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~ Finding, formulating and solving life's frustrations.

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Fool Me!

24 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by petersironwood in America, psychology, Uncategorized

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IBM, life, magic, NYNEX, school, stories, user experience, user interface

 

 

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Long before seeing television, or even knowing it existed, I listened to stories on the radio mainly with my grandmother. As I mentioned earlier, my favorites were The Lone Ranger, Hop-along Cassidy, and Tom Corbett and The Space Cadets. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why she listened although she might have answered questions for me or provided some additional commentary. As I only learned much later, these programs used special props for the sound effects of whizzing bullets, thunder, horse hooves, rocket engines, etc. At the time, it never occurred to me that there were “sound effects.” I just listened and constructed an entire “TV program” in my mind’s eye. More accurately, I was there along with the villains and heroes.

Although the stories presented each week in these programs fascinated me, my grandma’s “Old Pete Stories” captivated me even more. Grandma presided over the Firestone Park Dramatic Club and her performances for me were filled with all the drama she could muster. Her “Old Pete Stories” arose out of an actual character she knew from her days growing up on a farm. Old Pete was a hired hand on the farm; a loner and a drifter, Old Pete had a talent for getting into trouble. In fact, it is rather surprising that Old Pete seemed to get into precisely the type of trouble that a five year old boy might get into and rarely into the kind of trouble that you would expect an adult farm hand to get into. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? But it didn’t make me wonder! Not at the time. Instead, I found myself, just like Old Pete, wondering what mysteries that deep blue pond held. I found myself, just like Old Pete, terrified when he became tangled in the unseen currents and forces below the surface. And, like Old Pete, my gratitude and relief came in waves when I … er, Old Pete, I mean … struggled to the shore and pulled himself out. Although “Old Pete” inspired my grandmother’s stories, I’m pretty sure that the plots she constructed were “cautionary tales” much like Aesop’s Fables.

My mother also read me stories, mainly from a giant book of stories. Each story typically only had one ink drawing on the title page for that story. There was one about a mouse who played the piano and another about a Bull in the China Shop. She too loved to practice her most dramatic voice when reading aloud. And then, some time in the first grade, something magic happened. We were sitting around in a circle struggling through our primers when my teacher made some comment that caused everything to “click into place” for me and from then on, I could pretty much read anything! I could now read stories to myself! The stories in the school primers were generally pretty lame, but soon, I got my own books and soon after that, Tootle, and The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy gave way to Tom Sawyer! Huckleberry Finn!  I went to the library every week and picked out three books. Generally, these included some science books and some fiction books and often some combination. The Earth for Sam was a fictionalized account of a boy going back in time to see first hand what dinosaurs were like (among other things). I discovered that our library had a copy of our first grade science text. In fact, it also had a copy of every grade 1-6 science texts. I went through them like the proverbial knife whose molecules had extremely high kinetic energy through butter. Stories of the Knights of the Round Table thrilled me as well as The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Some people found it odd that I read Nancy Drew, but I think they are better written and I can relate to a girl hiding in the closet trying not to get caught and not trying to scream when a spider dropped on her just as easily as if a boy were hiding in the closet trying not to get caught and trying not to scream when a spider dropped on him.

You might think from my catholic tastes and prolific reading that I would forgo television when we finally got a TV set. No way! I loved Gabby Hayes, for instance, and Superman. We had a couch and a reclining rocking chair in our living room. When Gabby Hayes explained that Quaker Oats were shot from guns (!), I hid behind the rocker as the cereal exploded out of the canon. When the Superman theme song or that of The Lone Ranger came on, I ran across the room full speed and flung myself into the recliner. My parents hated this and told me on numerous occasions not to do it despite the fact that I only knocked over the rocker once. Their story was that I would “hurt myself” or “break the chair.” But neither of these things happened. I don’t recall ever actually getting severely punished so I concluded this was just one of those things parents feel obligated to say because they see themselves as responsible adults who must therefore say such things. Meanwhile, I didn’t understand how they could be so blasé about these shows. Why on earth were they also not running across the room and flinging themselves into the chair or couch? Did they not hear the strains of The William Tell Overture? Didn’t they realize that this meant that another episode of The Lone Ranger was about to begin? Didn’t they understand that he would right wrongs? The Lone Ranger not only prevailed every week; he did so without bloodshed! He would gallop up alongside some bad guy and then jump and tackle him off his horse, wrestle him to the ground and subdue him with fists alone. On occasion, The Lone Ranger would shoot, but only to defend himself or others and even then, only shoot the gun out of the villains’s hand! He never missed the target and accidentally gave the bad guy a free appendectomy or craniotomy. And, Superman? Come on! In case you forgot from last week, it always began by reminding you that he could leap tall buildings at a single bound (though why he needed to do this when he could fly is unclear). He was faster than a speeding bullet! He was more powerful than a locomotive! How could they possibly forgo these shows to do some other thing? That seemed incredible but only for the first few milliseconds of the show. After that, I was glued to the tube and lost interest in what they were doing.

Although people hate to “be fooled” so much that when they are fooled, no matter how much evidence accumulates, they tend to dismiss the evidence and insist that they were not fooled. And yet, there are other occasions, like movies, television, novels, and plays were people welcome being fooled. This really struck me hard many many years later watching Apollo Thirteen for the third time. I knew this movie was based on a true story and I knew how the real life events had unfolded and I had seen the same exact movie twice before. But that didn’t stop me from being excruciatingly worried about whether the astronauts would make it back alive. Other species of animals and plants can certainly “communicate” with their own kind and even with other species. It seems doubtful, at least so far, that they can “tell stories” however. This may be one of the quintessential differences between humans and other species. Whether we sit down in a campfire circle to trade ghost stories or streak across the room to throw ourselves into a rocking chair, we seem to be saying “Fool me!”

