Tag Archives: Dataliteracy

text | poetry, text | wondering, The field of AI

<< The Tàijí Quán of Tékhnē >>


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Looking at this title can tickle your fancy, disturb your aesthetic, mesmerize you into mystery, or simply trigger you to want to throw it into the bin, if only your screen were made of waste paper. Perhaps, one day.

<< The Balancing Act of Crafting >>

Engineering is drafting and crafting; and then some. Writing is an engineering; at times without a poetic flair.

One, more than the other, is thought to be using more directly the attributes that the sciences have captured through methodological modeling, observing, and interpreting.

All (over)simplify. The complexities can be introduced, when nuancing enters the rhetorical stage, ever more so when juggling with quantitative or qualitative data is enabled.

Nuancing is not a guarantee for plurality in thought nor for a diversity in creativity or innovation.

Very easily the demonettes of fallacy, such as false dichotomy, join the dramaturgy as if deus ex machina, answering the call for justifications in engineering, and sciences. Language: to rule them all.

Then hyperbole joins in on the podium as if paperflakes dropped down, creating a landscape of distractions for audiences in awe. Convoluting and swirling, as recursions, mirrored in the soundtrack to the play unfolding before our eyes. The playwright as any good manipulator of drama, hypes, downplays, mongers and mutes. It leaves audiences scratching at shadows while the choreography continues onward and upward. Climax and denouement must follow. Pause and applause will contrast. Curtains will open, close.

<< Mea Culpa>>The realization is that it makes us human. This while our arrogance, hubris or self-righteousness makes us delusionary convinced of our status as Ubermensch, to then quickly debase with a claimed technological upgrade thereof. Any doubt of the good and right of the latter, is then swiftly classified as Luddite ranting;<</Mea Culpa>>

While it is hard to express concern or interest without falling into rhetorical traps, fear mongering, as much as hype, are not conducive to the social fabric nor individual wellbeing.

“Unless we put as much attention on the development of [our own, human] consciousness as on the development of material technology—we will simply extend the reach of our collective insanity….without interior development, healthy exterior development cannot be sustained”— Ken Wilber

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Reference:

Wilber, K. (2000). A theory of everything: an integral vision for business, politics, science, and spirituality. Shambhala Publications

Fromm, E. S. (1956). The Sane Society. “Fromm examines man’s escape into overconformity and the danger of robotism in contemporary industrial society: modern humanity has, he maintains, been alienated from the world of their own creation.” (description @ Amazon)

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#dataliteracy #informationliteracy #sciencematters #engineering #aiethics #wellbeing #dataethics #discourseanalysis #aipoetics

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

<< Demons and Demos >>


The New Yorker and NSO in some glorious spy-novel context here

…and further, as a cherry on this cake, one might quickly conjure up Cambridge Analytica , or singularly, Facebook with its clandestine 50000+ or so datapoints per milked data-cow (aka what I also lovingly refer to as humans as datacyborgs) which the company’s systems are said to distill through data collection . Yes, arguably the singularity is already here.

Then, more recently, one can enjoy the application by a facial recognition service, Clearview AI, that uses its data mining to identify (or read: “spy on”) dead individuals; a service which might seem very commendable (even for individuals with no personal social media accounts, one simply has to appear in someone else’s visual material); and yet the tech has been applied for more.

The contextualization might aid one to have the narrative amount to:

“Alienation” and that, if one were to wish, could be extended with the idea of the “uncanny” hinted at with my datacyborg poetics. “Alienation” here is somewhat as meant as it is in the social sciences: the act of lifting the intended use of one’s data, outside of that intended use, by a third party. The questionable act of “alienation” is very much ignored or quietly accepted (since some confuse “public posting” with a “free for all”). 

What personally disturbs me is that the above manner of writing makes me feel like a neurotic conspiratorial excuse of a person… one might then self-censor a bit more, just to not upset the balance with any demonizing push-back (after all, what is one’s sound, educated and rational “demos” anyway?). This one might do while others, in the shadows of our silently-extracted data, throw any censorship, in support of the hidden self (of the other), out of the proverbial window.

This contextualised further; related to memory, one might also wish to consider the right to be forgotten besides the right to privacy. These above-mentioned actors among a dozen others, rip this autonomous decision-making out of our hands. If then one were to consider ethics mapped with the lack of autonomy one could be shiveringly delighted not to have to buy a ticket to a horror-spy movie since we can all enjoy such narratives for “free” and in “real” life. 

Thank you Dr. WSA for the trigger


Epilogue:

“Traditionally, technology development has typically revolved around the functionality, usability, efficiency and reliability of technologies. However, AI technology needs a broader discussion on its societal acceptability. It impacts on moral (and political) considerations. It shapes individuals, societies and their environments in a way that has ethical implications.”

https://ethics-of-ai.mooc.fi/chapter-1/4-a-framework-for-ai-ethics

…is ethics perhaps becoming / still as soothing bread for the demos in the games by the gazing all-seeing not-too-proverbial eye?

In extension to my above post (for those who enjoy interpretative poetics):

One might consider that the confusion of a “public posting” being equated with “free for all” (and hence falsely being perceived as forfeiting autonomy, integrity, and the likes), is somewhat analogous with abuses of any “public” commons.

Expanding this critically, and to some perhaps provokingly further, one might also see this confusion with thinking that someone else’s body is touch- or grope-for-all simply because it is “available”.

Now let’s be truly “meta” about it all: One might consider that the human body is digital now. (Ie my datacyborg as the uber-avatar. Moving this then into the extreme: if I were a datacyborg then someone else’s extraction beyond my public flaneuring here, in my chosen setting, could poetically be labeled as “datarape”)

As one might question the ethics of alienatingly ripping the biological cells from Henrietta Lacks beyond the extraction of her cancer into labs around the world, one might wonder about the ethics of data being ripped and alienated into labs for market experimentation and the infinite panopticon of data-prying someone’s (unwanted) data immortality

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks