34C3 - Why Do We Anthropomorphize Computers?...

34c3 intro

Herald: the next talk is Marloes de Valk,
she's an artist and writer from the

Netherlands and she's working with lots of
different materials and media and at the

moment she's doing an 8-bit game, so the
topic is "why do we anthropomorphize

computers and dehumanize ourselves in the
process?" and we have a mumble, which is

doing the translation, the talk is in
English and we will translate into French

and German.
Okay, give a big applause for Marloes!

applause

Marloes: Thank you and thank you all for

coming, my name is Marloes de Valk and I'm
going to talk about anthropomorphization

and I will approach this as a survival
strategy, see how it works and if it is

effective. And when I'm speaking of big
data, which is an umbrella term, my focus

will be on the socio-technical aspect of
the phenomenon, the assumptions and

beliefs surrounding Big Data and on
research using data exhaust or found data

such as status updates on social media web
searches and credit card payments.

Oh and now my slides are frozen. Oh my
gosh.

Audience: Have you tried turning it of and on again?

Marloes: laughs
I will in a moment. gosh it's

completely frozen... I'm very sorry,
technical staff I have to exit, if I can.

I can't. Help! I have to get rid of
something I think, should we just kill it?

That's so stupid yeah.

But they're gonna have a coffee soon and then it's gonna

Yes, force quit... I think I know
what the problem is. I'm sorry it's, it's

really not working. All right let's see if
we're back.

Okay, okay so sorry for the interruption.

I wanted to start by letting Silicon
Valley itself tell a story about

technology, really, sorry about the
interruption. So, Silicon Valley propaganda

during our lifetime, we're about to see
the transformation of the human race, it's

really something that blows my mind every
time I think about it. People have no idea

how fast the world is changing and I want
to give you a sense of that because it

fills me with awe and with an
extraordinary sense of responsibility. I

want to give you a sense of why now is
different why this decade the next decade

is not interesting times
but THE most extraordinary times ever in

human history and they truly are. What
we're talking about here is the notion

that faster cheaper computing power which
is almost like a force of nature, is

driving a whole slew of technologies,
technology being the force that takes what

used to be scarce and make it abundant.
That is why we're heading towards this

extraordinary age of abundance. The future
will not take care of itself as we know

the world looks to America for progress
and America looks to California and if you

ask most Californians where they get their
progress they'll point towards the bay,

but here at the bay there is no place left
to point, so we have to create solutions

and my goal is to simplify complexity,
take Internet technology and cross it with

an old industry and magic and progress and
big things can happen. I really think

there are two fundamental paths for
humans, one path is we stay on earth

forever, or some eventual extinction event
wipes us out, I don't have a doomsday

prophecy but history suggests some
doomsday event will happen. The

alternative is becoming a spacefaring and
multiplanetary species and it will be like

really fun to go, you'll have a great
time. We will set on Mars and we should,

because it's cool. When it comes to space
I see it as my job to build infrastructure

the hard way. I'm using my resources to
put in that infrastructure so that the

next generation of people can have a
dynamic entrepreneurial solar system as

interesting as we see on the internet
today. We want the population to keep

growing on this planet, we want to keep
you using more energy per capita. Death

makes me very angry, probably the most
extreme form of inequality is between

people who are alive and people who are
dead. I have the idea that aging is

plastic, that it's encoded and if
something is encoded you can crack the

code if you can crack the code you can
hack the code and thermodynamically there

should be no reason we can't defer entropy
indefinitely. We can end aging forever.

This is not about
Silicon Valley billionaires

living forever off the blood of young
people.

It's about a Star Trek future where no one
dies of preventable diseases where life is

fair. Health technology is becoming an
information technology, where we can read

and edit our own genomes clearly it is
possible through technology to make death

optional. Yes, our bodies are information
processing systems. We can enable human

transformations that would rival Marvel
Comics super muscularity ultra endurance,

super radiation resistance, you could have
people living on the moons of Jupiter,

who'd be modified in this way and they
could physically harvest energy from the

gamma rays they were exposed to. Form a
culture connected with the ideology of the

future, promoting technical progress
artificial intellects, multi-body

immortality and cyborgization. We are at
the beginning of the beginning the first

hour of day one, there have never been
more opportunities the greatest products

of the next 25 years have not been
invented yet. You are not too late.

