 The next talk is Malus DeWalck, 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 entromophize 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 Malus. Thank you, Yatia. And thank you all for coming. My name is Malus DeWalck, 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. And now my slides are frozen. Oh gosh. I will in a moment. Gosh, it's completely frozen. I'm very sorry, technical staff. I have to exit if I can. I have to get rid of something, I think. Should we just kill it? It's so stupid. But they're going to have a coffee soon, and then it's going to work. I think I know what the problem is. Start, yeah. I'm sorry. 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. I'm really sorry about the interruption. So Silicon Valley propaganda. During our lifetime, we're about to see the transformation of the human race, truly 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 space faring and multi-planetary species, and it will be really fun to go. You'll have a great time. We will settle 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 system as interesting as we see on the internet today. We want the population to keep growing on this planet. We want to keep 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 masculinity, 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. Former culture connected with the ideology of the future, promoting technical progress, artificial intellect, 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 going to be an AI that is able to source, create, solve, and answer just what is your desire. I mean, this is an almost God-like view of the future. AI is going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 going to invent, you're going to 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 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 CEOs speak of technology in mysterious ways, let's see some examples from the media. Artificial intelligence regulation, let's not regulate mathematics. A headline from import.io from May 2016 about the European general data protection regulation. 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, headlined from the independent. The article continues, the company's AI division DeepMind has unveiled AlphaGo Zero, an extremely advanced system that managed to accumulate thousands of years of human knowledge within days. Microsoft apologizing for their teen chatbot, 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 designed 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 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 Sarkadakis 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 non-human, when hunting anthropomorphizing animals had a great advantage because you could strategize, predict their movements. They show through multiple experiments, raves and nas, we're 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 and places even though 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-to-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 authoritative feel. Although disputed it's 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. Possessed by her god the oracle spoke, ecstatically and spontaneously. Priests of the temple then translated her gibberish into the prophecies 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 the data 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 put in 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. 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 and very undemocratic as Kathy O'Neill author of weapons of 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 alt-right 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 belief that large data sets 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 Stephen Levi describes how the authoritative 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 a stable environment but not if the world is changing. If you do not understand why things correlate you cannot know what may break down 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. Line 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 intelligence is that it 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 uncritically 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 checks, 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 moth, 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 use 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. Orid Halpern in beautiful data describes how Alan Turing and Bertrand Russell had proved conclusively in struggling with the Encheidung's problem 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, 10 years later in 58, artificial intelligence research began comparing computers and humans. Simon and Newell wrote, the program computer and human problem server 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? Sorry. Yeah, this is an image of a medieval drawing where the humors, the liquids in the body were seen as the essence of our intelligence and 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 René 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 seed 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 as 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 a sort of damoclast 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 resources 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 Boros 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 the 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 space X plan to colonize Mars presented in September last year. The goal of the presentation being to make living on Mars seem possible within our lifetime possible and fun. A less extreme version of these attempts to escape doom is 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 with out 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 considerate 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 Baotau in China. E-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 on 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 is believe 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 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 hardwired 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 Whitaker point out in the AI now report recent examples of AI deployment 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 oh sorry automated no sorry lost those directly impacted by deployment of AI systems rarely have a role in designing them and to assess their fairness to contest and rectify wrong and harmful decisions or impacts lack of methods measuring and assessing social and economic impacts now let's keep scrolling back but in any case there is a great chance of a 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 eats smart people by machay chiklowski depressing 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 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 thank you malosh is there any questions like you would have one minute okay so thank you again given the bigger applause again thank you