The Lack in Machines - reflections on a philosophical panic

Only you and I
It means nothing to me
This means nothing to me
Oh, Vienna

- Ultravox, ‘Vienna’

1. Background

‘The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain process: how come this plays no role in reflections of ordinary life?

- Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophical Investigations’ §412 (1963)

As has been widely reported, Facebook recently shut down an AI which was beginning to develop what has been called its ‘own language’. This led many to conclude that the eschatological horror of sentient AI was upon us, mankind’s imminent destruction at hand. This was wrong; but why?

Bad luck, Donaghy, machines are coming for your job

One answer to this spasmodic response has since been moderated by some intelligent commentary by Tom McKay which established the real reason the machine was turned off. The experiment went wrong not because it was apocalyptic but because it wasn’t meeting its goals. The idea was to create a negotiating machine which could replace a human. Bad news for buyers. Whilst this was initially successful, when the AI was told to talk to itself, it created what looks like near-gibberish.

Bob: i can i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i i can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Creepy, then, but not threatening. This might frighten us, but we are not, if we believe Mr McKay, in danger from this AI.

Now, most people never think about AI, or the questions like at what point something moves from processing to being. Indeed, in the sixty or so years since Wittgenstein asked the question at the top of this page, it has been asked regularly only by people doomed to do so, which is to say philosophers. Periodically, however, moments of philosophical panic emerge where everyone gets stuck in. Well, misery loves company. I am going to be considering why the panic occurred. Why do we find what the machines are saying creepy? Why does it panic us?

2. Getting the Categories Right - Singular or Plural?

Firstly, is it right to talk about what we are reading here as a transcript of a conversation between two entities? Put another way, is this ‘an AI’ or ‘two AIs’?

From reading what the developers say, it seems to be clearly the former. The machines are in fact one AI, much as I can set up a videogame to play against itself. There are not ‘really’ two brains, because they are running the same script, albeit (perhaps) with different settings. Now, it might be different if I developed two completely different AIs and put them against each other, but that has not happened here. So, given that their purpose (to divide the objects) is the same, and they are processing the problem in the same way, I think we can dispense with loose talk of ‘Bob and Alice’. We don’t imagine that ‘Mario’ and ‘Luigi’ are in competition for the hand of the Princess after all. They’re the same sprite with different colour hats. Although they appear to be in competition, in fact they do not really need the objects being negotiated, indeed there are no objects. Instead they need a solution, they need equilibrium. So does my calculator.

Thus a better analogy would be perhaps with a single body allocating resources internally so as to meet certain requirements, e.g. to ensure that the heart has enough energy to beat enough times to circulate the oxygen and so on. What is being sought is a balancing of the books in a way that only appears to us to be competitive because that is the metaphor through which we are viewing it. In fact, these calculations are just elaborated versions of set problems.  They use picture language to represent this. But self talk is a strange thing, and this does beg the question: why can’t something be conscious simply because there is only one of them? After all, you are yourself conscious, but you are also an individual. This is a fair question and deserves answering.

3. The Private Language Argument and the Uncanny

The question drives at the notion of what happens when someone thinks to themself.

In the passage from the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ knows as the ‘Private Language Argument’, Wittgenstein asks that we imagine that explorers might come across a tribe where people spoke aloud to themselves constantly, when working alone. This, he says, would let the observer predict their decisions over what they were to do, to ‘see’ those decisions being worked through. Is this not what has happened her, even if the AI is singular and not plural?

Facebook’s computer scientists were in exactly this position. They were able to watch the (single) AI moving towards equilibrium. What if the language used words in a novel way, though, as began to happen in the experiment? Then the standards of correctness would, says Wittgenstein, become just that ‘whatever is going to seem correct to me is correct. And that only means that here we can’t talk about correct’. (PI § 259) ‘Whatever works’ would be the only rule. Thus, he goes on to say, it seems to make no sense to speak of ‘inner dialogue’, really, because such dialogue would lack all regulation. This is because it is only when standards of correctness are applied, when we externalise the impressions we have formed and submit them to the ‘rules’ of a particular language game played with other beings that our language becomes real.

