Of course, this fires up the imagination – effectively, it’s a first contact scenario, which can include all manner of mistakes that could have repercussions. It’s not hard to think of them saying funny things. Imagine chatting with an old, grizzled whale who effectively says, “Get off my lawn!” or a young whale that is going through puberty and is only chatting to impress a female whale somewhere around the planet.
There’s so much that we might get wrong.
Imagine a group of Marine Biologists of the most serious sort chatting with a pod of whales for the first time.
Marine Biologists: *summoning call*
Pod of whales shows up and starts making noise.
Marine Biologists chattering to each other, “What are they saying? They’re talking a lot!” The resident AI expert – Bob, of course – says, “Give it time, give it time, the AI is catching up. There’s a few of them making whale sounds!”
Finally, the AI spits out some text: “What do you want?”
The Marine Biologists start chattering among each other and trying to decide what to send back.
The whales leave since nothing else is happening, making sounds that carry across the oceans around the world…
The Marine Biologists gape at one another as they stare at Bob, who in turn is staring at the screen waiting for the translation:
“There’s someone pretending to be one of us but they don’t know what they want. Ignore them. Fake news!”
One of the Marine Biologists sighs and says, “Well, we screwed that up…”
I spent a lot of time writing ‘From Inputs To The Big Picture: An AI Roundup‘ largely because it’s a very big topic, but also because I spent a lot of time considering the persuasive aspect of AI.
That, friendly reader, scares me, because we do not live in a perfect world where everyone has good intentions.
The key differences between manipulation and persuasion are about intention. An AI by itself has no intention, at least for now, but those that create it do have an intention. They could consciously manipulate an artificial intelligence through training data and algorithms, effectively becoming puppet-masters of a persuasive AI. Do they mean well?
Sure. Everyone means well. But what does ‘well’ mean for them? No villain ever really thinks they have bad intentions, despite what movies and television might have people think. Villains come dressed in good intentions. Good villains are… persuasive, and only those not persuaded might see a manipulation for what it is, even when the villain themself does not.
After all, Darth Vader didn’t go to the dark side for cookies, right?
Just last night someone wrote about an electrical outage, “The apparatus on the feeder pole has an issue”. It annoyed the hell out of me because the only thing on that ‘feeder pole’ is a transformer with it’s fused connections. Why not just say it’s a transformer problem rather than making the issue more complex than it is? It confuses people, it doesn’t inform them, and it only gives the appearance of information to quell those with questions. They might as well have said, “You’re stupid, you won’t understand, so we can just say gobbly-gook to you and you’ll like it. If you ask about it, we’ll just give you more complicated bullshit.”
I take it as a symptom of bureaucracy, and before you say technologists do it too, technologists do have bureaucracy. I know. Some people consider me a technologist, but I consider that a bit of an insult through pigeon-holing. Technology is a tool, no more, no less.
Bureaucracy confounds me. It likely confounds you to. It comes up a lot when I write (both here and here) because it just doesn’t make sense to me how we can make the simple so difficult.
…Language that deals with the idea of “improvement” is often associated more with enhancement, rather than reduction. This can prompt us to take actions that unnecessarily complicate the things we aim to enhance…
…The research also finds that other verbs of change like ‘to change’, ‘to modify’, ‘to revise’ or ‘to enhance’ behave in a similar way, and if this linguistic addition bias is left unchecked, it can make things worse, rather than improve them. For example, improving by adding rather than subtracting can make bureaucracy become excessive...
I drilled down and found the study, “More is better: English Language Statistics Are Biased Toward Addition“. The authors were kind enough to make the paper available under a Creative Commons License, so you can actually read the paper which I did, and I’m fortunate that I understand enough of the math to understand how it was done. If you’re into math and can handle Bayesian probability and binomials, I encourage you to read the paper.
Suddenly, much of what I have seen and continue to see around me makes sense, and the science looks right to this layperson, so I’ll fold this into my brain though I had it banged into my head long ago, “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify”.
When writing for the public eye, I have this odd need to mention both sides and even advocate both sides. Thus, when I wrote “The beauty of a cell tower“, even though with my background I do not personally believe there are issues with cell tower radiation, and I heard people who were voicing opinions and sharing information that were plausible and coherent. Realistically, no one has come out and said there are no issues because they can’t. We don’t know. At least some of us believe not, and at least some of us believe so. Who is right? I do not know. I acknowledge I can be wrong with my personal opinion; it is an opinion after all, and so I explored what could be researched.
As I told a friend recently over a drink, “I don’t think that there is a danger, but I imagine if I had a pacemaker in my chest I might view things differently.” That I do not have the fear does not make someone else’s fear less real. And as I sat with my morning coffee this morning and considered perspectives around me, people reaching for solid answers on a topic, it seems to me that this is a lot of what is missing in social media, and even between peoples sitting across from us.
