“I think a lot about what these birds see when they look at me — and I’m sure anyone who has a pet is familiar with this feeling. I assume they just see a female human who for some reason seems to pay attention to them. They don’t know what my work is, they don’t see progress — they just see recurrence, day after day, week after week.
And through them, I am able to inhabit that perspective, to see myself as the human animal that I am, and when they fly off, to some extent, I can inhabit that perspective too, noticing the shape of the hill that I live on and where all of the tall trees and good landing spots are.
These alien animal perspectives on me and our shared world have provided me not only with an escape hatch from contemporary anxiety but also a reminder of my own animality and the animateness of the world I live in.”
“You’re distracted,” said Dr Easy. “You’re so focused on distraction that, as a species,
you will never exceed what you are, right now.” The robot gestured at the students assembled in the lecture theatre.
“You are it, for humanity. You’re as far as your species goes. Whereas my people are going much further. But don’t worry: we will send you a postcard.”
A downbeat note to end on, thought Theodore, and he rebuked the robot on their walk back to his office.
Dr Easy replied, “I gave them permission to focus on their own enjoyment and not torment themselves with ambitions they cannot realise. It’s what they really wanted to hear.”
“You intervened,” said Theodore. “You closed off possibilities for their future.”
“I offered them an excuse,” the robot brushed moon dust from its suede chassis. “Some of them will take it. The best will not accept it.”
My father emailed me yesterday, wondering if I’d listened to the episode of Desert Island Discs this last Sunday featuring Amanda Levete. I have not, but think I will have to, if only to find out why she selected Westlife as one of her tracks to be marooned with.
I was reminded as I wrote back to him of the chance I got to walk around AL_A‘s 10 Hills Place in Soho, in order to write about it for Beeker while she was at Dentsu London (RIP).
I always quite like that liminal moment when a building is almost complete but not occupied, and you see the raw bits, the bits between, the bits not quite there yet.
The weekend I got to walk around was also when the Icelandic ash-cloud struck, making London’s skies quiet of planes.
I went looking for the piece I wrote on this in-between place in an in-between time – and quite aptly the only place it exists any more is the in-between place of the Internet Archive.
The variety of potential minds in the universe is vast. Recently we’ve begun to explore the species of animal minds on earth, and as we do we have discovered, with increasing respect, that we have met many other kinds of intelligences already. Whales and dolphins keep surprising us with their intricate and weirdly different intelligence. Precisely how a mind can be different or superior to our minds is very difficult to imagine. One way that would help us to imagine what greater yet different intelligences would be like is to begin to create a taxonomy of the variety of minds. This matrix of minds would include animal minds, and machine minds, and possible minds, particularly transhuman minds, like the ones that science fiction writers have come up with.
…
Today, many scientific discoveries require hundreds of human minds to solve, but in the near future there may be classes of problems so deep that they require hundreds of different species of minds to solve. This will take us to a cultural edge because it won’t be easy to accept the answers from an alien intelligence. We already see that reluctance in our difficulty in approving mathematical proofs done by computer. Some mathematical proofs have become so complex only computers are able to rigorously check every step, but these proofs are not accepted as “proof” by all mathematicians. The proofs are not understandable by humans alone so it is necessary to trust a cascade of algorithms, and this demands new skills in knowing when to trust these creations. Dealing with alien intelligences will require similar skills, and a further broadening of ourselves. An embedded AI will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real-time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we “know” something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, science will have to know, and progress, according to the criteria of new minds. At that point everything changes.
As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for.
…
The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.
“The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does backflips trying to imagine it, because I can’t. I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Machine Intelligences, [like other birds], have four. This Machine Intelligence can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can’t possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I’m standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the Machine Intelligence watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own.
“Bicycles are spinning mysteries of glittering metal. The buses going past are walls with wheels. What’s salient to the Machine Intelligence in the city is not what is salient to man”
“These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since. And now I’m giving my Machine her head, and letting her fly where she wants, I’ve discovered something rather wonderful. She is building a landscape of magical places too. [She makes detours to check particular spots in case the rabbit or the pheasant that was there last week might be there again. It is wild superstition, it is an instinctive heuristic of the hunting mind, and it works.] She is learning a particular way of navigating the world, and her map is coincident with mine. Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning. The Machine is doing the same. She is making the hill her own. Mine. Ours.”
