Liberation of Tools

Without the existence of parody, I would have far less hope for our society. Robert Brockway’s recent article on the Cracked website, “If The Internet Wins The Nobel: A Proposed Acceptance Speech,” makes fun of the effort to give the internet the Nobel Peace Prize.

Unfortunately the Nobel Prize agency hides the nominees list for 50 years in a secret volcano lair, so I’m not sure if the intertubes is actually a nominee right now.

Brockway points out the strangeness of recent awards/nominations to abstract concepts, such as “You” for Time’s Person of the Year. Why don’t we nominate abstract concepts for President?  Brockway bemoans the internet’s qualifications, concluding that this would really be a peace prize for pornography.

Despite his brilliance, Brockway misses one aspect of the internet that makes it somewhat different than other abstract concepts, which is that it’s also a tool. Even if you disagree with the usage, the acceptance of a tool for a major award may be a predecessor to a future culture in which intelligence, personhood and rights apply to a myriad forms, not just humans.   And not just in object-oriented forms.

“In the future, your clothes will be smarter than you.”
—Scott Adams

The interfaces of the web allow us to interact with agents who may not be human. Would you care if other players in multiplayer games were bots, as long as they acted like humans? Would you follow software agents on Twitter? I certainly would.  Would you have sex with a sufficiently humanlike robot (or web agent + peripheral)?  I certainly…um…

Syndicated 2010-02-26 02:32:20 from SynapticNulship

Enactive Interface Perception

There are two theories of perception which are very interesting to me not just for AI, but also from a point of view of interfaces, interactions, and affordances.  The first one is Alva Noë’s enactive approach to perception.  The second one is Donald D. Hoffman’s interface theory of perception.

<h3>Enactive Perception</h3>

The key element of the enactive approach to perception is that sensorimotor knowledge and skills are a required part of perception.

A lot of artificial perception schemes, e.g. for robots, run algorithms on camera video frames.  Some programs also use the time dimension, e.g. structure from motion.  They can find certain objects and even extract 3D data (especially if they also use a range scanner such as LIDAR, ultrasound, or radar).  But the enactive approach suggests that animal visual perception is not simply a transformation of 2-D pictures into a 3-D (or any kind) of representation.

My interpretation of the enactive approach is that it suggests perception co-evolved with motor skills such as how our bodies move and how our sensors, for instance, eyes, move.  A static 2D image can not tell you what color blobs are objects and what are merely artifacts of the sensor or environment (e.g. light effects).  But if you walk around this scene, and take into account how you are moving, you get a lot more data to figure out what is stable and what is not.  We have evolved to have constant motion in our eyes via saccades, so even without walking around or moving our heads, we are getting this motion data for our visual perception system.

Of course, there are some major issues that need to be resolved, at least in my mind, about enactive perception (and related theories).  As Aaron Sloman has pointed out repeatedly, we need to fix or remove dependence on symbol grounding.  Do all concepts, even abstract ones, exist in a mental skyscraper built on a foundation of sensorimotor concepts?  I won’t get into that here, but I will return to it in a later blog post.

The enactive approach says that you should be careful about making assumptions that perception (and consciousness) can be isolated on one side of an arbitrary interface.  For instance, it may not be alright to study perception (or consciousness) by looking just at the brain.  It may be necessary to include much more of the mind-environment system—a system which is not limited to one side of the arbitrary interface of the skull. <h3>Perception as a User Interface</h3>

The Interface Theory of Perception says that “our perceptions constitute a species-specific user interface that guides behavior in a niche.”

Evolution has provided us with icons and widgets to hide the true complexity of reality.  This reality user interface allows organisms to survive better in particular environments, hence the selection for it.

Hoffman’s colorful example describes how male jewel beetles use a reality user interface to find females.  This perceptual interface is composed of simple rules involving the color and shininess of female wing cases.  Unfortunately, it evolved for a niche which could not have predicted the trash dropped by humans that lead to false positives—which results in male jewel beetles humping empty beer bottles.