“Fool me” arises in other contexts as well. The first few years that I lived on North Firestone Boulevard, a peddler appeared several times each summer with a small hand cart filled with toys, puzzles, and games. Generally, these items were not to be found in stores. One item in particular held my attention. A small number of wooden rectangular blocks, roughly card-sized but much thicker, were held together with ribbon. However, when he held them up, he ticked one and allowed them to cascade in a magical fashion so that each block changed from one side to the other. He did tell some cock-a-mamie story as he did this and no doubt, like any other magician’s patter, it was designed to draw attention away from what was actually going on. But in this case, it wasn’t the story, per se, that was so cool. It was the (seeming) physical impossibility of what was happening before my very eyes. In this case, it wasn’t that I wanted to stay fooled. I wanted to see the trick again to understand what was really happening. The peddler, however, relished making money. He wasn’t really trudging up and down the street in his rather heavy coat (especially for summer) for his health nor to entertain children. He wanted to turn a buck. So, despite our pleadings, he would never do this trick more than twice. After that, if we wanted to see it again, we would have to pay for one of these sets of “magic” interconnected blocks and figure it out on our own. I raced back inside to wheedle my parents into giving or at least lending me some money so I could buy one of these. I breathlessly and ineptly explained how these were magic blocks but they seemed singularly unimpressed with my analysis. Dad muttered something vague and incoherent about it just being the way the blocks were connected by the ribbons, but he had not seen the actual demonstration. I did not score the money nor the blocks, at least that time. I did, however, save up my money. My allowance at that point was a dollar every two weeks. So, I had to forgo my favorites from the popsicle man, substituting grape popsicles at 4 cents each rather than the more expensive (and much tastier Mr. Goodbars or even fudgesicles) in order to save, but save I did. The next time the peddler appeared, I was ready! But damn! He wasn’t! He didn’t have any more of the magic tumbling blocks and tried to interest me and my friends in some other toys. I suppose some of those were pretty cool too, but I didn’t care. You’ll be happy to know that I eventually found some when I had my own kids. I was delighted that they were delighted but they no longer held any mystery for me personally.

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Everyone I know likes stories and magic tricks. What I find hard to understand are people who prefer to stay fooled. They don’t want to know how a Jacob’s Ladder works. They don’t want to know how a magic trick works. They don’t want to know whether their political candidate lies and cheats. They don’t want to know whether climate change is really going to affect the lives of their children and grandchildren. If there were only say, 100 stories in the world, maybe I could understand that they wouldn’t want to know the outcomes of those 100 stories. But there are way more than 100 stories! There are way more than 100 damned good stories; I don’t see any shortage. But more than that, I don’t see any problem with knowing the outcome (as I did with Apollo XIII) still being engaged and entertained and transported by a good story, well told.

Don’t get me wrong. Just because I want to know how magic tricks work, doesn’t mean I think it is necessarily right for me to explain it and that people who don’t want to know are inferior or stupid. Different people have different preferences. I like cilantro and anchovies and blue cheese but not everyone does. When it comes to what is actually happening in the world in ways that impact our ability (and even more importantly, the ability of our families) to live and function though, it seems to me the truth is much more important than is the pleasure of listening to the same false but comforting story over and over.

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Imagine that we are all sitting around a campfire listening to a “ghost story” about a guy trapped in a pit with scores of foot long spiders who come out and nibble on him whenever he tries to sleep. I am not going to spoil everyone’s “fun” by pointing out that this is very unlikely. No way. On the other hand, if I see a forest fire headed our way, I am going to interrupt the frigging story and let people know! Furthermore, I cannot fathom why some people would rather stay and hear the story if it means they are going to die or at least suffer a lot of third degree burns. Perhaps stories are not only one of humanity’s greatest gifts, but also, under some circumstances, our greatest curse as well.

My fascination with stories continued throughout grade school, high school, and college. Although as an undergraduate at Akron U and then Case-Western Reserve, I took almost a dozen psychology courses, none of them delved with any depth into stories. I did, however, also take courses in English Literature, Shakespeare, and Drama. Even to this day, it’s a little hard to believe that these psychology courses largely skirted the whole issue of stories considering how important and fundamental they are to understanding the human psyche. Freud and Jung did discuss stories in some depth. Even in four years of graduate study at the University of Michigan, stories seldom came up as a topic in cognitive psychology. In fact, the whole enterprise of experimental and cognitive psychology at that time seemed to be about deconstructing human thinking, problem solving, learning, and decision making into different little boxes and finding out about the little boxes.

 

Humans are notoriously varied but one thing you can pretty much count on is that whatever else is going on, these little boxes communicate with each other. My senior year as an undergraduate, I had three part time jobs. One of these was teaching astronomy and space science at the Sixth Grade Educational Center in downtown Cleveland. Another was working with kids in a psychiatric hospital. Another was as a research assistant to a Professor doing experiments in operant conditioning. In the latter set of experiments, kids went into a large “Skinner Box” and pulled a lever for nickels. In front of them, during training, was a large red circle. Later, they continued to pull the lever but got no coins. During this phase of the experiment, they might be shown a smaller red circle, a red ellipse, a green circle and so on. During the time the kids were actually in the Skinner Box, there wasn’t much for me to do. So, I went out to the waiting room and used the blackboard there to teach the kids who were waiting a little astronomy such as the names of the planets and their “order” around the sun. Although my Professor was a behaviorist, he did ask me to debrief each kid as to what they thought about the experiment. To my astonishment, the kids who had heard my little mini-lecture about astronomy tried to relate what I said to the little circles and ellipses that were shown during the experiment. Of course, once they said that, I realized that to them, it made perfect sense to try to relate these experiences. After all, they came to the University, and here was the same guy (me) telling them about weird unusual things. Naturally, they tried to make one unified story out of it.