We're going to take over the world, one
robot at a time. It's gonna be an AI that

is able to source create solve an answer
just what is your desire. I mean this is

an almost godlike view of the future. AI
is gonna be magic. Especially in the

digital manufacturing world, what is going
to be created will effectively be a god,

the idea needs to spread before the
technology, the church is how we spread

the word, the gospel. If you believe in
it, start a conversation with someone else

and help them understand the same things.
Computers are going to take over from

humans, no question, but when I got that
thinking in my head about if I'm going to

be treated in the future as a pet to these
smart machines, well I'm gonna treat my

own pet dog really nice, but in the end we
may just have created the species that is

above us. Chaining it isn't gonna be the
solution as it will be stronger than any

change could put on. the existential risk
that is associated with AI we will not be

able to beat
AI, so then as the saying goes if you

can't beat them, join them.
History has shown us we aren't gonna win

this war by changing human behavior but
maybe we can build systems that are so

locked down, that humans lose the ability
to make dumb mistakes until we gain the

ability to upgrade the human brain, it's
the only way. Let's stop pretending we can

hold back the development of intelligence
when there are clear massive short-term

economic benefits to those who develop it
and instead understand the future and have

it treat us like a beloved elder who
created it. As a company, one of our

greatest cultural strengths is accepting
the fact that if you're gonna invent,

you're gonna disrupt. Progress is
happening because there is economic

advantage to having machines work for you
and solve problems for you. People are

chasing that. AI, the term has become more
of a broad, almost marketing driven term

and I'm probably okay with that. What
matters is what people think of when they

hear of this. We are in a deadly race
between politics and technology, the fate

of our world may depend on the effort of a
single person who builds or propagates the

machinery of freedom, that makes the world
safe for capitalism.

These were all quotes. Every single one.
not only Silicon Valley CEO speak of

Technology in mysterious ways, let's see
some examples from the media.

Our official intelligence regulation,
"lets not regulate mathematics" a headline

from import dot IO from May 2016 about the
European general data protection

regulation and the article concludes
autonomous cars should be regulated as

cars, they should safely deliver users to
their destinations in the real world and

overall reduce the number of accidents.
How they achieve this is irrelevant. With

enough data the numbers speak for
themselves which comes from the super

famous article "The end of theory" from
Chris Anderson in Wired magazine 2008.

"Google creates an AI that can teach
itself to be better than humans" headline

from "The Independent. The
article continues the company's AI

division deepmind has unveiled "alpha go
zero" an extremely advanced system that

managed to accumulate thousands of years
of human knowledge within days. Microsoft

apologizing for their teen chat Bot gone
Nazi stating it wasn't their fault. "We're

deeply sorry for the unintended and
hurtful tweets from Tay which do not

represent who we are or what we stand for
nor how we design Tay" and then the PC

world article "AI just 3d printed a brand
new Rembrandt and it's shockingly good",

the subtitle reads
"the next Rembrandt project used data and

deep learning to produce uncanny results".
Advertising firm J walter thompson

unveiled a 3d printed painting called "the
next Rembrandt" based on 346 paintings of

the old master, not just PC world, but
many more articles touted similar titles

presenting the painting to the public, as
if it were made by a computer, a 3d

printer, AI and deep learning. It is clear
though, that the computer programmers who

worked on the project are not computers
and neither are the people who tagged the

346 Rembrandt paintings by hand. The
painting was made by a team of programmers

and researchers and it took them 18 months
to do. So what is communicated through

these messages is that the computer did
it, yet there is no strong AI, as in

consciousness in machines at this moment,
only very clever automation, meaning it

was really us. We comprehend the role and
function of non-human actors rationally,

but still intuitively approach them
differently. We anthropomorphize and

stories about the intelligent things
machines can do and force the belief in

the human-like agency of machines, so why
do we do it.