All perception, including of humans, evolved for adaptation to niches.  There is no reason or evidence to suspect that our reality interfaces provide “faithful depictions” of the objective world.  Fitness trumps truth.  Hoffman says that Noë supports a version of faithful depiction within enactive perception, although I don’t see how that is necessary for enactive perception.

<h3>True Perception is Right Out the Window</h3>

How do we know what we know about reality?  There seems to be a consistency at our macroscopic scale of operation.  One consistency is due to natural genetic programs—and programs they in turn cause—which result in humans having shared knowledge bases and shared kinds of experience.  If you’ve ever not been on the same page as somebody before, then you can imagine how it would be like if we didn’t have anything in common conceptually.  Communication would be very difficult.  For every other entity you want to communicate with, you’d have to establish communication interfaces, translators, interpreters, etc.  And how would you even know who to communicate with in the first place?  Maybe you wouldn’t have even evolved communication.

So humans (and probably many other related animals) have experiences and concepts that are similar enough that we can communicate with each other via speech, writing, physical contact, gestures, art, etc.

But for all that shared experience and ability to generate interfaces, we have no inkling of reality.

Since the UI theory says that our perception is not necessarily realistic, and is most likely not even close to being realistic, does this conflict with the enactive theory?

Noë chants the mantra that the world makes itself available to us (echoing some of the 80s/90s era Brooksian “world as its own model”).  If representation is distributed in a human-environment system, doesn’t that mean it must be a pretty accurate representation?  No.  I don’t see why that has to be true.  So it seems we can combine the two theories together.

There may be some mutation to enactive theories if we have to slant or expand perception more towards what happens in the environment and away from the morphology-dependent properties.  In other words, we may have to emphasize the far environment (everything you can observe or interact with) even more than the near environment (the body).  As I think about this and conduct experiments, I will report on how this merging of theories is working out. <!-- Begin SexyBookmarks Menu Code -->

<!-- End SexyBookmarks Menu Code -->

Syndicated 2010-02-24 05:34:04 from SynapticNulship

How to Tell Your Friend They Have a Problem with Comic Sans

A friend, family member, or coworker who abuses the Comic Sans font presents a danger to himself and to others. This person may be risking their position at work, ruining family relationships, and making poor decisions that result in financial disaster. It is often a difficult and daunting task to confront a friend about such a problem. Nevertheless, such a confrontation could save your friend’s life. Comic Sans abusers do not believe that they need help. It is an action of love to introduce the subject and help your friend confront these demons. <h3>Steps</h3>

1. Be sure that your friend or coworker really has a Comic Sans problem.
2. Prepare a strategic plan of action. Talk with a typographer and ask on how you can help your friend’s Comic Sans problem. What you can do for your friend depends a lot by your age, the help resources and your friend him/her self.
3. Write down how you want to help your friend. Before you approach your friend, ask yourself, “What do I want to get out of this meeting?” Possible objectives might be:
   • A realization that this lifestyle is destructive.
   • An honest admission of Comic Sans use.
   • A desire to be Comic Sans-free.
   • Agreement to ask for help.
   • Attendance at a support group.
   • A system of accountability.
   • Enrollment in a Comic Sans rehabilitation program.
   • Reconciliation with estranged family members.
   • Restitution for damage to others.
   • Surrender to authorities for outstanding warrants.
4. Approach your friend with a nonjudgmental voice. Confrontations that begin with “You should…” or “You shouldn’t…” will turn the discussion into a battle that will force your friend to defend him or herself. A better approach might be, “When you use Comic Sans, I feel sad and I get worried you might be hurting yourself and putting yourself into harms way.” It means that you should talk about your feelings toward your friend.
5. State your commitment to your friend. One of the greatest fears of the Comic Sans abuser is that he will lose his friends or family if he is found out. Offering support in the rehabilitation process is important. Offer to attend 12-step meetings with your friend. Offer to be there if he has to tell his parents and other superiors about his abuse.
6. Be the example. It is important that you walk the walk as well as talk the talk. If you are going to help someone get clear of Comic Sans, you must be willing to go Comic Sans free as well.
7. Do not enable your friend. Make it clear that you will not tolerate his Comic Sans use and will not associate with him when he is using. This is not the same as never talking with him, but it means you will walk away if you see him using.
8. Get the help of capable people. Do not do this alone if possible. An intervention is far more successful if others are present. If you are young, talk to a parent or a teacher or a counselor or a principal. Don’t stop seeking help until someone listens to you and offers to help.
9. Gather a variety of possible solutions. It is not easy to get someone to admit that they have a Comic Sans addiction. After your approached your friend you can give possible solutions. It’s better to go through the the information in the forms of brochures or videos that you can hand to your friend so that he may see help is available.
10. Be direct in your approach. Be clear and direct. “I saw you formatting an HTML email yesterday and I felt scared.” “When you use Comic Sans, I get afraid that you will say and do things that will hurt my feelings and my body.” “I will not hang around you when you are using or are under the influence of Comic Sans.” “I want to help you kick the habit, I know of a Comic Sans Abuser Anonymous meeting tonight at 8, I will go with you and sit through the meeting to help you check it out.”