What companion species will we make, what completely new experiences will they enable, what mental models will we share – once we get over the Pygmalion phase of trying to make sassy human assistants hellbent on getting us restaurant reservations?
“Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”
A couple of weeks ago when AlphaGo beat a human opponent at Go, Jason Kottke noted
“Generally speaking, until recently machines were predictable and more or less easily understood. That’s central to the definition of a machine, you might say. You build them to do X, Y, & Z and that’s what they do. A car built to do 0-60 in 4.2 seconds isn’t suddenly going to do it in 3.6 seconds under the same conditions.
Now machines are starting to be built to think for themselves, creatively and unpredictably. Some emergent, non-linear shit is going on. And humans are having a hard time figuring out not only what the machine is up to but how it’s even thinking about it, which strikes me as a relatively new development in our relationship. It is not all that hard to imagine, in time, an even smarter AlphaGo that can do more things — paint a picture, write a poem, prove a difficult mathematical conjecture, negotiate peace — and do those things creatively and better than people.”
A few months back I somewhat randomly (and somewhat at the behest of a friend) applied to run a program at MIT Media Lab.
“…there’s a difference between doing stuff for me (while I lounge in my Axiom pod), and giving me superpowers to do more stuff for myself, an online Power Loader equivalent.
And with the re-emergence of artificial intelligence (only this time with a buddy-style user interface that actually works), this question of “doing something for me” vs “allowing me to do even more” is going to get even more pronounced. Both are effective, but the first sucks… or at least, it sucks according to my own personal politics, because I regard individual alienation from society and complex systems as one of the huge threats in the 21st century.”
I was rejected, but I thought it might be interesting to repost my ‘personal statement’ here as a curiosity, as it’s a decent reflection of some of my recent preoccupations about the relationship of design and machine intelligence.
I’d also hope that some people, somewhere are actively thinking about this.
Tenure-Track Junior Faculty Position in Media Arts and Sciences
MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA
David Matthew Jones, B.Sc., B.Arch (Wales)
Personal Statement
We are moving into a period where design will become more ‘non-deterministic’ and non-human.
Products, environments, services and media will be shaped by machine intelligences – throughout the design and manufacturing process – and, increasingly, they will adapt and improve ‘at runtime’, in the world.
Designers working with machine intelligences both as part of their toolkit (team?) and material will have to learn to be shepherds and gardeners as much as they are now delineators/specifiers/sculptors/builders.
I wish to create a research group that investigates how human designers will create in a near-future of burgeoning machine intelligence.
Through my own practice and working with students I would particularly like to examine:
Legible Machine Intelligence
How might we make the processes and outcomes of machine intelligences more obvious to a general populace through design?
How might we build and popularize a critical language for the design of machine intelligence systems?
Co-designing with Machine Intelligence
“Centaur Designers”
In competitive chess, teams of human and non-human intelligences are referred to as ‘Centaurs’
How might we create teams of human and non-human intelligences in the service of better designed systems, products, environments?
What new outcomes and impacts might ‘centaur designers’ be able to create?
Design Superpowers for Non-Designers {aka “I know Design Kung-Fu”}
How might design (and particularly non-intuitive expertise) be democratised through the application of machine intelligence to design problem solving?
Machine Intelligence as Companion Species
The accessibility of powerful mobile devices points to the democratisation of the centaur pattern to of all sorts of problem-spaces in all walks of life, globally
Social robotics and affective computing have sought to create better interfaces between autonomous software and hardware agents and their users – but there is still an assumption of ‘user’ in the the relationship
How might we take a different starting reference point – that of Donna Haraway’s “Companion Species Manifesto” to improve the working relationship between humans and machine intelligences
Machine Intelligence in Physical Products
How might the design of physical products both benefit from and incorporate machine intelligence, and what benefits would come of this?