I'd like to think of this as two survival

strategies that found each other in big
data and AI discourse. George Zarkadakis

in the book "in our own image" describes
the root of anthropomorphization, during

the evolution of the modern mind humans
acquired and developed general-purpose

language, through social language and this
first social language was a way of

grooming of creating social cohesion.
We gained theory of mind to believe that

other people have thoughts, desires,
intentions and feelings of their own -

Empathy. And this led to the describing of
the world in social terms, perceiving

everything around us as agents possessing
mind, including the nonhuman, when hunting

anthropomorphizing animals had a great
advantage because you could strategize,

predict their movements. They show through
multiple experiment- Oh, Reeves and Nass

were picking up on this
anthropomorphization and they show through

multiple experiments that we haven't
changed that much, through multiple

experiments they show how people treat
computers, television and new media like

real people in places even though it test
subjects were completely unaware of it,

they responded to computers as they would
to people being polite cooperative,

attributing personality characteristics
such as aggressiveness, humor, expertise

and even gender. Meaning we haven't
evolved that much, we still do it.

Microsoft unfortunately misinterpreted
their research and developed the innocent

yet much hated Clippy the paper clip,
appearing one year later in office 97.

This survival strategy found its way into
another one. The Oracle. Survival through

predicting events.
The second strategy is trying to predict

the future, to steer events in our favor,
in order to avoid disaster. The fear of

death has inspired us throughout the ages
to try and predict the future and it has

led us to consult Oracles and to creating
a new one.

Because we cannot predict the future in
the midst of lives many insecurities, we

desperately crave the feeling of being in
control over our destiny, we have

developed ways to calm our anxiety, to
comfort ourselves and what we do is we

obfuscate that human hand in a generation
of messages that require an objective or

authority feel, although disputed is
commonly believed that the Delphic Oracle

delivered messages from her god Apollo in
a state of trance induced by intoxicating

vapors arising from the chasm over which
she was seated, possesed by her God the

Oracle spoke ecstatically and
spontaneously. Priests of the temple then

translated her gibberish into the
prophesies, the seekers of advice were

sent home with. And Apollo had spoken.
Nowadays we turn to data for advice. The

Oracle of Big Data functions in a similar
way to the Oracle of Delphi. Algorithms

programmed by humans are fed data and
consequently spit out numbers that are

then translated and interpreted by
researchers into the prophecies the

seekers of advice are sent home with. The
bigger data the set, the more accurate the

results. Data has spoken.
We are brought closer to the truth, to

reality as it is, unmediated by us,
subjective biased and error-prone humans.

This Oracle inspires great hope. It's a
utopia and this is best putting words in

the article "The end of theory" by
Anderson where he states that with enough

data the numbers can speak for themselves.
We can forget about taxonomy, ontology,

psychology, who knows why people do what
they do. The point is they do it and we

can track and measure it with
unprecedented fidelity, with enough data

the numbers speak for themselves. This
Oracle is of course embraced with great

enthusiasm by database and storage
businesses as shown here in an Oracle

presentation slide. High Five! And getting
it right one out of ten times and using

the one success story to strengthen the
belief in big data superpowers happens a

lot in the media, a peculiar example is
the story on Motherboard about how

"Cambridge Analytica" helped Trump win the
elections by psychologically profiling the

entire American population and using
targeted Facebook ads to influence the

results of the election. This story evokes
the idea that they know more about you

than your own mother. The article reads
"more likes could even surpass what a

person thought they knew about themselves"
and although this form of manipulation is

seriously scary in very undemocratic as
Cathy O'Neil author of "weapons

of mass mass destruction" notes, "don't
believe the hype".

