I'm in love with my new robot vacuum cleaner, should I be worried?

I’m writing to you from my couch, it’s a bleak wintery new years day in London, I’m 43 years old, wearing a big fluffy electric blue jumper, and I’m head over heels with my new robot vacuum cleaner. It's an unexpected love since I would say I’m rather indifferent to vacuuming. But the cleaning history doesn’t lie, I’ve only had it a week and I’ve sent it out to clean about 8 times, as well as 2 times to mop and 3 times to redo under the bed! To temper this new found love, I’ve also spent the holiday break listening to the Reith lectures, which this year features the topic ‘Living with Artificial Intelligence’, delivered by AI professor Stuart Russell. 

I must admit I’d already started to dream about the other nondescript chores in my life I could farm out to robot helpers, or better yet, put that all together into one robot that could learn any new tasks I’d like to give it, i.e moving from specialised to generalised intelligence, then all the better right?  Of course dabbling as I have in the area of Responsible Tech I knew it was highly unlikely Stuart Russell was about to let us know of all the joys that no longer having to fold up my own clothes would bring, but instead to examine the dangers that might come alongside artificial generalised intelligence. 

There’s quite a lot to unpack from these lectures, but in short, the overarching question of the series is, in creating general purpose AI we create entities that are far more powerful than humans, how do we ensure that they never have power over us? And should we, as Alan Turing warned, have to expect the machines to take control? This is of course a big, rather headache inducing question, to which it seems not even Stuart Russell has an answer. Although he does have some good ideas, (see lecture 4). But don’t despair, he also reminds us that we are not there yet and I’m reminded by a quote from Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI, that currently AI is neither artificial (referring to all the human labour that goes into it) nor intelligent. 

Still it seems there is already plenty to be wary of in the area of specialised artificial intelligence. I would liken the message of the lecture on warfare to suggesting that we were all wearing big fluffy electric blue jumpers and standing only millimetres from an open flame. If you want to sustain your nightmares from this lecture you could follow up by re/watching the Black Mirror episode ‘Hated in the Nation’, in which a swarm of robotic bees use facial recognition to hunt down and kill the most hated person voted for in a daily twitter poll. A technology he claims is entirely plausible and seems to suggest perhaps you could already buy something similar on the market.

Then there is of course the question, who is in control, us or the machine? Russell argues we have already seen this control over us in action, in the algorithms that govern social media content selection. Rather than serve us up more stuff we like, he argues, they have increased their goal of user clickthrough by instead making us more predictable. Users with more extreme preferences are easier to predict. Knowing this you’d think we’d be able to turn them off, but neither the majority of the users, as they are too addicted, nor the companies that govern the algorithms, as well they simply make too much money, has yet been able to act. 

Of course this wouldn’t be a lecture series on the perils of technology if it didn’t cover what will we do when the robots not only do all of the vacuuming and clothes folding, but all of the work? Should we learn to enjoy the simple art of being or do we still require some kind of purpose to make us get out of bed? I lean on the side of requiring purpose to make life worth living, but perhaps that's because, as he puts it I’m much more British than I am French or Italian (I’m in fact from New Zealand). I offer as evidence the fact that I’m writing this on my holiday and already setting goals for my 3 month sabbatical which I am starting in February. Although perhaps I just need to unlearn my goal oriented tendencies and as Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches embrace non striving? I’ll get back to you on that one after the 3 months.

There is a lot in the lectures that I haven’t covered and which will require many evenings of pondering. But if I could leave you with some final parting advice from Russell on how we might give ourselves a fighting chance of staying in control of the machines, it's to get out our ethics book. To quote him “What works is for a real conversation to happen, for the AI researchers to understand that they don’t know much about the last two and a-half thousand years of ethics research and  be willing to learn about it and read it, and just see the pitfalls, because philosophers, in a way, have been debugging the moral programmes of other philosophers". So it seems that my love for my robot vacuum cleaner is ok, for now, but it might be time to turn off Netflix and learn the difference between rights-based, virtue-based and utilitarian approaches to ethics.