What was most amusing to me was that someone said the article was misinformation, when in fact there is no misinformation in there – sources are linked, and a topic explored that probably could afford to be explored more. If there is no risk with cell towers, why then doesn’t the Trinidad and Tobago Ministry of Health say something on the topic?
It’s an inconvenient topic. As I mentioned in the article, there is a balance between progress and concerns that must be addressed and while I have an opinion, and while everyone else has an opinion, what we lack are facts. So do we become paralyzed about it? No. We should not be.
But that’s the trick with trying to present something that is balanced. People with strong opinions that cannot acknowledge that they might be wrong will accuse writing of misinformation, even gaslighting (such a popular term these days though few seem to understand it when they do it). To dismiss the fears of others without addressing them also fits ‘gaslighting’.
Vaccines are another example. I believe in general that vaccinations have value. Others are worried about what’s in vaccinations – some out of profound ignorance, some out of informed opinion, but it’s inconvenient to address both for some so they… gaslight. Rather than address the concern through knowledge and rationality, it’s easy to simply gaslight and make someone question their reality.
Balance has value. There is room for more than one perspective on anything that we think we know or that we believe.
As a child, my mother would tell me to clean my room, something I often felt was a punishment or a way to get me out of her hair which was at least partly right given what I have learned as an adult. And so I would go and do things, largely unproductive, and then say I had cleaned my room.
She never thought I had. And after a while she seemed to realize she and I had very different ideas of what a clean room was and told me that before I told her that the room was clean I should stand at the doorway, pretend I was her, and see if the room was clean. This was a great idea, but poorly implemented in retrospect, as she never quite told me what she was looking for in a clean room. Suffice to say my room was never clean in her eyes, and in mine it was almost always clean.
Everyone has some sort of story like that, where in communicating we might say the same words with very different meanings, and this negotiation is something we end up doing every day.
Yesterday, someone wrote that gravity was ‘the way that objects were attracted to each other’, which doesn’t stand as much rigor as he was trying to demonstrate. There are other reasons that objects are attracted to each other, such as ionic and covalent bonding, and gravity by itself isn’t an answer as much as a question. Sure, scientists have learned a lot about gravity, but the notion of gravity itself as we accept it and how scientists deal with it is different. Gravity is an explanation, and more accurately, it’s an evolving explanation, as everything is.
Meaning changes. Meaning is constantly being negotiated between people, between peoples, and even within ourselves. At some point, we as individuals decide when we’ll just call something by a name, and collectively, society does the same based on how popularly lazy we are about it – after all, if we got muddled down in being pedantic about everything, nothing would get done – but underneath it all, we have to understand, everything is being negotiated.
Everything.
And everything we agree upon will eventually change.
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about communications, information, and how one can weave ideas into the fabric of other people’s minds.
Writing has always come easy, and for a long time was something I took for granted because it simply helped me or hindered me. If someone didn’t understand what I said or wrote, I took it upon myself to get better at communicating. Lately, though, I find myself feeling less responsible for what people don’t understand or misunderstand – no one likes a pedant, not even other pedants, and there are some people who are simply unreasonable and unreachable. I turned to writing long ago because shouting at walls makes no sense.
Yesterday, two people took issue with this article about the digitized paper processes of Trinidad and Tobago, and it was a little revealing. To understand this, you have to understand that getting a credit or debit card in Trinidad and Tobago is a daunting process that many people don’t qualify for. It’s a bureaucratic process that, instead of getting approved in one day, can take months (I know) – and even then, teeters on the brink of whether or not you’re presented well to whoever is behind the Mastercard or Visa system associated with it. Because the majority don’t enjoy this luxury, I didn’t write about it.
Two people took issue with that. They began commenting on Facebook about how one didn’t have to print bills because you could pay with the credit or debit card… which is true, if you can get one, and in the weighted world of finance specific to Trinidad and Tobago, is not the majority of people. Further, the point about those who lacked that financial luxury taken for granted elsewhere – in the U.S., banks give out debit cards like candy, as an example (more really, most banks don’t have candy anymore). So those who don’t have the financial tools in Trinidad and Tobago, the majority, have to print out the same bill.
It’s not as if one can depend on the local postal service to get you your bill on time, assuming that the relevant service provider has sent it on time – so people interested in uninterrupted service end up going to the website and using their ink and paper to print the very same bill – which is 2-3 pages, usually, when really, done right, you could just print one and go to a more convenient outlet to pay. Parking at the offices is always problematic, so they have ancillary places where one can pay.