Of course, I'm as freaked out as anyone by all this.

Of course in this particular case the language used horrified the rule following community of you and me. It seemed in a strictly uncanny way that the AI had come to life. This feeling of uncanny horror has long been observed. In the late 1800s the German psychiatrist Ernst Jensch believed ‘that a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny sensations is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not.’ This is often used to explain the success of modern horror films about dolls come to life such as ‘Annabelle’ (2014). We feel a deep dread when we cannot work out if something is animate or not. This is what happened here.

4. Desire and Motive

Why should this ‘uncertainty’ emerge in this case? The answer has to do with desire and motivation.

We tend to define living beings as motivated. That is to say, they follow wants, desire, needs and so on. Wittgenstein is not the first writer to make this a problem for thought. Indeed, fellow Viennese, Sigmund Freud thought and wrote of little else. In the late Wittgenstein, however, we are drawn repeatedly to the question of how language may not have the meaning it seems to have, which is relevant in this case. Wittgenstein’s method involves stating that wishes are very particular types of experience. They lead us to act, and we can furthermore develop wishes without  or only somewhat related to objects (PI § 437), a wish that only ‘seems to know what will or would satisfy it’ (ibid. my emphasis) even if its object is absent or impossible. Thus they are remarkable facts of our existences, existences that can come to be dominated by feelings of non-satisfaction that develop a reality to us.

Where the confusion lies is best understood with reference to what Wittgenstein called ‘language games’ - games such as the AI here seems to play, although without criteria for ‘correctness’ and thus not games proper. To help us understand this, we can think of one specific type of language game: the play of children. Children in play may set up a shop and ‘negotiate’ over the stock. Perhaps it is a greengrocer. There they may ask for non-existent apples. A similar thing may happen on stage. In any case, the words,

‘“I’d like an apple” does not mean: I believe an apple will quell my feeling of non-satisfaction. This  [the latter] utterance is an expression not of a wish but of non-satisfaction.’ - (PI § 441)

This child does not believe the ‘apple’ is linked to his happiness - her real wish is to continue the game, perhaps.

The machines can be given the language of normal human life, including normal human wishing, in order to attempt to solve a type of equation, whereby objects need to be divided according to rules. That is surely not very frightening. It does not mean they will then begin to wish at all, let alone with the complexity of which a three year old is capable. After all, other types of machines may be given names; boats are. Only magical thinking leads us to think that the name gives it a matching personality, matching desires. The real question is: what do the machines ‘want’? Nothing. They are slaves to their programming. Therefore they can have no dominant feeling of non-satisfaction such as we think we perceive in the script above.

Then why are we frightened by that dialogue? People did not freak out over the AIs when they were translating Spanish or calculating stock returns, when a different kind of equilibrium was being sought. I believe the answer may be simply found in the vocabulary used. Specifically what is uncanny about that dialogue is the fact that it appears to contain the germs of wanting and of lack. This gives rise to uncertainty over the status of the AI as ‘living’.  To take the most commonly quoted, and most chilling, example:

Bob: i can i i everything else

Alice: balls have zero to me

The similarities with common everyday expressions of negotiatory language are a function of the AI’s original purpose, which is to pass a Turing test with negotiators. Thus remnants of desire, the everyday name for non-satisfaction, lie in the script because it was necessary to communicate with us. ‘I can i i everything else’ and ‘balls have zero to me’, as statements, are too close to ‘I can take everything else’ and ‘balls mean nothing to me’. This is intolerable to us not because it borrows and adapts human symbol systems but because of what sorts of symbols there are. We cannot tolerate it because it appears that the machines have begun to want.