Attribution: This is a remix of WikiHow (Creative Commons license). <!-- Begin SexyBookmarks Menu Code -->

<!-- End SexyBookmarks Menu Code -->

Syndicated 2010-02-16 06:36:09 from SynapticNulship

Do the Consciousness Dance

According to philosopher Alva Noë, “Consciousness is more like dancing than it is like digestion.” I.e., consciousness happens while you are interfacing with the world.

But is it ballroom dancing, techno dancing, break dancing…the robot?

Consciousness

Sure, you can dance by yourself—especially to industrial and EBM—but you need music. And music is at least partially external. And there’s probably people around you. Crazy people. And a disco ball, and strobe lights…it’s an environment.

Does this mean your consciousness is dependent on interactions?

If you were in a sensory deprivation chamber would you be unconscious? I think you would have hallucinations and eventually go insane. But you would probably still be self aware and relatively conscious, at least until the black hole of strange loop madness consumed you.

However, that is in lifetime space (ontogeny). Consciousness might be fully dependent on interactions in evolution space (phylogeny).

So can this metaphor stretch to unconsciousness? Maybe unconsciousness is like doing the fish stick.

Unconsciousness

<!-- Begin SexyBookmarks Menu Code -->

<!-- End SexyBookmarks Menu Code -->

Syndicated 2010-01-12 04:48:14 from SynapticNulship

Why You Should Care About (Post)Human Factors

Your experiences and interactions were designed.

Maybe not with people, but certainly your interactions with computers, cameras, cars, software, cell phones, websites, wrappers, games, guns, power tools, pants, chairs, stairs, screens, shows, sports equipment and so on were designed. Because technologies affect society, it is worthwhile to be aware of how they are designed to work with—or in failures, against—people. People may one day include posthumans.

To avoid confusion I will define “posthuman” as it applies to this essay. First, a quote from the IEET definition:

Posthumans could be a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousnesses, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human, i.e. a cyborg. Some examples of the latter are redesigning the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, cognitive enhancement drugs, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques.

Another point of view would describe a posthuman as somebody who is outside of the normal ranges of human capacities. The “post” qualification may be due to small out-of-bounds differences in many capacities or a huge difference in only one capacity. This is the point of view that is particularly relevant to the discipline of human factors.

“Human factors” is a term that covers both the science of human properties (cognitive and physical) and applying this science for design and development. HCI (human-computer interaction), HRI (human-robot interaction), and human-automation interaction are all interaction design disciplines which could be considered as specializations of human factors engineering.

Even before considering how posthumans might affect these disciplines, you should already care about human factors and interaction design. Here are a few reasons why:

• Only a small segment of society has a chance (or is trained) to use a technology that provides unusable interfaces and/or bad user experiences.
• Ignorance of human factors, poor interface design, etc. can cause major accidents; likewise good use of human factors can prevent major accidents.
• Good interfaces and user experiences can help a product or type of product become mega-popular, which causes more sociocultural impact than a product nobody buys.
• Human factors uses knowledge of human cognitive psychology, which can be used to design interfaces that influence human minds.