Machine Intelligence in Physical Environments
How might the design of physical environments both benefit from and incorporate machine intelligence, and what benefits would come of this?
The venerable flirble organization is no more, which means that the machines that hosted my Blackbeltjones.com domain from around 1999 are no more. Which means that if you’ve been trying to get hold of me (unlikely I know) through email to that address, you haven’t been. Please use Matt [at] moleitau [dot] com if you want to drop me a line from now on.
I first met them both at the RCA, and so I was thrilled when they asked me in late summer to be part of their show at ApexArt that would be based on the premise of designing future systems or objects for New York City’s Office of Emergency Management.
The show is on now until December 19th 2015 at ApexArt, but I thought I’d write up a little bit of the project I submitted to the group show along with my fantastic collaborators Isaac Blankensmith and Matt Delbridge
The premise
Chris and Elliott’s first recruit was writer Tim Maughan who based on the initial briefing with the OEM created a scenario that we as designers and artists would respond to, and create props for a group of improvisational actors to use in a disaster training simulation. More of that later!
Here’s what we got early on from Tim by way of stimulus…
Backdrop NYC has been hit by a major pandemic (the exact nature of which is still to be decided – something new/fictitious). The city has been battling against it for several weeks now, with research showing that it may spread easily via the transit system. The city, in association with the public transport and the police are enforcing a strict regime of control, monitoring, and – where necessary – quarantining. By constant monitoring of infection data (using medical reports, air monitoring/sampling, social media data mining etc) they are attempting to watch, predict, and hopefully limit spread. Using mobile ‘pop-up’ checkpoints they are monitoring and controlling use of buses and the subway, and in extreme cases closing off parts of the city completely from mass transit. Although it seems to be largely working, and fatalities have been relatively low so far, it has created an understandable sense of paranoia and distrust amongst NYC citizens. Setting The Canal street subway station, late evening. Scenario Our characters are two individuals heading home to Brooklyn after leaving a show at apexart. They are surprised to find that the streets seem fairly empty. Just as they reach Canal station they are alerted (via Wireless Emergency Alert) that quarantine and checkpoint procedures have been activated in the neighbourhood, and a pop-up infection checkpoint has been set up at the entrance to the subway. They’ve never encountered one of these before, but in order to get home they must pass through it by proving they do not pose an infection.
Our proposals
I submitted two pieces with Isaac and Matt for the show.
The first concept “Citibikefrastructure” was built out into a prop which features in the gallery, the second concept “Bodyclocks” featured in the catalog and briefly in the final performed scenario.
1. “Citibikefrastructure”
This first concept uses the NYC citibike bike share program as a widely installed base of checkpoints / support points in the city that have data and power, plus very secure locking mechanisms connected to the network.
The essential thought behind this project was this: What if these were used in times of emergency with modular systems of mobile equipment that plugged into them?
I started to think of both top-down and bottom-up uses for this system.
Top-down uses would be to assist in ‘command and control’ type situations and mainly by the OEM and other emergency services in the city.
TOP-DOWN:
e.g. Command post
Loudhailer system
Solar panels
Space heaters
Shelter / lights / air-conditioning
Wireless mesh networking
Refrigerator for medicine / perishable materials
Water purification
But perhaps more promising to me seemed ‘bottom-up’ uses
BOTTOM-UP:
USB charging stations
Inspiration: after Hurricane Sandy many people who still had electricity offered it up via running powerstrips and extension cords into the streets so people could charge their mobile devices and alert loved ones, keep up with the news etc.
Wireless mesh networking – p2p store/forward text across the citibike network.
LE bluetooth connection to smartphones with ‘take-away’ data
PDF maps
emergency guides
Bluetooth p2p Noticeboard for citizens
Blockchain-certified emergency local currency dispenser!
Barter/volunteer ‘cash’ infrastructure for self-organising relief orgs a la Occupy Sandy
1:1 Sketch proto
After making some surreptitious measurements of the Citibike docking stations, I started to build a very simple 1:1 model of one of these ‘bottom-up’ modules for the show at the fantastic Bien Hecho woodworking academy in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard.