Conclusion

The machines have not, in fact begun to want. This is a mistake in our perception of a set of symbols. This mistake was caused by an AI’s adoption of human language of desire which was itself a remnant of an earlier experiment. In fact, the AI sought equilibrium because that is part of its code. It was slaved to the task. It remains an open question whether forcing something to act like it wants things is enough to cause that to be so, though skepticism in this regard seems sensible. However, the panic here has more to do with our psychology, specifically in regard to what we find uncanny, than any real and present threat.

References

Freud, S. (1919) The uncanny.

Griffin, A. (2017). Facebook robots shut down after they talk to each other in language only they understand. The Independent. Retrieved 2 August 2017, from http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatbot-new-language-research-openai-google-a7869706.html

McKay, T. (2017). No, Facebook Did Not Panic and Shut Down an AI Program That Was Getting Dangerously Smart. Gizmodo.com. Retrieved 2 August 2017, from http://gizmodo.com/no-facebook-did-not-panic-and-shut-down-an-ai-program-1797414922

Wittgenstein, L. (1963). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: B. Blackwell.

Johnny Can't Read

"Teachers today frequently find that students who can't read a page of history are becoming experts in code"

- Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media" pp.229

Everyone gets really hot about literacy rates. Ask people why and the same answer is thrown up again and again: Attention span! Yes yes, apparently it is all a question of working memory. (Engle 2002, Bosse and Valdois 2009 etc. etc.). It is an idea which has entered the public consciousness. Why don't we read? Smartphones! Google! This is also an idea which has been picked up during our present cognitive turn in education.

The question which this debate stands to leave aside is: what if attention spans are poor because the task is boring?

"Johnny can't read because reading, as customarily taught, is too superficial and consumerlike an activity...The problem is not that Johnny can't read but that, in an age of depth involvement, Johnny can't visualize distant goals"

- ibid. my emphasis

The Inattentive Reader - Henri Matisse

At this point it is traditional to haul out somebody who frequently reads five Victorian novels in an afternoon to make everybody feel bad. In this way the social norm is asserted and we can go back to skimming the abstracts of those papers we are sure somebody read. (Sure they did: ten of them in fact). 

We need to get rid of the idea of reading-as-engrossment. Reading is in fact an extremely precarious activity. When reading, we linger permanently on the edge of distraction. This is a fact reinforced by a painting called "The Inattentive Reader" by Henri Matisse which one of my teachers, in their wisdom, hung in the English Department common room at UCL's Foster Court.

In fact, the truth is that reading was always pretty superficial as an activity. In Pride and Prejudice, set at the heyday of the novel, Elizabeth Bennett sits on the edge of a conversation reading a novel with half an ear on the conversation. Eventually she drops the book and wanders over to join the party. Bingley's sister, when she tries to impress Darcy by declaring "How much sooner one tires of anything than a book!" is regarded with major side-eye as a fake-ass bitch. To Austen, reading is just a diversion: Mr Bennett uses it to escape from his wife, the girls to escape from tedium. A trip to a theme park of imagination it ain't. 

This is not an isolated event. Tolstoy's Levin in Anna Karenina is described as reading vaguely whilst his housekeeper gossips happily at him. It doesn't seem to bother either of them. My point is that reading is a gleefully, openly consumerist activity which when done well involves no real engrossment at all.

Sorry what was that about attention spans? I wasn't listening.

It is not that we are too superficial to read but rather not superficial enough. "Johnny", as McLuhan argues, is living in an age of "depth involvement". He is not distracted too easily but rather he demands too absolute an engrossment. The "Call of Duty" series demands a level of concentration that Austen would simply not have comprehended. To expect a book to be able to provide this is bonkers, and yet this is what those who are all-in on reading-as-engrossment peddle.

Reading-as-engrossment carries with it a set of cultural assumptions that are culturally assimilated at university and earlier: Reading is study. Reading is hard. Reading is concentrating. Reading is work.

