on:
 
‘Symbolic Artificial Intelligence’ is synonymous to the more colloquial ‘Good Old-Fashioned AI’, which is in turn simplified to the abbreviation ‘GOFAI’. Symbolic AI uses symbols that could be read by humans. These symbols represent ‘real world’ concepts. These concepts could be formal logic concepts or other (e.g. ‘linguistic’). These symbols are used (or ‘manipulated’) to create ‘rules.’

‘Rules’ are also used to enable the use (or manipulation) of these symbols. This, in its entirety, I understand, for now, as an integrated whole that encapsulates human (‘expert’) knowledge, and these aforementioned rules, into a system which I understand as a ‘Rule-Based System’.

For instance then, ‘Reasoning through syllogisms’ is a rule-based method toward logic reasoning and implies a set of rules used by humans that are also computational and hence, I sense, could be used in the above-mentioned AI systems.

As an added bonus, I think to understand that if these rules and symbols are then used with, for instance, human (aka ‘natural’) language processing (‘NLP’), then one can see the ‘deterministic’ at work. And yet, here, I feel my learning is still very shaky.

That stated, my syntactic logic, of the latter, should not be turned around in thinking that I believe to have learned that NLP is inevitably and only GOFAI. I don’t think so; for now, I do not understand it as such.

This is where the last paragraph of my story here above is trying to imply the second major branch, along the first branch as described here above, in the field of AI: (un)supervised ML, ANNs and the likes; or so I am understanding it to the present day.

Some of these terms and words, in this second branch of the AI field, I explore elsewhere here on the blog, and that as output of my auto-didactic learning processes.
 

Keeping it as basic as possible, with the aim to explain it to anyone who might ask me (while I do think it more cautious not to ask this layperson), where could I improve or correct this “understanding” (which I assume to be lacking)?

The field of AI, Uncategorized

<< AI Text, Subtext & Contextual(izing) Literacies >>


It might be desirable to consider (functional, nonlinear) literacy in a larger context and not only within the market or professional realms; and not only of data preceding AI alone

For instance: computational thinking (as a methodology & secondarily as an “attitude” for increasing awareness and human discernment about one’s mental models creation) could (and is starting to) occur at a childhood’s level (K-12)

One might want to methodologically map this with digital literacy: not collapsed to technique or production alone, and yet, also through community lenses, eco-system & environmental lenses, cultural lenses, and policy lenses, which might/should imply ethics and careful consideration, via different mental models, allowing, for instance, what-if scenarios, value-thinking & context/consequential thought

And a learner could also be thinking about thinking:

“what could be (non-human) thinking, intelligence, awareness? How could these be imaginable, even if someone believed these not to exist outside of humans? What is signal versus communication versus language? What is poetry if not human-made? What is signal versus knowledge? Why might someone (besides me) care about alternative forms of intelligence? What would it be like to be an intelligence stuck in a car? Does consciousness exist? Is thought a tool of the mind and language a technology? What could it mean (to someone besides me) “to understand”? How do these technologies influence information? What can I do about it? How would these questions influence (my) design, application or recycling? How do / could these affect (my) energy use and (my being in this) environment? How would I balance reflection with action, with revision, with innovation, with harmony, with well-being with compassion, with…? How can I be(come) “smarter” (less gullible / biased / less dependent) about these structures and processes?”

…and so on

Next one could consider media literacy mapped with data literacy & learning about various visualizations of the same data leading to subjectivities, & implying information, misinformation, disinformation or confusions in representation and cognitive processes, leading to sustained undesirable biases & behaviors (note: debate and dialog about “undesirable” as ongoing, compassionate and driven by caring discernment)

Then, as the attached post resonates with me hinting behind its self-labeled “simplified” structure: AI literacy (well beyond the hype, brain mimicry or Neural Networks & Machine Learning alone; and inclusive of AI ethics even if, though some voices disagree, the technical insight is minimal)

These literacies could be nurtured both via #offline non-digital methods and via non-brand specific (online) electronics (soft & hardware)

ai strategy minus foundations could lack awareness and (longitudinal, multidimensional) sustainability

Header: sculpture by Lucas H. (2022); reproduced here with permission