It wasn't just Trump everyone was doing it
Hillary was using the groundwork, a

startup funded by Google's Eric Schmidt,
Obama used groundwork too, but the

groundwork somehow comes across a lot more
cute compared to Cambridge analytica,

funded by billionaire Robert Mercer who
also is heavily invested in all-tried

media outlet Breitbart, who describes
itself as a killing machine waging the war

for the West, he also donated Cambridge
analytica service to the brexit campaign.

The Motherboard article and many others
describing the incredibly detailed

knowledge Cambridge Analytica has on
American citizens were amazing advertising

for the company, but most of all a warning
sign that applying big data research to

elections creates a very undemocratic
Asymmetry and available information and

undermines the notion of an informed
citizenry. Dana Boyd and Kate Crawford

described the beliefs attached to big data
as a mythology "the widespread believe

that large datasets offer a higher form of
intelligence and knowledge that can

generate insights, that were previously
impossible with the aura of truth

objectivity and accuracy".
The deconstruction of this myth was

attempted as early as 1984 in a
spreadsheet way of knowledge, Steven Levi

describes how the authority of look of a
spreadsheet and the fact that it was done

by a computer has a strong persuasive
effect on people, leading to the

acceptance of the proposed model of
reality as gospel. He says fortunately few

would argue that all relations between
people can be quantified and manipulated

by formulas of human behavior, no
faultless assumptions and so no perfect

model can be made. Tim Harford also refers
to faith when he describes four

assumptions underlying Big Data research,
the first uncanny accuracy is easy to

overrate, if we simply ignore false
positives, oh sorry, the claim that

causation has been knocked off its
pedestal is fine if we are making

predictions in the stable environment,
but not if the world is changing. If you

do not understand why things correlate,
you cannot know what might breakdown this

correlation either.
The promise that sampling bias does not

matter in such large data sets is simply
not true, there is lots of bias in data

sets, as for the idea of why with enough
data, the numbers speak for themselves

that seems hopelessly naive, in data sets
where spurious patterns vastly outnumber

genuine discoveries. This last point is
described by Nicholas Taleb who writes

that big data research has brought cherry-
picking to an industrial level. Liam Weber

in a 2007 paper demonstrated that data
mining techniques could show a strong, but

spurious relationship between the changes
in the S&P 500 stock index and butter

production in Bangladesh. What is strange
about this mythology, that large data sets

offer some higher form of intelligences,
is that is paradoxical it attributes human

qualities to something, while at the same
time considering it to be more objective

and more accurate than humans, but these
beliefs can exist side by side. Consulting

this Oracle and critically has quite far-
reaching implications.

For one it dehumanizes humans by asserting
that human involvement through hypothesis

and interpretation is unreliable and only
by removing ourselves from the equation,

can we finally see the world as it is.
The practical consequence of this dynamic

is that it is no longer possible to argue
with the outcome of big data analysis

because first of all it's supposedly bias
free, interpretation free, you can't

question it, you cannot check if it is
bias free because the algorithms governing

the analysis are often completely opaque.
This becomes painful when you find

yourself in the wrong category of a social
sorting algorithm guiding real-world

decisions on insurance, mortgage, work
border check, scholarships and so on.

Exclusion from certain privileges is only
the most optimistic scenario, so it is not

as effective as we might hope. It has a
dehumanizing dark side

so why do we
believe. How did we come so infatuated

with information. Our idea about
information changed radically in the

previous century from small statement of
fact, to the essence of man's inner life

and this shift started with the advent of
cybernetics and information theory in the

40s and 50s where information was suddenly
seen as a means to control a system, any

system be it mechanical physical,
biological, cognitive or social. Here you

see Norbert Wiener's moths a machine he
built as part of a public relations stunt

financed by Life magazine. The photos with
him and his moth were unfortunately never

published, because according to Life's
editors, it didn't illustrate the human

characteristics of computers very well.
Norbert Wiener in the human hues of human

beings wrote,
"to live effectively is to live with

adequate information, thus communication
and control belong to the essence of man's

inner life, even as they belong to his
life in society" and almost

simultaneously, Shannon published a
mathematical theory of communication a

theory of signals transmitted over
distance. John Durham Peters in speaking

into the air, describes how over time this
information theory got reinterpreted by

social scientists who mistook signal for
significance.