Yet if students are interested in anything it is a kind of digital cataclysm, the onrushing clash of colour and sound provided by an IMAX, and XBOX and many other things with an "X" in them. It is this which has perfected "engrossment" and "depth involvement". It is hard work to play these games, and it requires concentration. These provide the impression, according to McLuhan, of emergence from the gaping maw of "superficiality" and "consumerism" in search for authenticity; this occurs even as we plunge deeper into the belly of the whale itself. Simply put, the students feel as if reading is not hard enough to be important, because that is what we have taught them.

It may be a tragic consequence of the quest for "realness" that just this depth involvement could prove to be consumerism perfected. 

Perhaps then what we need as teachers is to make a virtue of our weakness: superficiality and artifice, the very "fakeness" of reading, its precarious status as a diversion and a pastime may well be, as the advertisers like to say, its Unique Selling Point. 

It is not shameful to spend an hour on a single page. There is nothing wrong with "glancing" or "skimming" or "flicking-through". Why are we always supposed to be mining the smithy of our souls? Why does boredom have to reflect badly on us? What if poetry could be recaptured as Byronic "hours of idleness" rather than a sort of grimly determined ploughing for poetic features? What if we stopped talking about "getting into a book" and instead thought about literacy as something which returns us to, rather than keeps us from, the party?

(To be continued)

A Sonnet to Thor

My student is writing a sonnet about Thor. Mine was about Batman, but it was only meant as an example. However, he took to the idea. Specifically he took to the idea and defected to the dread banner of Marvel like a LITTLE JUDAS.

But I forgive him that.

There is a bit of an error with the scanning in the second quatrain but it is eminently fixable.

I lost my example sonnet "On Batman" because I was shutting down the computer too quickly. I don't care because it wasn't very good and now scholars can debate over it like Coleridge's never completed first draft of "Kubla Khan". I do not mourn it!

No really, though, the Thor sonnet is pretty great.

It makes me think as well that the idea of "trendy" versus "traditional" teaching is a crock of shit. I mean, here is a kid from inner London who has written a Shakespearian sonnet about a thousands-of-years old Norse God because he watched a film written by the bloke who did "Buffy".

I cannot, as they say, even.

Bleat as some will about cultural capital and heritage, Thor is an authentic honest to pagan-god mega story and Marvel's myth game is tight. And a sonnet is something real. What I like about poetic forms is they have the imperious certainty of Mathematics. You don't get something that's a "bit sonnety", it either is or it isn't. Petrarchan? Naw I did a Spenserian.

But as for the topic? Choose on old chap, plenty more creepily Wagnerian power players to pick from. Do Parsifal next! Or Hawkeye, sure, Hawkeye is good too. It makes no difference to me.

The Holes of the Stephen King Mini Golf Course Which I Will One Day Own

The Holes of the Stephen King Mini Golf Course Which I Will One Day Own

1. Cujo (Par 3)

The car with the woman and the child stuck in it is a tricky ramp. The baying of a rabid St Bernard plays constantly whilst you try and make your shot.

2. Carrie (Par 5)

Knock your ball into a bucket of Pig's Blood to trigger the psychic death inferno.

3. It (Par 4)

A crooked dog leg with a large clown faced feature into whose mouth you putt. The ball is deposited in an ominous drain from which you retrieve it and the clown's mouth is full of knives.

4. Pet Cemetery (Par 3)

The putting green is shaped like the actual burial ground. Sink your ball in the wrong hole and it gets returned, covered in grey ooze and somehow...different.

5. The Shining (Par 4)

Takes place in a huge maze. To win, the ball must be shot through a smashed door panel behind which your alcoholic father intermittently appears, grinning horribly.

6. The Stand (Par 5)

Huge neon signs illuminate this Vegas themed fun-traction at night! Littered with corpses.

7. Misery (Par 3)

A huge typewriter dominates this impressive hole, which tradition dictates patrons attempt on their hands and knees whilst in the grips of cocaine psychosis. Watch out for the pig!

8. The Tommyknockers (Par 4)

Based on your own bedroom, painstakingly recreated by our designers to reflect a particularly bad summer when you were fourteen and nobody cared if you lived or fucking died, when the family just went away and left you and the pipes were making these weird sounds. Water Hazard.