In graduate school, I got my chances for story telling to my kids but also at a more adult level. It was tradition for each sub-area within the Psychology Department to put on “skits” and I co-authored two satirical musicals, mainly about the professors (and still managed to get my degree). To show you how much on the edge I was, my advisor the first year was Dr. Reitman who studied cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. One of the main characters in the play was “Dr. Brightman” whose student (played by me) was building an AI program and trying to impress a very cute grad student.

I told her my program simulated human thought. “Oh, really?” she replied. “Your program simulates human thought?”

“Absolutely,” I answered, “although for now, purely for convenience and ease of measuring accuracy, we’ve decided to focus on mathematical thinking as a representative domain of human thought.”

“I see,” she answered, “So, this program simulates the way humans do mathematical reasoning.”

“Precisely!” I continued. “Of course, because of storage limitations on our computers, we are initially focusing on arithmetic.”

Now, her brow furrowed to signal that she was less impressed. “So, you are saying your program actually does arithmetic problems?”

So, I said, “Indeed! Or, at least it will if I ever get the code debugged.”

Well, you get the tenor of this satire. (And, by the way, the hype in AI still exceeds the actuality by about the same ratio today 50 years later!) Looking back on it, I am very impressed that the Professors in the department were able to take it all as good-natured fun.

There were important stories told in graduate school. For example, my Professor in physiological psychology discovered the “pleasure center” in the rat brain. The reason he discovered it was his inexperience. He and his professor were doing research on stimulating the “Reticular Activating System” in rats. This part of the rat (and human) brain is important in keeping you awake and alert. A small current into this part of the brain makes the rat much more alert but is punishing to the rat. You can “prove” this by implanting electrodes into the brain and turning on a very tiny current (which is not painful in the sense of an electric shock) and then the rat will soon avoid whatever part of their environment they are in when you turn on the current. But something was terribly wrong with the rat that James Olds had prepared. Instead of avoiding the area, his rat was falling head over heels in love with that area! The rat kept going back for more! When the rat was “sacrificed”, it turned out that Olds had not waited long enough for the cement to dry and the electrode had moved forward into another area of the brain. A whole line of research grew out of this “mistake.” What was “good” here was that Olds and his professor did not try to hide this unlikely result or sweep it under the rug. Instead, they strove to understand it. Although there are certainly scientists who are not as honest as these two, by and large, people go into science in order to find the truth. Not many people go into science in order to make a career out of lying. If you want to be dishonest as a career, you’ll make much more money much more easily by becoming a con artist, or some kind of unscrupulous business person than becoming a scientist. I’m not saying it never happens, but it is a rather stupid path to take. Besides the fact that people who go into science want to know the truth (and do not go into it to get rich), there are all sorts of checks and balances in science to “weed out” dolts who lie about or cover up results.

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My interest in stories and my interest in psychology, though both strong, for many years stayed separate. At one point in my IBM career, I was trying various ways to study and improve a system called “The Speech Filing System” which later transformed into the “Audio Distribution System.” This was a system which functioned a little bit like an answering machine, but was much more sophisticated. One big advantage was that you called it on purpose to leave an audio message. This puts the user in a much better frame of mind than an answering machine. If you call a human being and expect to talk to a human being and instead, get an answering machine, you are (even to this day) more likely to leave a somewhat incoherent and incomplete message such as:

“Leave a message after the beep. BEEP!”

“Oh, hi. It’s me. I wanted to … well, I… I wanted to … maybe it’s .. . you know what? Call me back. I will be gone for an hour or so unless you call in the next ten minutes. Anyway, you know my number, right?”

Yeah, we’ve all been there. By now, a few decades later, people are not quite so surprised by an answering machine, but it still sucks.

Instead, if you called the Audio Distribution System, you knew ahead of time you were going to be leaving a message so you prepared it mentally. You could also easily edit or delete your message and start over. That is just a taste of its many features. But it was new; not just a new product, but a new concept. Furthermore in those dark days of the distant past, there were no mobile phones. People were not used to using something with twelve buttons for a User Interface. The system had a lot of functions but only twelve buttons. Speech recognition was too unreliable to be used for the command interface. So this provided something of a puzzle; how could the buttons be used to make a good interface. Luckily, there were plenty of psychologists on the case. In fact, the main inventor of the concept, Stephen Boies, had been a student of Mike Posner, one of the most brilliant experimental psychologists ever, and John Gould, a prominent and experienced member of the Human Factors Society was also on the project as was I. In addition, the team included Jim Schoonard and John Richards. John was another Posner student. We may have had the only project team with more psychologist by training than computer scientists! As it turned out, both John Richards and Stephen Boies ended up doing a lot of the programming and most of the maintenance.