Or at Halpern in beautiful data describes
how Alan Turing and Bertrand Russell had

proved conclusively in struggling with the
Entscheidungsproblem that many analytic

functions could not be logically
represented or mechanically executed and

therefore machines were not human minds.
She asks the very important question of

why we have forgotten this history and do
we still regularly equate reason with

rationality. Having forgotten this ten
years later in '58, artificial

intelligence research began comparing
computers and humans. Simon and Newell

wrote: the programmed computer and human
problem solver are both species belonging

to the genus 'information processing
system'.

In the 80s, information was granted an
even more powerful status: that of

commodity. Like it or not, information has
finally surpassed material goods as our

basic resource. Bon appetit! How did we
become so infatuated with information?

Hey sorry sighs yeah, this is an image
of a medieval drawing where the humors,

the liquids in the body were seen as the
the essence of our intelligence in the

functioning of our system. A metaphor for
our intelligence by the 1500s automata

powered by Springs and gears had been
devised, inspiring leading thinkers such

as Rene Descartes to assert that humans
are complex machines. The mind or soul was

immaterial, completely separated from the
body - only able to interact with the body

through the pineal gland, which he
considered the seat of the soul.

And we still do it, the brain is commonly
compared to a computer with the role of

physical hardware played by the brain, and
our thoughts serving a software. The brain

is information processor. It is a metaphor
that is sometimes mistaken for reality.

Because of this the belief in the Oracle
of big data is not such a great leap.

Information is the essence of
consciousness in this view. We've come

full circle, we see machines as human like
and view ourselves as machines. So does it

work, we started out with two survival
strategies predicting the behavior of

others through anthropomorphizing and
trying to predict the future through

oracles. The first has helped us survive
in the past, allows us to be empathic

towards others - human and non-human. The
second has comforted us throughout the

ages, creating the idea of control of
being able to predict and prevent

disaster. So how are they working for us
today?

We definitely have reasons to be concerned
with the sword of Damocles hanging over

our heads: global warming setting in
motion a chain of catastrophes threatening

our survival, facing the inevitable death
of capitalism's myth of eternal growth as

Earth's research has run out we are in a
bit of a pickle. Seeing our consciousness

as separate from our bodies, like software
and hardware. That offers some comforting

options.
One option is that since human

consciousness is so similar to computer
software, it can be transferred to a

computer. Ray Kurzweil for example
believes that it will soon be possible to

download human minds to a computer, with
immortality as a result. "Alliance to

Rescue Civilization" by Burrows and
Shapiro is a project that aims to back up

human civilization in a lunar facility.
The project artificially separates the

hardware of the planet with its oceans and
soils, and a data of human civilization.

And last but not least, the most explicit
and radical separation as well as the

least optimistic outlook on our future,
Elon Musk's SpaceX planned to colonize

Mars, presented in September last year.
The goal of the presentation being to make

living on Mars seemed possible within our
lifetime. Possible - and fun.

A less extreme version of these attempts
to escape doom is what, that with so much

data at our fingertips and clever
scientists, will figure out a way to solve

our problems. Soon we'll laugh at our
panic over global warming safely aboard

our CO2 vacuum cleaners. With this belief
we don't have to change our lives, our

economies, our politics. We can carry on
without making radical changes. Is this

apathy warranted? What is happening while
we are filling up the world's hard disks?

Well, information is never disembodied, it
always needs a carrier and the minerals

used in the technology hosting our data
come from conflict zones, resulting in

slavery and ecocide. As for instance in
the coltan and cassiterite mines in Congo,

gold mines in Ghana. Minerals used in
technology hosting our data come from

unregulated zones leading to extreme
pollution, as here in the black sludge

lake in Baotou in China. EU waste is
exported to unregulated zones, and server

farms spit out an equal amount of CO2 as
the global aviation industry. Our data

cannot be separated from the physical, and
its physical side is not so pretty.