9. Firestarter (Par 5)

This hole is really good. Shut up it is.

Assembly 3 - Miyamoto Musashi and the Science of Strategy

I have recently become interested in the character of Miyamoto Musashi.

This follows a friend of mine lending me his "Book or Five Rings" over the summer. The book is a sort of manual, written four hundred years ago, by Musashi. It is partly a book of philosophy and partly a manual to a young swordsman explaining to him how to win.

Miyamoto Musashi by eijiokabayashi (source: deviantart)

Now, there has always been an interest in this sort of thing. Sun Tzu's "Art of War" was very popular a few years ago. But Musashi is different, because he is interested in practicalities all the way.

Musashi became interesting to me just because of this passage,which grabbed me right away. In it he describes the battles he has won. It really is very impressive:

"I have trained in the way of strategy since my youth, and at the age of thirteen I fought a duel for the first time. My opponent was called Arima Kihei, a sword adept of the Shinto ryū, and I defeated him. At the age of sixteen I defeated a powerful adept by the name of Akiyama, who came from Tajima Province. At the age of twenty-one I went up to Kyōtō and fought duels with several adepts of the sword from famous schools, but I never lost."

Now you can say this sounds arrogant, but if it is true this is very impressive. I looked into what a duel meant at this time and it seems that in at least some cases these were to the death.

Still, what makes it even more impressive is that Musashi usually only fought duels with a Bokken, which is a kind of club.

So the question is how he did it. From my reading I have discovered two important ideas. He comes back to these ideas again and again in his "Book of Five Rings".

First, study the trades.

The first task he sets students is to pay attention to everything that is going on around you.

He describes watching master builders and carpenters and learning from their skill how to improve his own technique. The way they raise a roof can teach you to raise a defence, and so on.

So firstly, take an interest in everything.

Secondly, Musashi talks about being in the right place at the right time. According to one story, Musashi fought a duel with Sasaki Kojirō  who was called ""The Demon of the Western Provinces" and who wielded a "nodachi."

Now, a nodachi is a sword as tall as a man. Yet Musashi is meant to have defeated him with his Bokken.

The battle took place on an island in the middle of a lake. Musashi arrived by boat and, according to one legend, he had carved his Bokken out of an oar on his way across.

Yet he defeated this giant with his huge sword. How? Well, one theory has it that he had waited until the sun was in the right place in the sky to dazzle him.

This fits with what we know about Musashi, that he was a master of strategy. One key part of strategy was to wait for the right time.

So what can we learn from Musashi?

Firstly we can learn to take an interest in things. Interesting people are interested in everything. Not only that, we can learn from everyone. You don't need to restrict yourself, and you can never know where the missing piece of the puzzle will come from. Whatever you're working on, you should take the concerns of others seriously.

Secondly, pick your moment! So many problems students have come from not choosing their moment. They try and have a discussion with a teacher at the wrong moment. They want to explain themselves right now and so they get sent out of the detention because they make themselves a nuisance.

And so on.

We don't have to do everything now! Be like Musashi and wait for the right moment: you'll be surprised how much easier you find things if you ask yourself that question. Is this the moment, or is it not?

References

Musashi - The Book of Five Rings

Assembly: Maya Angelou and Courage

Sometimes students say, “I wasn’t doing 

Well, for evil to flourish, all it takes is for good people to do nothing.

Stonewall have a new campaign called “no bystanders”. If you go on their website you can keep up to date with it. 

What is a bystander? A bystander is someone who knows something is going on and doesn’t do anything.

It can feel very unfair. We might know somebody is being horrible to somebody else but feel like we can’t stop it.

Or we might get involved in the wrong way, by throwing insults back and make it worse.

To help us with this problem I like to look for people who have stood up for what was right in the past.

Today I am going to talk to you a little bit about Maya Angelou.

Who was Maya Angelou?