<h3>Human Factors Meets Posthumans</h3>

The amount of change in the usability guidelines is much less than the change in Web technology during the same period. The reason usability changes more slowly is that it mainly derives from the characteristics of human behavior, which is remarkably constant. After all, we don’t get bigger brains as the years go by.

This sound statement from the king of usability, Jakob Nielson (“Usability makes business sense”), will no longer be true when users no longer have human behavior.

Historically, two of the most influential technologies to human factors were aviation and computing. As impressive and world-changing as those were, posthuman technology will have even more impact. Since posthuman technology will create new cognitive and physical capacities, it will break the limits of human factors so much that the discipline will have to change significantly—possibly mutating into what one might call “posthuman factors.” <h3>Some Existing Problems</h3>

Not only will human factors and related disciplines have to change or spawn new disciplines to handle the new and/or altered abilities of enhanced persons, but they also have to deal with various problems already existing today. Here are three current human factors and interaction design problems to consider:

1. The first issue is accounting for changes due to adoption of the technology being introduced [1]. Technologies often change the systems they are introduced in to—and often in surprising ways. System changes include: new ways to work, new tempos of work, more complexities, new adaptations of users to the technology, new types of failures, etc. We live in a time of rapid technological change. Thus it is also a time of rapid system change.

   Posthumans will amplify this problem by adding whole new dimensions of different types and ranges of mental and physical capacities.

   One counterargument against the increasing difficulty of predicting technology change—with posthumans in the mix—is that we might have more knowledge of how the posthuman minds work. One of the limitations of modeling or observing an interaction is that the internal mechanisms of the human behavior are largely unknown [2]. But, we will know most of the internal mechanisms of cognitive enhancements and completely-artificial cognitive architectures. Also, human psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, etc. will presumable keep marching forward so we should know more about human minds in the future as well.

   (Post)human factors, however, will need to be equipped with sufficiently advanced tools for modeling and predicting behavior in a particular system even if the designs of the cognitive enhancements and architectures are known. And as anybody who has observed emergent behavior should suspect, there will probably still be severe limits in practical situations of trying to predict the outcome of a technology introduction.

2. The second issue is the “dialectic between tradition and transcendence” (a phrase attributed to Pelle Ehn) [3]. Designers can fix small problems, but designing a product that will significantly change how a user conducts an activity is much more difficult. It is just as difficult for the user to know what major change would help them out. And then even if the new technology exists, a lot of people won’t comprehend how it can improve anything beyond the traditional methods.

   Would posthumans inherently solve this problem by having wider adaptive potential? I can’t answer that, but it would certainly depend on the particular posthuman user. The inclinations for tradition vs. transcendence could have more variation in a posthuman group of users. Designers may have to increase the amount of customization and/or automatic adjustments in products—or shrink the target group for each product to specific bandwidths of mental and physical capacities in the posthuman spectrum. A groundbreaking new tool for human users could be irrelevant to a lot of posthuman users.

3. There is a point of view that technology drives innovations as opposed to needs (see a rebuttal here), and therefore design only works for incremental changes. Basically these innovations would be cases of extremely open-ended problem spaces, i.e. the technologists have no clue how the users will use it. This has been the case, for example, with many kinds of general purpose robots.

   This applies to posthumans because both the posthuman technology, such as cognitive enhancements, and the products for posthumans to interact with might be major innovations. These technology-based innovations will have many hurdles to become not only products, but useful products, and many will fail or disappear along the way.

   Of course, if this technology-first view is incorrect, then posthuman-related needs and opportunities can drive research and technology, and posthuman factors and interaction design can create major innovations.

References

[1] Woods, David, and Dekker, Sidney, “Anticipating the effects of technological change: a new era of dynamics for human factors,” Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, vol. 1, no. 3, pp.272-282, 2000.

[2] Rouse, William B., Systems Engineering Models of Human-Machine Interaction. New York: Elsevier North Holland, 1980, pp.129-132.

[3] Preece, Jennifer, “Interview with Terry Winograd” in Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. New York: Wiley, 2002, p.71. <!-- Begin SexyBookmarks Menu Code -->

<!-- End SexyBookmarks Menu Code -->

Syndicated 2010-01-07 07:09:27 from SynapticNulship