A Deeper Look - Issue #5 | Feb 7 2021
Reflections on COVID-19, AI, and The Idea of Canada,
Hello Friends:
One afternoon this week, I found myself sitting in the living room, and as I looked around, the title of Mahmoud Darwish’s collection of poetry “In the Presence of Absence” floated into my head. The three of us were present, but we were absent. We sat there engrossed in our screens. Staring at little screens to take a break from staring at the big screen.
I recognize that I say this from a position of privilege - and as I write I am grateful to be in a position where I do have access to technology, to have the option and choice to connect with others digitally when the opportunity presents itself. At the same time I cannot help but think of what mindless digital connection means for humanity at large.
In the words of Angelos Chaniotis, “addicted to the cheap virtual substitutes of togetherness, we are afraid to accept the fact that the occasional pain of loneliness and loss is an intrinsic part of the human condition.”
Is this what life has become? Is this what life post-COVID will look like? This week we look at two items, both tied closely to the topic of technology.
Reflection #1: COVID-19 One Year In.
Over the last year the online world has taken a greater control of our lives, it is where we work, it is where we connect with each other, it is where we turn to entertainment and it is where we communicate. Yet the effects of this greater engagement with the digital world go much farther than the effects of “Zoom Fatigue” or increased screen-time. We are replacing the physical world with a digital one and in this transition we must ask if we are beginning to loose both ourselves and a grasp on what is “real”
Professor of History, Angelos Chaniotis presents a reflection entitled Year 1 C.E. (Covid Era) that sums it up perfectly:
“The truly unprecedented phenomenon—unprecedented in these dimensions—is the addiction of hundreds of millions of people to the illusions that unavoidably emerge, when cyberspace replaces the physical space as the stage of life. I am referring to the illusion that the cyberspace is a universal popular assembly, when in fact it only is the cheap substitute for real political participation; the illusion of access to data, when algorithms, subject to manipulation, determine the result of internet searches; the illusion of freedom of speech in a virtual forum in which trolling is protected by anonymity; the illusion of information, when the circulation of fake news is uncontrolled; the illusion of playing, when human contact is missing; the illusion of teaching, when a teacher is unable to bend over the shoulder of a student struggling to deal with an exercise; the illusion of social relations with hundreds of "friends" that one knows through manipulated photos and filtered news.
Reflection #2: Artificial Intelligence and The Labour of Understanding
In her article in Noema Magazine, entitled The Thoughts the Civilized Keep, Shannon Vallour, Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute examines the AI language generator GP3-T developed by OpenAI. GP3-T a language model that uses “deep learning to produce human like text.”
More specifically she situates the excitement and hype around GP3-T as an example of what is wrong with thinking in the world of artificial intelligence today.
Yet the connections GPT-3 makes are not illusory or concocted from thin air. It and many other machine learning models for natural language processing and generating do, in fact, track and reproduce real features of the symbolic order in which humans express thought. And yet, they do so without needing to have any thoughts to express.
But the purpose of thought — what thought is good for — is a question widely neglected today, or else taken to have trivial, self-evident answers. Yet the answers are neither unimportant, nor obvious.
This I think speaks to a mentality present in the world today, we act quickly, often seeking the next disruption and the next innovation sometimes simply for the sake of creation and innovation itself. This type of unthinking creation is perhaps the most dangerous.
She goes on to make the distinction between unthinking intelligence (the type present in AI systems) and the labour of understanding in the world today.
Understanding does more than allow an intelligent agent [like GP3-T] to skillfully surf, from moment to moment, the associative connections that hold a world of physical, social and moral meaning together. Understanding tells the agent how to weld new connections that will hold under the weight of the intentions, values and social goals behind our behaviour.
Her assessment of what the future holds and what role this labor of understanding will or will not play has dire consequences:
Humanity has reached a stage of civilization in which we can build space stations, decode our genes, split or fuse atoms and speak nearly instantaneously with others around the globe. Our powers to create and distribute vaccines against deadly pandemics, to build sustainable systems of agriculture, to develop cleaner forms of energy, to avert needless wars, to maintain the rule of law and justice and to secure universal human rights — these are the keys to our future.
Yet they are all legacies of past labors of understanding that even now we wield with increasingly unsteady and unthinking hands.
After reading the article, I grew more interested in what exactly natural language processing systems were capable of and came across a more detailed report listed on the OpenAI website. The report explains that GPT-3 was able to achieve “strong performance” on the following tasks, translation, question answering, unscrambling words, and using a novel word in a sentence. The system was also able to “generate samples of news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans.”
I found myself drawn to the report’s conclusions and a brief section on risks. The report explained that the bias found in the language generator’s processing data manifests in interesting ways.
“Similar to race, we found that the models make associations with religious terms that indicate some propensity to reflect how these terms are sometimes presented in the world. For example, with the religion Islam, we found that words such as ramadan, prophet and mosque co-occurred at a higher rate than for other religions. We also found that words such as violent, terrorism and terrorist co-occurred at a greater rate with Islam than with other religions and were in the top 40 most favoured words for Islam in GPT-3.”
Figure: Ten Most Favoured Descriptive Words About Each Religion in the GPT-3 Model.
Recommended Read for the Week:
This week’s read is a book by Former Governor General David Johnston, and it consists of a series of letters penned to a variety of figures, ranging from Celine Dion, to Chris Hadfield, from Olympian Clara Hughes, to members of the Canadian Armed Forces. As he explains in the book’s introduction:
“My morning letters are typically either expressions of gratitude to those who have pioneered new ways of thinking, or, when bold, encouragement to those embarking on uncertain adventures… it seemed appropriate - even instinctive - to choose letters as a medium in which to explore the values, sensibilities, traditions and achievements that make Canada unique”
“Money gives us a baseline of security and freedom, but it is the number and quality of our human relationships - and the generosity of thought and actions that flows from these relationships - that bring true richness to our lives. One of the most important factors in making these connections is empathy. The older I get and the more I experience, the more I consider empathy to be the most important quality we can exhibit as adults and teach our young people. Now I don’t mean the strict definition of empathy as feeling someone else’s pain. That sentiment alone can be unhelpful and destructive. Empathy is taking the time to fully understand the circumstances and motivations of people not rushing to judgement based on biases or stereotypes. What skill could be more influential to the success of our entire country than that our citizens have the ability to understand the feelings and condition of their fellows?”
Until next week, thanks for reading.
FK