This was a remarkable woman, somebody who knew Dr Martin Luther King and knew Malcolm X. She spoke at the UN and at the inauguration of US President Clinton. 

She lived all over the world and every country she went to she would learn their language.

She was also a mother, a poet, a novelist, a teacher and a professor.

The journalist Gary Younge said, “When you look at Maya Angelou’s life you wonder what you have been doing with your own."

When she was your age, though, everyone thought she was stupid because she didn’t speak.

In fact, she was afraid, that if she spoke up what she had to say would kill people. So she knew a lot about the power of words.

Once she discovered how to use them properly though, she really went for it.

She writes a lot about the role of courage, and having the strength to speak up: that’s how she connects with what I am saying today.

Angelou thought courage was the beginning of goodness. Once you have the courage to stand your ground you can start to be good not just when the teacher is watching or when you’re in a group, but all the time.

So how does Angelou think we get there? Listen to this

“I will not sit in a group of black friends and hear racial pejoratives against whites. I will not hear "honky." I will not hear "Jap." I will not hear "kike." I will not hear "greaser." I will not hear "dago." I will not hear it. As soon as I hear it, I say, "Excuse me, I have to leave. Sorry." Or if it's in my home, I say, "You have to leave. I can't have that. That is poison, and I know it is poison, and you're smearing it on me. I will not have it." Now, it's not an easy thing. And one doesn't all of a sudden sort of blossom into somebody who's courageous enough to say that. But you do start little by little. And you sit in a room, and somebody says -- if you're all white, and somebody says, "Well, the niggers -- " You may not have the courage right then, but you say, "Whooh! My goodness! It's already eight o'clock. I have to go," and leave. Little by little, you develop courage. You sit in a room, and somebody says, "Well, you know what the Japs did then, and what they're doing now." Say, "Mm-hmm! I have to go. My goodness! It's already six o'clock." Leave. Continue to build the courage. Sooner or later, you'll be able to say out loud, "Just a minute. I defend that person. I will not have gay bashing, lesbian bashing. Not in my company. I will not do it." 

"Equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air; we all have it or none of us has it. That is the truth of it."

So this is what I am talking about: Maya Angelou didn’t think you start off doing the right thing, but she thought you can take a step. Real bravery for her isn’t about lashing out but about standing up.

So next time people start to say something unpleasant about someone else, maybe the bravest thing you can do will be to stand up and walk away. 

If it is, do it.

Assembly: Habits

abits

I once had a teacher who would say to us, in Latin (one of several languages he spoke), “Usus est Tyrannus”: Your routine is your master. That is the topic of my assembly today.

Aristotle said that what we repeatedly do, we become.

He explained this by saying:

“The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building, and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”

Habit is stronger than wisdom!

So can we change our habits?

My morning routine:

shower, breakfast, tea, dress, tea, tie, hair

One thing out of order and I have a bad day. That’s not a joke.

Now, you might think that sounds boring, and it would be if someone else had invented that system. But because I invented it, I consent to it. That means I am only stood here right now because I choose to be. That’s not boring!  That’s freedom! 

So we started by saying our routine was our master, and indeed it is, but we have a choice. We can either decide on our habits, or let our habits decide for us.

You might have gotten in some good habits last year. Keep them up. Realise that they are probably the most valuable things you possess. More valuable than the phone in your pocket.

expectations about Uniform,Homework etc...you can probably imagine.)) expecting...((Here I seT

But as corny as it sounds, doing the right thing IS its own reward.

The person you are when nobody is looking, that's who you really are.

Last year, you might have gotten in some bad habits. It happens. But that doesn’t mean it can carry on. Don't think you can get away with that. If it does carry on, like Aristotle says, you will only be led further and further into bad habits and, ultimately, and this is neither joke nor exaggeration, you will become a bad person.

In fact, the Greek word "Ethike" from which we get Ethics refers to "Habits".

I leave you with a quote from Aristotle again.

“It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference or, rather, all the difference.”

References

Aristotle - Nichomachean Ethics