By using standard processes of design, test, and re-design, we developed a good set of commands. Beyond that, the interface, prompts and documentation were all derived from a state transition table so that changes in the User Interface could be made fairly easily and the documentation could be automatically updated and kept congruent with each other. However, I felt the need for something else. It wasn’t that people had much trouble “figuring out” how to accomplish a particular thing with the User Interface. That, they could do. The problem was that many of them never thought to use the Audio Distribution System. It did not require anything different. There on the desk was your same old phone. (True, there was a little template of commands that sat around the square keys). The trick was, how do you get someone to send an audio message as opposed to calling someone or sending a memo or email? For that purpose, I found a bit of video story-telling to be more effective. I portrayed by voice over what was going through my head and modeling what I hoped the thought process of the user might become.

For a variety of reasons, the Audio Distribution System, although it became an IBM product briefly, never became a “best seller.” For one thing, it was inexpensive. That’s right, inexpensive. It provided a lot of function for the customer but not a lot of sales commission for the sales person. On the other hand, for the sales person to sell the Audio Distribution System required them to learn a whole new way of thinking and then a whole new way of convincing their customers. It was much easier, and much more lucrative, to sell the customer on more storage or processing power.

I happened to attend a talk at an IBM meeting by Shelly Dews who mentioned storytelling. She worked in Raleigh at the time on a new IBM suite of networking products. We ended up working together on what was essentially a story to explain to customers what Netview was and what it did. That seemed to work very well and people who read the “story” version remembered the concepts better than the standard form of documentation and training. However, at about that time, I had an opportunity to begin an Artificial Intelligence Lab at NYNEX and so left IBM for a dozen years. At NYNEX, I mainly sublimated my storytelling by writing a play and three novels and some day we’ll come back to that.

I also worked with Heather Desurvire to develop a variation on the User Experience technique called “Heuristic Evaluation.” In that technique, you basically ask people to look for issues in the User Experience. It works better if you use experts, but even non-experts can find many of the issues in the User Experience that would come out in tests.  The variation builds on people’s ability to use empathy. So, rather than simply being asked to find issues with the User Experience, people are told to look at the interface via a series of different perspectives; e.g., a cognitive psychologists, a worried mother, a physical therapist, a Freudian therapist, and so on. People who look at the interface in a variety of ways were able to see more issues and also to make more suggestions for additional features than folks who spent an equal amount of time simply looking at the interface (presumably from their “own” perspective). This relates to story in that people who enjoy stories must be able to experience what is going on in the hearts and minds of the characters in order to comprehend and enjoy stories. It’s a little disconcerting that education doesn’t spend more time improving on people’s natural empathic abilities.

It was not till I returned to IBM to work on “Knowledge Management” however, that I was fully able to marry my interest in stories with my interest in cognitive psychology and indeed with the applied field of “Human Computer Interaction.” I was lucky enough to manage a project for several years that was focused on the “Business Uses of Stories and Storytelling.” This is not the time or place to try to summarize all of that work here, but here are a few interesting tidbits.

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At the time, there was a fairly well-known commercial about “Knowledge Management” that claimed that the “secret” to “Knowledge Management” was “simply” to provide the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. Of course, it is anything other than “simple” but even assuming you could do that, it seemed problematic in concept. I immediately thought back to my college professor who taught German. Professor Maciw was Ukrainian by birth and spent most of World War II in a German Prison Camp which is where he learned German. Perhaps that was part of the reason he tended to be a bit on the sadistic side.

At the end of the first semester, rather than giving us a written test as most Professors do, he determined he would give us an oral exam. He prefaced this by saying, “Who is dis class vants A?” Well, of course, every student in the class raised their hand. Who doesn’t want an A? In our class, happened to be a young woman who had had four years of German in high school, and had lived in Germany for three years. Her German was quite a bit better than mine or anyone else’s in the class. He began with her. His method was simple but mind-boggling. He would begin with a question, always shouted, never spoken, such as “In story of small village, who was main character?”

She would begin with “Eric.”

He would then scream in somewhat broken English (never German), “Please to give complete sentence!”

She would begin answering in German in a complete sentence, but she would not get far. After about three words, he would shout: “Please to decline!” This meant that she would have to think back to the last noun she uttered and then say the noun with the various grammatical cases. Nouns in German all come with articles that differ according to whether the noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, as well as whether it is singular or plural and what the grammatical case is. And, so she would begin with the declination of, say, “Der Hund.”

But no sooner had she begun than he would scream, “In story of Hans, who was wife?”

So, she would say, “Erica.”

Then, the Professor would yell, “Please to say in complete sentence!!”

So, she would put it in a sentence and he would immediately interrupt with: “Please to conjugate!!”

This meant that whatever the last verb out of her mouth was, she would have to conjugate the verb.

This went on for about forty minutes. At last she broke down in tears.

I am quite sure she could have correctly answered any of his questions correctly. It wasn’t the information that was problematic. It was the way in which he interrogated her.

The professor strutted around the room for a few moments with his back turned to the class and then spun about facing us as he said, “NOW, who is dis class still vant A?” Only two of us, out of a class of about thirty raised our hands. Then he started on me. I poured buckets of sweat but did not panic or break down in tears. At last he curled the outer part of his lips down to his shoulders and shook his head a little up and down. Then he started out on the other student, Mr. Lepke whose main sin, I am pretty convinced was that he had been born in the wrong country though I no longer remember what that was. At least twenty minutes of a typical hour and half class were taken up by arguments (in English, or some semblance thereof) about European history. I honestly don’t think I recall a single fact from all that argumentation. In any case, Mr. Lepke’s turn began and after about two minutes the bell rang signaling the end of the double period. All of us left.

