 Felly, ydych i'n peirlo pan arbennigion gweld gweld y pethau, cram am y cyfnodd o'r gwahrodd ar gyfer y cyrraeth ar gyferhowb y mae'r gwahodd o'r ang�el o'r ymlaen yng nghylchol mewn ymgyrchonol i'r leishio. A'r tyn y pethau ar wneud, efall nhw ar y cyllideb yn gynnig y pethau a ffantafau gweld ei wgwygon sy'n ei rhaid i ddweud yw pethau i'r gwahodd. Mae yw Lark. Yn'r gweithio yn colli'r Lark, hyd yn bwrth o'n gweld. I don't think it's a hugely popular app, but it's a step counter and activity tracker for the iPhone. And as you can say, it uses this conversation based interface, which is different from most of them. Most of my quantified self apps look more like this. They're very sort of, you know, here's the data, I'm very objective. And note that word objective because I'm going to return to that. They're objects, right? And this is serious stuff and you can trust me because I'm just the facts. I just have the numbers and these numbers are true. Whereas lark, as you can see, is all like, hey, Jill, hope you're enjoying your afternoon. You don't actually have very many options in this. The only thing I, as the human interactor, can do is click the button at the bottom. Gotcha. It's a fairly limited sort of script I have there. But sometimes I get three options, so you know. And most other apps that I've had are similar to this. One of the first I used, 2008, it was before smartphones really existed much. They weren't very, I didn't have one anyway. It was a baby napping tracker where you had to click a button on a website to say when your baby went to sleep and when it woke up. There's much more automated ways of doing this now. But even back then it was a very sort of like, just data only sort of interface. This is one of those automated diary apps which your phone just sort of tracks your location and where you are and what you seem to be doing and tries to give you a rundown of what you've been doing every day. Here's another one here which has a different way of presenting it. But both of these, this one's much more visual, but none of them really speak as if they have agency or subjectivity, right? Now, let me see if I can get the sound happening here. I think it was supposed to come in a couple of minutes. We just passed 30,000 amplified songs on Capsule FM. All of these are shared and enjoyed by your fellow listeners. Connect your music service and keep sharing your good taste in music. I'll just let you hear one more. So this is a robot DJ basically. And I need to capture some better lines from her because this was just what she was saying this morning. So this isn't exactly a quantified self app, although sometimes it is because it says you've liked 470 songs on Capsule FM. So sometimes it does the quantified thing, but mostly it's supposed to be something you listen to music on. But it very specifically has these robot DJ hosts who read you your Twitter. Like people have spoken to you on Twitter. Oh sorry, I meant to play more of that video a bit. Go and check it out yourself instead later. But this is another example. This is a very clear example of like an app that's really trying to speak to you. She addresses you. You can pick different robot voices, men, women, different languages, but they always address you by name. They always speak to you. And sometimes she really gets quite flirty. You know, oh Jill, I know you really love me even though you only paid $1.99 for me in the app store. Or Jill, please wash your hands before you touch me again on your iPhone screen. So it's very much sort of playing with the idea that this isn't artificial intelligence, but she's speaking directly to you. So this is a different sort of way of doing things. And it's also one that we're seeing, I think Facebook and the different big social media platforms are starting to try to use chatbots in order to let you access their services, which I don't know if that's going to work, but it's a sort of approach that's coming. So we're starting to see this a little bit in some quantified self-apps, which makes me think about how we think about our apps. And this is where perhaps this kinship or this relationship, because it is a very intimate relationship. You carry your phone with you everywhere. You wear it against your skin if it's a wristband, right? And what is this doing to us? The idea of the computer as artificial intelligence is not exactly new. Alan Turing, just after the Second World War, proposed this Turing test, which is like, okay, how could you tell the difference between a computer and a human if you're typing to them and you can't see which has a human on the other end and which has a computer. So people have actually managed to pass that test. Someone put a lot of money on it. And I think it was last year, the year before, someone actually passed it. But to pass a test like that, to write an AI that people can be tricked into thinking it's human, you have to have a very specific dialogue line, right? You have to have a very specific kind of human. Eliza is one of the first of these chatbots. Gosh, it's so tiny, isn't it? I wonder if I can make that bigger. Eliza was written in the, I think, was it the 50s or the 60s? 50s. A computer scientist. And she's scripted to be like a Nigerian psychoanalyst. So she says, hello, I'm Eliza. Someone tell me what to say. I'll rush right. I am at a conference. Did you come to me because you are at a conference? Yes. Are you sure? Would you prefer if I were not a computer? So she plays a very specific role, right? She just picks out some of your keywords and repeats them back to you, but adding them into sentences. And this works pretty well. I mean, there are all these stories of how people have sat down and spent hours and hours every day with Eliza. There's a novel by Louisa Alcott that came out last year called Speak. It's really quite good if you're interested in AI and also it's a fun read. And it tells you the story about a world not so far, you know, the near future kind of science fiction, where all the children in the world were given dolls that had artificial intelligence. And everyone thought this would be great because the kids could have this lovely intelligent company from their dolls. But the problem was that the kids were only interested in talking to the dolls. So they stopped having friends. It was like they really weren't interested in anything except the dolls. So the grown-ups decided to ban the dolls completely and you've got this whole generation of children who are just completely distraught because those most important relationships were broken. It's a really interesting sort of philosophical read actually. Okay, so that's a little bit about AI. Now, one