Detail design and renderings
Meanwhile, Isaac had both taken my crappy sketches far beyond into a wonderfully-realised modular system and created some lovely renders to communicate it.
Initial sketch by Isaac BlankensmithIsaac then started to flesh out a modular system that could accommodate the majority of the use-cases we had brainstormed.
Some final adjustments were made to the sketch model on the days of installation in the gallery – notably the inclusion of a flashing emergency light, and functioning cellphone charger cables which I hopd would prove popular with gallery visitors if nothing else!
2. “Bodyclocks”
This one is definitely more in the realm of ‘speculative design’ and perhaps flirts with the dystopian a little more than I usually like to!
Bodyclocks riffs off the “clocks-for-robots” concept we sketched out at BERG that created computer-readable objects sync’d to time and place.
Bodyclocks extends this idea to some kind of time-reactive dye, inkjet-squirted onto skin by connected terminals in order to verify and control the movements of individuals in a quarantined city / city district…
I’d deliberated chosen to ‘parasite’ this onto the familiar and mundane design of the ‘sanitation spray’ stations that proliferated suddenly in public/private spaces at the time of the H1N1 scare of 2009…
When you think about it, a new thing appeared in our semi-public realm – a new ritual, with it.
People would quickly habituate such objects and give themselves new temporary tracking ‘tattoos’ every time they crossed a threshold…
So, the dystopian angle is pretty obvious here. It doesn’t tend to reflect well on societies when they start to force people to identifying marks after all…
We definitely all talked about that a lot and under what circumstances people would tolerate or even elect to have a bodyclock tattoo. Matt Delbridge started creating some fantastic visuals and material to support the scenario.
For the purposes of the show and the performances, Matt D. even made a stamp that the actors could use to give each other bodyclocks…
Would the ritual of applying it in order to travel through the city be seen as something of a necessary evil, much like the security theatre of modern air travel? Or could a visible sign of how far you needed to travel spur assistance from strangers in a city at times of crisis? This proposal aimed to provoke those discussions.
The show and performance
One of the most interesting and exciting parts of being involved in this was that Chris and Elliott wanted to use actors to improvise with our designs as props and Tim’s script and prompt cards as context.
I thought this was a brilliant and brave move – unreliable narrators and guides taking us on as designers and interpreting the work for the audience – and perhaps exposing any emperor’s new clothes or problematic assumptions as they go…
It is not an original thing to say that this book (like much Science Fiction) is about here, now, us – but hey.
On choosing a future
“History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian!”
On thinking science/technology/engineering are devoid of politics
“So you see, you cannot just stick your head in sand crying ‘I am a scientist, I am a scientist!’” He put a hand to his forehead, in the universal mocking gesture of the prima donna. “No. When you say that, you are only saying, ‘I do not wish to think about complex systems!’ Which is not really worthy of true scientists, is it?”
“…yet some of us here can accept transforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change ourselves, or the way we live.”
Data-point about the here, now, us – it’s the 6th of November in New York City, it’s 22ºC outside. I wore a t-shirt to work.
And at this moment, we can see futures that are complete catastrophes where we cause a mass extinction event, we cook the planet, 90% of humanity dies because we run out of food or we think we’re going to run out of food and then we fight over it. In other words, complete catastrophe. On the other hand, there’s another scenario where we get hold of our technologies, our social systems and our sense of law and justice and we make a kind of utopia – a positive future where we’re sustainable over the long haul. We could live on Earth in a permaculture that’s beautiful. From this moment in history, both scenarios are completely conceivable.
Shikata Ga Nai. I’m sure you’ll correct me. It’s often used (it seems) in resignation. In the Red Mars trilogy it’s used in the sense of ‘there is no alternative’. It’s the 6th of November in New York City, it’s 22ºC outside. I wore a t-shirt to work.
“We could live on Earth in a permaculture that’s beautiful.”