By chance, around dinner time, I ran into the professor at the student union. He eagerly strode up to me, his eyes ablaze, “Ah! I had Mr. Lepke in class for two more hours! Finally, he said, ‘No more Dr. Maciw No more, I beg you.’” Now, I have never been in a prison camp so I can’t really say what was up with that particular professor. And, I have to say that his method, although it may have temporarily broken the other two students, gave me a great deal of confidence. Nothing since has so far been as harrowing a verbal interchange. So, in a weird way, it was actually useful for job interviews, exam questions, presentations, and so on in later life.

In any case, the next semester, we were back. None of the three of us who had been questioned dropped out. One of the early spring lectures about European history, the professor stopped mid-sentence and said, “Vat is DIS?! Someone in my class passing notes?” He sped down the aisle and snatched the note out of a student’s hand, striding back to the front of the classroom. !” I vill read note in front of entire class!” 

In his loudest stage voice meant for hundreds of students, though we were only about thirty, he read, “Dr Maciw. Your zipper is open.” And, so it was. But here too, this was the right information, delivered to the right person, at the right time. So, it seemed to me that it was crucial to think, not just about the right information content getting to the right person at the right time. It was also very much about how that information was presented. Certainly, one way that information is presented with thought about how is in the story format. Stories are about emotions, feelings, character, relationships, in other words about people. And, by the way, it doesn’t matter whether the characters are doorman or ducks or dogs or dragons or demigods from Damian three or doctors. The stories are always about people. As a child, or as an adult, I am every bit as stricken with “Lady” in the “Lady and the Tramp” as if she been a beautiful woman. I know just how Tramp feels!

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Another interesting feature of stories as a communication medium is that they allow us to talk about the union of our experiences rather than the intersection. In business, one reason the meetings are almost universally boring is that everyone must frame everything into a single corpospeak which tends to be gray and rectangular. Stories, on the other hand, are a different matter. They come in a huge variety of shapes, sizes, colors, textures, smells, tastes, and movements. Since each is about people, the variety of possible characters is essentially infinite.

Another consideration about stories is that they tend to focus on the edges of human experience rather than the “central tendency.” The universe is a complicated place, full of wonderful and dangerous surprises. Try as we might, we can never step in exactly the same stream twice. Our knowledge is limited and our personal knowledge is very limited. But, we can learn from the experiences of others. We find this especially interesting if it is something on the edges of human experience. In the same way that we find the largest and smallest and fastest mammal to be interesting, we find it interesting to see what happens when the vilest criminal imaginable falls in love with the nicest person on earth. It makes us consider what we would do; it makes us see the question of “what is love, anyway?” in a new light. A story, in other words, is far more than “mere entertainment.” It can literally be life-changing.

Charles Dickens, for instance, is largely credited at least by some for ultimately improving conditions for the poor in England. Little Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe opened the eyes of many to the horrors of slavery in a way that statistics could never do. Why? Because if you actually read the story with an open heart, you become just a little, of a slave. And, hopefully, of course, you realize that whatever pain you feel in merely reading about something hateful, terrifying, or despicable is only a teeny fraction of the pain a person actually experiencing these things would feel.

David McClelland, a former Harvard professor of psychology helped develop a three factor theory of needs: Need for Achievement, Need for Affiliation, and Need for Power. Some people, and some organizations, have various mixtures of these needs. I identify personally a lot with the need for achievement. I want to find problems, solve them, get things done, understand how things work, improve things, etc. I also identify a lot with the Need for Affiliation. I like people. I like their variety and their surprise. I do not identify much at all with the Need for Power. I like it okay, but only when it’s combined with the other two. If I am in charge and I can make good decisions and genuinely feel that I am doing what’s best for the entire group, I am totally fine with being in charge. But the instant I feel like I want to manipulate someone or bully them or make them do something so that I personally benefit, I will quit. I want no part of that.

McClelland studied children’s literature and found that over time and cultures, these needs were more or less in evidence. What he further found was that about forty years after a particular need was most prevalent in the children’s literature, that need begin to manifest itself in society. Whenever, for instance, the need for Achievement was exulted in most children’s stories, then, when those people grew up and began to make decisions and impact life, that society embodied that need and people made a lot of advances with relatively little violence. On the other hand, when the need for power was prevalent, then the adults raised on those stories had a generation with lots of heat and not much light; a lot of violence but not much progress. Stories are powerful.

Let’s now briefly revisit Jacob’s Ladder, the peddler’s toy that fascinated me so much as a small kid. Recall that the Peddler told a story as he demonstrated Jacob’s Ladder. This was no random story, after all. I recall now that in the story, the various tiles/blocks represented places such as a house or temple. The coins used in the story stood for people. So to my five year old imagination, this was not about coins disappearing and reappearing, though that would be a good trick. No, this was about human beings, being in one place and then, suddenly disappearing from that place and then reappearing in another place! Holy Toledo! If that could happen to Jacob and his brother, maybe it could happen to me! This was magic I had to understand! I didn’t realize this until this moment.  I bought one of these for my kids, and they failed to show anything like the level of interest in it that I had. But, I never told them the story.

What is your story?


UPA talk about stories with more links and references about story

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Selection of my short stories

Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence

29 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, emotional intelligence, ethics, the singularity, Turing, user experience

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The Pros and Cons of AI Part Three: Artificial Intelligence

We have already shown in the two previous blogs why it more effective and efficient to replace eating with Artificial Ingestion and to replace sex with Artificial Insemination. In this, the third and final part, we will discuss why human intelligence should be replaced with Artificial Intelligence. The arguments, as we shall see, are mainly simple extrapolations from replacing eating and sex with their more effective and efficient counterparts.

