Can I calculate the moment, its envelope, or the number of the memories I have forgotten? Even one?
One September fifteenth, oh as I remember it as a Friday, I have entirely forgotten. And yet that then holds as much confidence within me as stating: “this statement is a lie.”
Can I calculate that moment when I looked up at my son and he suddenly seemed just that ever little length taller, at about zero point two four seven three five eight zero millimeters, than my life’s partner? Things fell apart as things grow beyond. That is via a model of my son that was ignoring the layers and swirling of his hair sticking out well beyond his parent’s height.
Do I remember the color of the t-shirt he was wearing that day, yesterday? Oh, as I remember it as a bright reflection with a dash of four point forty seven times ten to the fourteenth power. A kind of red I might assume?
That day, I do remember clearly, was not September fifteenth, no. it was a day, at seven fifty in the evening, within a timezone likely not that of the reader of these words.
While we are collectively & synchronously brushing our teeth –in harmony with taking “the World From Another Point of View,” as the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman encourages us, (1973)– let us revisit Norbert Wiener.
Besides likely Feynmanian brushing, Norbert also made a few predictions through his publications about “the development of controlled machines and about the corresponding techniques of automatization.” (1960)
Playing with Feynman, when we brush teeth at that sharp Earthly edge of day-to-night, & vice versa, have we been developed into a collective controlled machine by expert “dentists” & “parents” alike? Wiener claimed to foresee this having “important consequences affecting the society of the future.” (Wiener 1960)
Here is one of his 1960 predictions. Several of its attributes might harmonic oscillate with today’s AI applications & mythologies, grinding away at the socially-cleansed enamel we hold so dear:
“If we use, to achieve our purposes, [0] a mechanical agency [1] with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere [2] once we have started it, [3] because the action is so fast [4] and irrevocable that we have not the data [5] to intervene before the action is complete, [6] then we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine [0] is the purpose which we really desire [7] and not merely a colorful imitation [8] of it”
Today, more than 60 years later: what are the new points of view relatable to achieving our purposes? That is, where the “point” in the “point of view” itself (à la Feynman) is innovative (irrespective of any of our technologies being more, or less, innovative)? Above I highlighted 8 attributes in Wiener’s quote that trigger both teeth grinding & the consideration of view-pointing in the imagined character writing this post. Below, I will touch on only three of those (if any one wishes I can also touch on the others)
This post does not pretend to answer the existence of innovating points of view. Besides hinting at some present concerns & polemic or hyped tensions (Wiener 1960, Samuel 1960) going back to the early days of ethics surrounding AI as a field, this post lets you widen your own points of view
& yet, we can note with text, context & subtext that “therefore, the task is not so much to see what no one has seen before as to think about what no one has yet thought about what everyone sees. That’s why it takes so much more to be a philosopher than a physicist” (Schopenhauer 1851)
As an influencing side note: in so many ways it is ironical that this quote is not a quote, as many claim on our (mis)informing internet, by the physicist Schrödinger. Either way, in allowing us a place in & a sense of the world, this quote can be extended: it is also our task to relationally look backward, forward, presently, outward & inward, far & nearby, & always confidently celebrate doubt
ITEM [0]
“purposes:” are these now aligned with needs, urgencies, importance? Who is “we”? Whose purposes, needs, urgencies and weighing of importance is addressed and is answered? If probably not all (and if any) needs (etc.) are considered or met, then who is affected by the consequential ethical debt?
Atari, M., Xue, M. J., Park, P. S., Blasi, D., Henrich, J. (2023, Sep 22). Which Humans?. Harvard University, University of Massachusetts Amherst. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5b26t.
Lazar, Seth, and Alondra Nelson. “AI Safety on Whose Terms?” Science 381, no. 6654 (July 14, 2023): 138–138. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi8982.
Petrozzino, C. (2021) “Who Pays for Ethical Debt in AI?” AI and Ethics 1, no. 3 (August 1, 2021): 205–8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-020-00030-3.
ITEM [1]
agency has been understood as a “temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its “iterational” or habitual aspect) but also oriented toward the future (as a “projective” capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a “practical-evaluative” capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment)” (Emirbayer et al. 1998)
Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Ann Mische. “What Is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 962–1023. https://doi.org/10.1086/231294.
Does this fit any or all (labeled) agent?
ITEM [5]
quality collection of data (e.g., in pre-process: consent, IPR, right to be forgotten. In post-output: libel via the mislabeled “hallucinations”) is unique from quality of data.
Samuel, A. L. (1960). Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation–A Refutation. Science, 132(3429), 741–742. doi:10.1126/science.132.3429.741
Schopenhauer, A. (1851) Parerga und Paralipomena: Kleine Philosophische Schriften. Volume 2, paragraph 76, p 93. Berlin: A. W. Hayn. Original: “Daher ist die Aufgabe nicht sowohl zu sehen was noch keiner gesehen hat, als bei Dem was Jeder sieht, zu denken was noch Keiner gedacht hat. Darum auch gehört so sehr viel mehr dazu, ein Philosoph als ein Physiker zu seyn.” https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_WuUOAAAAIAAJ/page/92/mode/2up
Wiener, N. (1960). Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation. Science 131, 1355-1358. DOI:10.1126/science.131.3410.1355
In the vast fields of the mundane, the conceptual lingers through the patches of the practical poking shoots and hatchlings are sprinkled abstractions, patterns and theories interweeding with chaos and brown noise
interloping the hurricanes of action and instant result cross-pollination blossoms absurdity with irrationality, reason with awareness, determinism with serendipity as wildness of life joining streams of uncontrolled thoughts with the unintentional wetlands swamping mind, measured matter, consciousness and ephemeral information in dark and intangible laws of natures unseen.
’t is where I lay. undefined by names given, occupations imposed, labels carried or roles maintained. You cannot join since joints forge separations of what was already one