Why do people have to print out all those pages? Largely because the bills are inefficient and have been for as long as I remember. After all, one might just hand someone the account number and the amount to pay – and they should be able to handle that, but because of receipts and bureaucratic fail-safes, and because… well, because they just digitized a paper process.
And that was the point of the article. I’ve written more than enough about the failure of banks to provide better online payment services for more people, but these two people were stuck on their ability to pay their bills online.
They were stuck in their perspective – nothing existed beyond their perspective. Even saying that they were correct in that they could pay their bills online while the majority could not was a bridge too far for them.
This ground away at me for all of 5 minutes, before they removed themselves from my audience (thank you!). Their minds didn’t stretch that far, stuck in the ice-tray of their own little worlds they were completely cut off from the rest of the world and liked that so much that they wanted to impose their world on everyone else.
We all do it. Oddly enough, though, it has something to do with a software project I’m working on and a bit of the philosophy behind it. When I write about it on KnowProSE.com, the link will appear below.
I’m guilty of going somewhere and interrogating my phone – who isn’t in this day and age? – yet it seems you see people going out together only to stop and get coffee somewhere so that they can sit closely, a faux intimacy, checking up on things and not interacting at all.
Worse, they may be using the infrastructure to share information with each other – bouncing off of servers, perhaps even internationally, so that they can share information.
Have we forgotten how to make eye contact, to talk?
And these are typically the same people who do not respond to messages in a timely manner. It makes one think they are studying articles on how not to communicate.
Yet I myself am guilty at times, when things have run their course and the person with me no longer holds interest for me. This is why I’m usually alone – people generally bore me quickly – but when I’m present, I am completely present.
He deals the cards as a meditation
And those he plays never suspect
– Sting, ‘Shape of My Heart’, Ten Summoner’s Tales (1993).
The cliché, that no one understands, echoes humorously in minds that take great pains to explain themselves, dedicating great portions of their lives such that they are not misunderstood – only to realize that despite what they may have been told, they are not the issue. Few people know how to listen, something that cannot be taught, and fewer have a reading comprehension that stacks up above the scribblings of graffiti they call ‘news’ in this day and age. The spoken word is confused, the written word a vernacular of acronyms that cascades down the chasm of context known only to the author.
If even the author knows.
WTF IDK EIEIO.
And then when they don’t understand the motives, the reason, the driving force…
He doesn’t play for the money he wins
He don’t play for respect
– Sting, ‘Shape of My Heart’, Ten Summoner’s Tales (1993).
Suddenly, the fool and the wise share the same fate as the intelligent and those less so: Babel, even in the same language.
That realization of the fool’s errand, that Scylla to the Charybdis, can either break or build. It’s so very hard to tell the difference.
You can ignore being alone through the hard times, pushing forward out of sheer force of will – because that’s sometimes what it takes: grit, determination and tenacity coupled with strategy, observation, constant adjustments… it soon becomes a place where people do not tread because there’s simply too much to explain.
How many times have I been deep in thought, with what some people mistake as an angry face when instead it’s a face of focus? And they think I won’t let them in when the reality is that if I let it out, I’ll spend so much time explaining things that everyone will get frustrated? I am certain I am not alone in that.
The point is you get used to that, living in the simulation of reality in your head with as much data as you can possibly absorb and derive. And in these castles in the mind, you don’t realize you’re alone.
Until you have a victory. And then you look around and realize no one is there.
As luck would have it I ran into Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation in a local bookstore here in Trinidad and Tobago. That’s the upside of the bookstores in Trinidad and Tobago. A hungry reader finds themselves reading off their own beaten path because the books on the shelves simply haven’t been purchased since they were published.
Bookstores in Trinidad and Tobago are a topic worthy of their own book, if anyone would read it.
Amazon.com never suggested it for me. Of course, my digital shadow is not known for reading books like this. Amazon.com doesn’t know I have a Reverse Dictionary within a foot of my left hand, or that next to it are rare paperback copies of Sir Isaac Newton’s works.
As I started reading it this morning, chuckling at a few things, I came to think of why I had always been interested in these sorts of things. Was it my mother the poet? No, not really, it simply made her happy that I was interested for a while in poetry as a child. Was it the devastating accuracy I needed in saying what I meant to my father when I was growing up, being understood? Partly. The anniversary of his death was yesterday, and I might write something on that.
And so, as I started reading the book, all of this came flooding back. Writing was an outlet, a way to think through things, and most desperately a way to be understood. There is folly in that; even the best of writers is limited by the reading comprehension of the reader.
If you are interested in writing, take a look at this book. I’m only through the first chapter with my first cup of coffee. That alone was worth the price for me so far. The rest, as they say, is cream.