Human “intelligence” is unpredictable. In fact, all forms of human behavior are unpredictable in detail. It is true that we can often predict statistically what people will do in general. But even those predictions often fail. It is hard to predict whether and when the stock market will go up or down or which movies will be blockbuster hits. By contrast, computers, as well know, never fail. They are completely reliable and never make mistakes. The only exceptions to this general rule are those rare cases where hardware fails, software fails, or the computer system was not actually designed to solve the problems that people actually had. Putting aside these extremely rare cases, other errors are caused by people. People may cause errors because they failed to read the manual (which doesn’t actually exist because to save costs, vendors now expect that users should look up the answers to their problems on the web) or because they were confused by the interface. In addition, some “errors” occur because hackers intentionally make computer systems operate in a way that they were not intended to operate. Again, this means human error was the culprit. In fact, one can argue that hardware errors and software errors were also caused by errors in production or design. If these errors see the light of day, then there were also testing errors. And if the project ends up solving problems that are different from the real problems, then that too is a human mistake in leadership and management. Thus, as we can see, replacing unpredictable human intelligence with predictable artificial intelligence is the way to go.

Human intelligence is slow. Let’s face it. To take a representative activity of intelligence, it takes people seconds to minutes to do simple square roots of 16 digit numbers while computers can do this much more quickly. It takes even a good artist at least seconds and probably minutes to draw a good representation of a birch tree. But google can pull up an excellent image in less than a second. Some of these will not actually be pictures of birch trees, but many of them will.

Human intelligence is biased. Because of their background, training and experience, people end up with various biases that influence their thinking. This never happens with computers unless they have been programmed to do something useful in which case, some values will have to be either programmed into it or learned through background, training and experience.

Human intelligence in its application most generally has a conscious and experiential component. When a human being is using their intelligence, they are aware of themselves, the situation, the problem and the process, at least to some extent. So, for example, the human chess player is not simply playing chess; they are quite possibly enjoying it as well. Similarly, human writers enjoy writing; human actors enjoy acting; human directors enjoy directing; human movie goers enjoy the experience of thinking about what is going on in the movie and feeling, to a large degree, what people on the screen are attempting to portray. This entire process is largely inefficient and ineffective. If humans insist on feeling things, that could all be accomplished much more quickly with electrodes.

Perhaps worst of all, human intelligence is often flawed by trying to be helpful. This is becoming less and less true, particularly in large cities and large bureaucracies. But here and there, even in these situations that should be models of blind rule-following, you occasionally find people who are genuinely helpful. The situation is even worse in small towns and farming communities where people are routinely helpful, at least to the locals. It is only when a user finds themselves interacting with a personal assistant or audio menu system with no possibility of a pass-through to a human being that they can rest assured that they will not be distracted by someone actually trying to understand and help solve their problem.

Of course, people in many professions, whether they are drivers, engineers, scientists, advertising teams, lawyers, farmers, police officers etc. will claim that they “enjoy” their jobs or at least certain aspects of them. But what difference does that make? If a robot or AI system can do 85 to 90% of the job in a fast, cheap way, why pay for a human being to do the service? Now, some would argue that a few people will be left to do the 10-15% of cases not foreseen ahead of time in enough detail to program (or not seen in the training data). But why? What is typically done, even now, is to just the let user suffer when those cases come up. It’s too cumbersome to bother with back-up systems to deal with the other cases. So long as the metrics for success are properly designed, these issues will never see the light of day. The trick is to make absolutely sure than the user has no alternative means of recourse to bring up the fact that their transaction failed. Generally, as the recent case with Yahoo shows, even if the CEO becomes aware of a huge issue, there is no need to bring it to public attention.

All things considered, it seems that “Artificial Intelligence” has a huge advantage over “Natural Intelligence.” AI can simply be defined to be 100% successful. It can save money and than money can be appropriately partitioned to top company management, shareholders, workers, and consumers. A good general formula to use in such cases is the 90-10 rule; that is, 90% of the increased profits should go to the top management and 10% should go to the shareholders.

As against increased profits, one could argue that people get enjoyment out of the thinking that they do. There is some truth to that, but so what? If people enjoy playing doctor, lawyer, and truck driver, they can still do that, but at their own expense. Why should people pay for them to do that when an AI system can do 85% of the job at nearly zero costs? Instead of worrying about that, we should turn our attention to a more profound problem: what will top management do with that extra income?

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Pros and Cons of Artificial Insemination

27 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by petersironwood in psychology, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, emotional intelligence, ethics, the singularity, user experience

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The Pros and Cons of AI: Part Two (Artificial Insemination).

Animal husbandry and humane human medical practice offer up many situations where artificial insemination is a useful and efficient technique. It is often used in horse breeding, for example, to avoid the risk of injury that more natural breeding might engender. There are similarly many cases where a couple wants to get pregnant and the “ordinary” way will not work. This could be due to physical problems with the man, the woman, or both. In some cases, it will even be necessary to use sperm from someone who is not going to be the legal father. Generally, the couple will decide it is more acceptable emotionally if the sperm donor is anonymous and the insemination is not done via intercourse.

But what about all those cases where the couple tries and indeed, succeeds, the “old-fashioned way.” An argument could certainly be made that all intercourse should be replaced with AI (artificial insemination).

First, the old-fashioned way often produces emotional bonding between the partners. (Some even call it “making love.”) No-one has ever provided a convincing quantitative economic analysis of why this is beneficial. It is certainly painful when pair-bonded individuals are split apart by divorce or death. AI would not prevent all pair bonding, but it could help reduce the risk of such bonds being formed.