Fazerdaze

It’s a rainy and cold bank holiday Monday, and I find myself curled up in my room avoiding a machine learning assignment by instead consuming an endless stream of everything Fazerdaze. Like the condensation on the window it’s one of those bands that just creep up on you, at first you dismiss it as a catchy poppy song, but before you know it you’ve listened to their entire back catalogue, read everything about them, and you can’t see out your window!

I still can’t quite put my finger on exactly why they’ve got under my skin. But there’s something intoxicating about not knowing why you love something. Like the beautifully simplistic song Somethink, with lyrics like “Something in the way your smile disappears when you look at me, Something in the way you love me, Something in the way you don’t”. You need to touch it and prod it as much as you can to figure it out how it makes your heart beat a little faster.

There’s nothing attention grabbing about Fazerdaze, like Amelia herself who seems the typical self deprecating New Zealander, but perhaps its that unassumingness that makes it all the more endearing. Amelia although only 24 has been around the music scene for a while, getting into music at an early age as a solace from a chaotic family life. Music was where she found her people, and clearly her passion. And with bedfellows like Goodshirt’s Gareth Thomas as her testing ear, I wouldn’t be surprised if she is on her way to being part of New Zealand’s music royalty. In song “Little Uneasy” you  can hear shades of her quoted early musical influence, Smashing Pumpkins. That is, if you can imagine Smashing Pumpkins had taken antidepressants and instead of Billy Corgan’s intense 90’s twang vocals its a bit more dreamy and you can bath in the bliss filled summer that’s not outside your window.

Fazerdaze’s first full album, Morningside, has been released today. Check them out, but be careful after a few listens you might find yourself dancing around your room with Fazerdaze on repeat…..and if I keep avoiding my machine learning course that’s no doubt where the robots will find me too.

It's funny what you get used to

Mouldy union jack curtains tower to the sky

It’s funny what you get used to

The dank smell of no light leaks out of every corner

It’s funny what you get used to
The ten year old next door smokes weed
It's funny what you get used to

The neighbours give you the weird eye through their long strewn hair and jungle of a garden

It’s funny what you get used to

We're not welcome in the park in the evenings, shut the windows to block out the noise

It’s funny what you get used to

Someone was stabbed in the car park, they crawled home and died

It’s funny what you get used to

Power in the hands of too few?

I’ve finished my grieving over Brexit and have started my soul searching.  In looking for a glimmer of hope the only one I can see is if I believe that it was not a vote to put Britain first and that we can do it better than if we didn’t have all those pesky European neighbours of ours coming over eating our food and meddling in our business, but if I believe that it was an actually an outcry against the powers that be. If it was in fact the masses saying no, listen to us for once.

Unfortunately I don’t think the masses have voted for something that is in fact in their best interests, but that they have been forced to take the only opportunity they can to show their dissent.  I’ve been flip-flopping in the last few days about wether the outcome of this referendum means other forms of democracy which give the public more direct involvement in democracy, such as liquid democracy, are in fact a good thing.  One the one hand it seems to show that the general public can be swayed by inflammatory advertising and emotional triggers, which can yet still be controlled by those few in power, but on the other side this does make them widely unpredictable and in turn harder to control.  Unfortunately in the case of Brexit I doubt the reaction will be a general uprising but rather a clamp down and a short return to the status quo, those in power don’t actually want the financial system to fail nor actually to change and whether we are officially part of the European union or not will no doubt have little effective difference. 

The one hope in fact lies in the shock of the middle class. Those not in power but baffled by the irrationality of the majority.  If we ask ourselves why they acted this way, perhaps we’ll see the system for what it is, power in the hands of too few.

What world is this?

I feel deeply saddened to wake to the world today. To a world that I thought I understood but to which I realise I don’t.  Today the majority of Britain voted to leave the EU. 