And what is happening is that the earth is
getting warmer and climate research is not

based on Twitter feeds, but our
measurements yet somehow largely has been

ignored for decades. Scientific consensus
was reached in the 80s, and if you compare

the dangerously slow response to this, to
the response given to the threat of

terrorism which has rapidly led to new
laws, even new presidents, this shows how

stories, metaphors, and mythologies in the
world of social beings have more impact

than scientific facts. And how threats
that require drastic changes to the status

quo are willfully ignored.
So does this survival strategy work? This

mythology, this belief in taking ourselves
out of the equation, to bring us closer to

truth, to reality as it is, separating
ourselves from that which we observe,

blinds us to the trouble we are in. And
our true nature and embodied intelligence,

not a brain in a jar, an organism
completely intertwined with its

environment, its existence completely
dependent on the survival of the organisms

it shares this planet with, we can't help
to anthropomorphize, to approach

everything around us as part of our social
sphere with minds and agencies. And that

is fine, it makes us human. It allows us
to study the world around us with empathy.

The most important thing is that the
metaphor is not mistaken for reality. The

computer creating, thinking, memorizing,
writing, reading, learning, understanding,

and people being hard-wired, stuck in a
loop, unable to compute, interfacing with,

and reprogramming ourselves - those
metaphors are so embedded in our culture.

You can only hope to create awareness
about them. If there is more awareness

about the misleading descriptions of
machines as human-like and humans as

machine-like and all of reality as an
information process, it is more likely

that there will be less blind enchantment
with certain technology, and more

questions asked about its
purpose and demands.

There is no strong AI... yet, only very
clever automation. At this moment in

history machines are proxies for human
agendas and ideologies. There are many

issues that need addressing. As Kate
Crawford and Meredith Whittaker point out

in the AI Now report, recent examples of
AI deployments such as during the US

elections and Brexit, or Facebook
revealing teenagers emotional states to

advertisers looking to target depressed
teens, show how the interests of those

deploying advanced data systems can
overshadow the public interest, acting in

ways contrary to individual autonomy and
collective welfare, often without this

being visible at all to those affected.
The report points to many - I highly

recommend reading it - and here are a few
concerns. Concerns about social safety

nets and human resource distributions when
the dynamic of labor and employment

change. Workers most likely to be affected
are women and minorities. Automated

decision-making systems are often unseen
and there are few established means to

assess their fairness, to contest and
rectify wrong or harmful decisions or

impacts.
Those directly impacted.... Sorry,

automated... No, sorry.... I'm lost...
Those directly impacted by deployment of

AI systems rarely have a role in designing
them. sighs And to assess their

fairness, to confess and rectify wrong and
harmful decisions or impacts, lacks....

lack of methods measuring and assessing
social and economic impacts... nah, let's

keep scrolling back.... In any case, there
is a great chance of like me bias because

of the uniform... uniformity of those
developing these systems. Seeing the

Oracle we've constructed for what it is
means to stop comforting, comforting

ourselves, to ask questions. A quote from
super intelligence, the idea that it's

smart people by (?)Muchaichai(?) (?)Clowsky(?),
the pressing ethical questions in machine

learning are not about machines becoming
self-aware and taking over the world, but

about how people can exploit other people.
Or through careless, in carelessness

introduce immoral behavior into automated
systems. Instead of waiting for the nerd

rapture, or for Elon Musk to whisk us off
the planet, it is important to come to

terms with a more modest perception of
ourselves and our machines. Facing the

ethical repercussions of the systems we
are putting in place. Having the real

discussion, not the one we hope for, but
the hard one that requires actual change

and a new mythology. One that works, not
only for us, but for all those human and

non-human, we share the planet with.
Thank you. That's it.

applause

Herald Angel: Thank you, Marloes. Is there
any questions? Like, you would have one

minute. laugs Okay. So, thank you
again. Give her a big applause again,

thank you.

applause

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