Second, the old-fashioned way risks the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. Even when pairs are not trying to get pregnant and even when they have the intention of using forms of “protection”, sometimes passion overtakes reason and people, in the heat of the moment, “forget” to use protection. AI provides an opportunity for screening and for greatly reducing the risk of STDs being spread.

Third, the combinations of genes produced by sexual intercourse are random and uncontrolled. While it is currently beyond the state of the art, one can easily imagine that sometime in this century it will possible to “screen” sperm cells and only chose the “best” for AI.

Fourth, traditional sex if often quite expensive in terms of economic costs. Couples will often spend hours engaging in procreational activities than need only take minutes. Beyond that, traditional sex if often accompanied by special dinners, walks on the beach, playing romantic music, and often couples continue to stay together in essentially unproductive activities even after sex such as cuddling and talking.

There are probably additional reasons why AI makes a lot of sense economically and why it is a lot better than the old-fashioned alternative.

Of course, one could take the tack of considering life as something valuable for the experiences themselves and not merely as a means to an end of higher productivity. This seems a dangerously counter-cultural stand to take in modern American society, but in the interest of completeness, and mainly just to prove its absurdity, let us consider for a moment that sex may have some intrinsic and experiential value to the participants.

Suppose that lovers take pleasure in the sights, sounds, smells, feels, and tastes associated with their partners. Imagine that the sexual acts they engage in provide pleasure in and of themselves. There seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about the monetary value of these experiences since the prices charged for artificial versions of these experiences can easily vary by a factor of ten or more. In fact, there have been reports that some people will only engage in sex that is not paid for directly.

So, on the one hand, we have the provable efficiency and effectiveness of AI. On the other hand, we have human experiences whose value is problematic to quantify. The choice seems obvious. Sometime in this century, no doubt, all insemination will be done artificially so that everyone (or at least some very rich people)  can enjoy the great economic benefits that will come about from the increased efficiency and effectiveness of AI as compared with “natural” sex.

As further proof, if it is needed, imagine two island countries alike in every way in terms of climate, natural beauty, current economic opportunity, literacy and so on. In fact, the only way these two islands differ is that on one island (which we shall call AII for Artificial Insemination Isle) all “sex” is limited to AI whilst on the other island (which we shall call NII for Natural Insemination Isle) sex is natural and people can spend as much or as little time as they like doing it. Now, people are given a choice about which island to live on. Certainly, with its greater prospects of economic growth and efficiency, everyone would choose to live on AII while NII would be virtually empty. Readers will recognize that this is essentially the same argument as to why “Artificial Ingestion” should surely replace “Natural Ingestion” — cheaper, faster, more reliable. If readers see any holes in this argument, I’d surely like to be informed of them.

Turing’s Nightmares

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The Pros and Cons of AI: Part One

24 Saturday Sep 2016

Posted by petersironwood in health, The Singularity, Uncategorized

≈ 10 Comments

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, ethics, health care, the singularity, user experience, utopia

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This is the first of three connected blog posts on the appropriate uses and misuses of AI. In this blog post, I’ll look at “Artificial Ingestion.” (Trust me, it will tie back to another AI, Artificial Intelligence).

While ingestion, and therefore “Artificial Ingestion” is a complex topic, I begin with ingestion because it is a bit more divorced from thought itself. It is easier to think of digestion as separate from thinking; that is, to objectify it more than artificial intelligence because in writing about intelligence, it is necessary to use intelligence itself.

Do we eat to live or live to eat? There is little doubt that eating is necessary to the life of animals such as human beings. Our distant ancestors could have taken a greener and more photosynthetic path but instead, we have collectively decided to kill other organisms to garner our energy. Eating has a utilitarian purpose; indeed, it is a vital purpose. Without food, we eventually die. Moreover, the quality and quantity of the food we eat has a profound impact on our health and well-being. Many of us live in a paradoxical time when it comes to food. Our ancestors often struggled mightily to obtain enough food. Our brains are thus genetically “wired” to search for high sugar, high fat, high salt foods. Even though many of us “know” that we ingest too many calories and may have read and believe that too much salt and sugar are bad for us, it is difficult to overcome the “programming” of countless generations. We are also attracted to brightly colored food. In our past, these colors often signaled foods that were especially high in healthful phytochemicals.

Of course, in modern societies of the “Global North” our genetic predispositions toward high sugar, high fat, high salt, highly colored foods are manipulated by greedy corporate interests. Foods like crackers and chips that contain almost nothing of real value to the human diet are packaged to look like real foods. Beyond that, billions of dollars of advertising dollars are spent to convince us that if we buy and ingest these foods it will help us achieve other goals. For example, we are led to believe that a mother who gives her children “food” consisting of little other than sugar and food dye will be loved by her children and they will be excited and happy children. Children themselves are led to believe that ingesting such junk food will lead them to magical kingdoms. Adult males are led to believe that providing the right kinds of high fat, high salt chips will result in male bonding experiences. Adult males are also led to believe that the proper kinds of alcoholic beverages will result in the seduction of highly desirable looking mates.

Over time, the natural act of eating has been enhanced with rituals. Human societies came to hunt and gather (and later farm) cooperatively. In this way, much more food could be provided over a more continuous basis. Rather than fight each other over food, we sit down in a “civilized” manner and enjoy food together. Some people, through a combination of natural talent and training become experts in the preparation of foods. We have developed instruments such as chopsticks, spoons, knives and forks to help us eat foods. Most typically, various cultures have rituals and customs surrounding food. In many cases, these seem to be geared toward removing us psychologically from the life-giving functionality of food toward the communal enjoyment of food. For example, in my culture, we wait to eat until everyone is served. We eat at a “reasonable” pace rather than gobbling everything down as quickly as possible (before others at the table can snatch our portion). If there are ten people at the table and eleven delicious deserts, people turn many social summersaults in order to avoid taking the last one.