of the interesting things about AI and science fiction, I've been reading about post-humanism recently and there's a lot of post-humanism that also uses science fiction and these science fiction portrayals of artificial intelligence to think through the relationship between humans and computers. And I think with quantified self-apps and phones, it becomes that intimacy, it becomes a really interesting point. It's technology and technology actually, I was going to say that this is an example of an early, it actually relates very directly to space and time here because this is from 1880. It was the first time people worked out what a horse looks like when it gallops and they worked that out because they had cameras, 12 cameras set to take photos, a second apart or something like that. This is what people used to think horses looked like when they galloped. They used to think that their legs were all out like that. If you look at newer drawings of horses galloping, they're going to look like one of these images. I was going to show you that this is an example of how the technology we use actually changes the way we see the world. But after listening to you, I'm thinking this really shows what happens when you spatialise time and movement. Because, and I don't have this slide in here, but there's this beautiful quote by Rodin, the sculptor, where he's interviewed by Paul Verilio in Paul Verilio's book, The Vision Machine. Rodin says, he's being interviewed and someone says, well, but photography is true, right? Your sculpture isn't true in the way that photography, this is what a horse looks like when it gallops. Rodin said, no, because in real life time never stands still, he said. And this is a really good point. There's these two different versions of truth here and I need to re-read Bergson obviously because he's obviously discussing similar questions. Because our apps, here's another quantified self-app that measures sex, but it measures it in the ways that an iPhone is able to measure sex. That is the duration, oh well, it measures, you put it on the bed and so it can measure movement, so it measures thrusts per second or minute maybe and the decibel peak. And then the duration is how long do the thrusting movements and the decibels last. So this is a very sort of bizarre version of sex, really, to most my, I mean, actually it's a sort of version of sex you do see in some kind of hardcore porn, but most people would probably experience sex differently, but this is how a phone at the moment is able to perceive it. And so if this is your sex diary, you're getting a very particular idea of what your sex life is like. Josef van Dyck calls this dataism, she calls dataism as like this belief, it's almost like an ideology or religion where if it's in numbers it must be true, you know? And I think this is a really useful concept to have, to remember the sort of power in numbers and it's the same as what Rodin was arguing against by saying that no, life doesn't stand still, you can't tell all of life in photographs or numbers. Another writer or thinker I've been reading is Willem Flusser who writes about the technical image among other things. And he sees, so this is not him, obviously, this is a self-portrait by Jermaine Croll, but I use this because of the way the camera at that time was such a big thing that you couldn't really imagine, it's hard to not realise how much the technology means in this situation when you've got this large camera. Flusser sees the human as sort of more like an operator of the technology rather than a subject using the technology, right? So he sees the technology as so sort of power and the humans rarely really have a whole lot of agency or control over the technology and we're just doing what the technology allows. So that's a very sort of techno determinist viewpoint which actually I'm starting to lean towards these days the more the internet happens. Flusser does have a gleam of hope, true art can come when there's some more sort of equality happening. So this is one view of technology. We just do whatever technology asks us to do basically. That's it. This is a book by James Bridal which I think is also rather interesting. He's a designer, he came up with the term New Aesthetic some years ago it was revealed that the iPhone was tracking all our location data and whenever you synced it to a computer it would transfer it without, it wasn't being encrypted and it was not very good and so forth. Anyway, when he discovered this no one realised until then that the location data was all being tracked. Anyway, when this was revealed James Bridal downloaded all his location data and he made this art book which consists of maps of where he was. The title as you can see is an expression that he doesn't actually remember being all those places. So his take on this is this isn't actually my diary this is my phone's diary. That's an interesting point if we're thinking about quantified self or even the Nike fuel band on your wrist there it's pretty intimate yes but it's tracking its movement really, right? Okay, so this is me on breakfast of the morning I tried to write it out here so I went to Snapchat because they have good emojis so this is my attempt to just explain the main sort of points I'm trying to come up with here. Snapchat doesn't have very good emojis for basic human that's not gender or racially specific so I hope you'll accept this as my human representation. Okay, so now I'm sort of assuming most of it the phone could be other technology but so much quantified self stuff is the phone now so I'm just using the phone as our example. So you've got a human, you've got a phone, you've got these two things and usually we think about like this a human uses a phone, right? and if you think back to high school did you have to do this or was this just my, you know the human's the subject, user's is the verb and the phone's the object and I don't know in the 90s my literature professors are very easy about this whole subject version of the world that's clearly, there are clearly many many takes on that but there is this sort of assumption that we're the humans, we are in charge of our technology, right? So this is the sort of basic idea we act upon the phone and we use it and so then, oh maybe I wanted that one first, yeah okay so this is what I've been thinking about and I'm not sure whether it works so I'd love feedback here this is a fairly old, I think it's from the 70s Chapman, the theorist of like literature and film and it's his idea of, okay you've got the text so this is like, you know, a book or a movie or something like that and outside of the text you have a real author and a real