I’m not worried about the financial ramifications. The outcome has already caused havoc in the markets this morning. But I’ve learnt, having lived through the financial crisis, financial markets have short memories. You only have to look to Iceland, who despite being bailed out and voting not to pay back the money still continues to thrive.  Or the sub-prime mortgages, which despite being at the root of the speculation on which the crisis was built, begin to appear again. No I’m not worried about that. I have no doubt that those in power wish to remain that way and will figure it out. 

Nor am I worried that my dream of being 1.5 years away from attaining freedom to live anywhere in Europe will be dashed. It’s a freedom that is very dear to my heart, having had it threatened to be taken away from me in 2009 in the last crisis, I know first hand the stress it causes. The lack of freedom to make decisions about your life is soul destroying. Living since then with that burden on my shoulder I will celebrate with great vigour the day that monkey is off my back. But no this doesn’t worry me either. Britain needs immigrants as much as immigrants need Britain and I doubt they will make that move. 

What worries me is the sentiment. The sentiment to separate, point our differences and build walls. That deeply saddens me, and feels like a major setback. 

Those people are not taking your stuff, they are not chaining you to their rules. That is our stuff, that is our responsibility to figure it out. This is our world. Everyone’s.

I hope some day you’ll join us and the world will be as one!

Memories

It was the smell that drew me back.  The wet damp smell of hay that lined the birds cages. I'd been wandering around a market in the French countryside, on task of my writing teacher to go and be inspired by my surroundings, and to let it invoke memories.  

At first glance the market could be a market anywhere, filled with plastic, and the the sounds of rhythmically clashing traditional music intersecting in your ear. But I quickly found myself drawn to the one thing that struck me as unusual. It seems a common good to buy at a French country market are live fouls. Stacked high in wooden crates with barely enough room to move are little furry bundles of various sizes and mottles, their feathers sticking out here and there through the rough wooden crates.  One woman orders three. The store owner opens the crate grips them by their powerful legs and they are plunged head first in a furious flurry of flapping into a smaller crate, where their defeated cries become quiet chirps. The crate is tied in blue string and the new owner carries them off balanced on 2 fingers, their tiny heads peaking out at freedom as they go. 

Suddenly though I breathed in and found myself in my grandparents barn in New Zealand, or more specifically behind it.  We would often play in there.  It was the height of a two story building and, from my memory, never completely full.  You could climb up the prickly rectangular bails and lie at a great height.  For some reason this day my brother had decided to venture out back.  I’m not sure what he did to disturb the bees, nor am I sure how we knew to find him there.  But I do remember all of us standing there, all my little cousins and I, at a safe distance, watching as the swarm attacked. The strange thing was my brother just stood there, not moving, not screaming, just standing as one after the other the bees left their stings in his body.

The thing was this frozen boy was very unlike my brother.  He was always the loud one, the one you would hear when he was two houses from home. The  first and only one of the grandchildren to give a speech at my grandmothers 70th birthday.  He baffled me with his ability to speak with confidence about topics he knew nothing about, and how he would often contradict himself in his beliefs.  Swinging widely between strict vegetarianism, lecturing us about the health benefits and ethical high ground of not consuming to meat, to revelling in eating the thickest, reddest, juiciest steak on offer.   Still despite his contradictions, I admire my brother.  I admire him for being able to leap into whatever comes his way. It’s a beneficial quality and it’s this boldness I believe has enable him to deserve the highest praise I have heard for him, “He has a mind”

Back in the market I can just about see him conversing with store owners without any French. Buying the large black charcoal disc on offer to find out what it was, turns out it was a cheesecake. Buret atop his head to simultaneously blend in and charm the locals. I hope that one day he can join me here in person, and we'll grab one of those horrid to a New Zealanders taste, French coffees to try with the charcoal covered cheesecake, and chat excitedly about what obscure traditional CDs we have purchased and are eager to get home and listen to while swilling a glass of the local French wine.

See you soon, love sis xx

Dear Tomorrow,

You need not come

I'm quite happy under this tree,

With the sun on my face,

And the breeze in my hair.

Forget your quest for ever marching time

And come smell the Tuscan roses with me!

Jeantine xx