reader, right? so let's say that movie about the dolls for instance she was writing, there's a real Louisa it can't be Louisa Alcott, she's from Little Women I must have got the name, Louisa Hall I think, sorry Google it you've got the real flesh and blood author clearly somebody actually wrote the book, right? and then within the text you've got an implied author and that's like what it sounds like actually my example in my draft was Donald Trump even though that's not literature or film because it's so incredibly simple to apply because clearly there's a real flesh and blood Donald Trump, who knows what his actual motivations are for running for president, right? and there's a real reader or viewer of his speeches and for this case that's all of us or it's many other people but it's also you and me, right? and then there's the implied author and that's clearly a person who actually is presenting himself as actually a legitimate candidate for president and he's wishing to position himself in certain ways which aren't necessarily the same as what the real flesh and blood person are doing, right? and his implicit reader is clearly not us he's clearly not speaking to educated Europeans that's sort of very obvious his implicit reader is somebody very different in America so you can sort of read that out of the text you don't need Donald Trump to tell us who the implied author and reader are you can figure that out of the text, right? but then there might also be a narrator in a narrative so when Trump speaks he says I he's clearly the narrator if he says you and he occasionally in a speech he might actually speak to an individual that case that's the narrative some positions aren't always present in a text anyway, so my question is does this work when thinking about this sort of assumes that everything is a narrative and maybe it isn't but I'm just trying to think about this in this way because if you do that then you could end up with like okay here's the medium in the middle, right? so now it's not just a person and a phone but it's a person and a phone and then it's someone real on the other side of it, right? when I'm on Snapchat or when I'm using RunKeeper I go for a run, it's just me and the phone but then I post it to Facebook because I want other people to see my results, right? or I look at the feed of my friends on RunKeeper so there is a situation where we humans use a phone just to get to something else and that's where it's kind of a traditional medium not that different from newspapers televisions, etc and you could think of that as me being a narrator and I'm speaking to I want to share my runs with somebody and that somebody is my narrative because I'm sort of speaking to them about my run, right? or you could see it as like a broadcast model like a fairly sort of traditional feud to many media model and say it's a speaker speaking to an audience and on Snapchat which I've been looking at recently you really see that there's an interesting division where some people who speak to the camera on video a teenager pointed this out to me actually or to my friend because my friend was speaking to the video and the teenager said can't do that, only celebrities do that which is really insightful actually because now I've been watching everything on Snapchat and it's true, you only speak video if you think you have an audience if I'm speaking to an individual it seems like maybe you don't anyway so the point is there's a situation where you're using it as a medium right? and social media kind of is that but in a loop so here it's not the broadcast model but it's like the human uses the phone to get to other humans and they speak back right so fair enough but we're still seeing the phone there as an object like sort of inanimate dead object right? okay but what about these apps? because with your Nike band well you can probably see the friends list if you want and you could share your results but most of your time is probably being spent just you and the app together right? at least when I never share my runs I hate that but I do track them you know and in this case maybe we're seeing our phones not so much as objects or as media but as companions and this is where I need to re-read Haraway and think about this kinship thing too and that brought me back to diaries because I love stories and diaries and things like that and this way we used to or still do sometimes address the convention of addressing the diary as if the diary is a person or a subjectivity of some sort right? and of course when we write Dear Diary we know that we're imagining it we're projecting it but it's like you cannot write without imagining a listener or a reader you cannot speak without imagining someone listening to it even when you speak to yourself in your head you sort of speaking to your Chapman would say that oh I'm not going there and so I think there's something there about intimacy on the one hand like there's something where thinking of our phones or apps as obviously not humans but some kind of subject actually makes us feel safer in sharing our secrets with them and so and I'm thinking that largely because I'm comparing it to the diary so I might be wrong there but also something about just companionship I mean we like to we don't like feeling alone nobody likes feeling alone but if anyone of you actually did keep a diary I only kept a diary when I was a angstful teenager but I mean I had people around me all the time my horrible mum and dad and my awful little sister but I like them now but there was no way I was going to share my secrets with them I wanted a diary because it's a pure reflection of me like it's only the things I want it to be and I think there's something there about the way we're thinking about our apps in the the other thing I did was I don't have a slide of it but I actually I'll just show you this Google books right they digitise almost I don't know I need to check exactly how a larger percentage of books but this is like you can go to Google books and search words in print books and they have a pretty large proportion of the world's books now so I did a search for Dear Diary and as you can see okay so that's like from 1970 to 2000 huge increase that's kind of interesting and then it drops after 2000 I think that's because we got the internet so we didn't need to speak to our Dear Diary anymore so I do find that somewhat interesting okay I think I'm almost done here there's a lot more to think about here and I really want to try to use more of the like the post humanism theory and think about these things but there's some really interesting stuff happening in this sort of area so I look forward to more discussion