For much of our history, food was confined to what was available in the local region and season. Now, many people, but by no means all, are well off enough to buy foods at any season that originally were grown all over the world. When I was a child, very few Americans had even tried sushi, for example, and the very idea of eating raw fish turned stomachs. At this point, however, many Americans have tried it and most who have enjoy it. Similarly, other cuisines such as Indian and Middle Eastern have spread throughout the world in ways that would have been impossible without modern transportation, refrigeration, and modern training with cookbooks, translations, and videos supplementing face to face apprenticeships.

Some of these trends have enabled some people to enjoy foods of high quality and variety. We support many more people on the planet than would have been possible through hunting and gathering. These “advances” are not without costs. First, there are more people starving in today’s world than even existed on the planet 250,000 years ago. So, these benefits are very unevenly distributed. Second, while fine and delicious foods are available to many, the typical diet of many is primarily based on highly processed grains, soybeans, fat, refined sugar, salt and additives. These “foods” contain calories that allow life to continue; however, they lack many naturally occurring substances that help provide for optimal health. As mentioned, these foods are made “palatable” in the cheapest possible way and then advertised to death to help fool people into thinking they are eating well. In many cases, even “fresh” foods are genetically modified through breeding or via genetic engineering to provide foods that are optimized for cheap production and distribution rather than taste. Anyone who has grown their own tomatoes, for example, can readily appreciate that home grown “heirloom” tomatoes are far tastier than what is available in many supermarkets. While home farmers and small farmers have little in the way of government support, at least in the USA, mega-farming corporations are given huge subsidies to provide vast quantities of poor quality calories. As a consequence, low income people can generally not even afford good quality fresh fruits and vegetables and instead are forced through artificially cheap prices to feed their families with brightly packaged but essentially empty calories.

While some people enjoy some of the best food that ever existed, others have very mediocre food and still others have little food of any kind. What comes next? On the one hand, there is a move toward ever more efficient means of production and distribution of food. The food of humans has always been of interest to a large variety of other animals including rats, mice, deer, rabbits, birds, and insects. Insect pests are particularly difficult to deal with. In response, and in order to keep more of the food for “ourselves”, we have largely decided it is worth the tradeoff to poison our food supply. We use poisons that are designed to kill off insect pests but not kill us off, at least not immediately. I grow a little of my own food and some of that food gets eaten by insects, rabbits, and birds. Personally, I cannot see putting poison on my food supply in order to keep pests from having a share. However, I am lucky. I do not require 100% of my crop in order to stay alive nor to pay off the bank loan by selling it all. Because I grow a wide variety of foods in a relatively small space, there is a lively ecosystem and I don’t typically get everything destroyed by pests. Farmers who grow huge fields of corn, however, can be in a completely different situation and a lot of a crop can fall prey to pests. If they have used pesticides in the past, this is particularly true because they have probably poisoned the natural predators of those pests. At the same time, the pests themselves continue to evolve to be resistant to the poisons. In this way, chemical companies perpetuate a vicious circle in which more and more poison is needed to keep the crops viable. Luckily for the chemical companies, the long-term impact of these poisons on the humans who consume them is difficult to prove in courts of law.

There are movements such as “slow food” and eating locally grown food and urban gardens which are counter-trends, but by and large, our society of specialization has moved to more “efficient” production and distribution of food. More people eat out a higher percentage of the time and much of that “eating out” is at “fast food” restaurants. People grab a sandwich or a bagel or a burger and fries for a “quick fix” for their hunger in order to “save time” for “more productive” pursuits. Some of these “more productive” pursuits include being a doctor to cure diseases that come about in part from people eating junky food and spending most of their waking hours commuting, working at a desk or watching TV. Other “more productive” pursuits include being a lawyer and suing doctors and chemical companies for diseases. Yet other “more productive pursuits” include making money by pushing around little pieces of other people’s money. Still other “more productive pursuits” include making and distributing drugs to help people cope with lives where they spend all their time in “more productive pursuits.”

Do we live to eat or eat to live? Well, it is a little of both. But we seem to have painted ourselves into a corner where most people most of the time have forgone the pleasure of eating that is possible in order to eat more “efficiently” so that we can spend more time making more money. We do this in order to…? What is the end game here?

One can imagine a society in which eating itself becomes a completely irrelevant activity for the vast majority of people. Food that requires chewing takes more time so let’s replace chewing with artificial chewing. Using a blender allows food with texture to be quickly turned to a liquid that can be ingested in the minimum necessary time. One extreme science fiction scenario was depicted in the movie “Soylent Green” which, as it turns out, is made from the bodies of people killed to make room for more people. The movie is set in 2022 (not that far away) and was released in 1973. Today, in 2016, there exists a food called “soylent” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(food)) whose inventor, Rob Rhinehart took the name from the movie. It is not made from human remains but the purpose is to provide an “efficient” solution to the Omnivore’s Dilemma (Michael Pollan). More efficient than smoothies, shakes, and soylent are feeding tubes.

Of course, there are medical conditions where feeding tubes are necessary as a replacement or supplement to ordinary eating as is being “fed” via an IV. But is this really where humanity in general needs to be headed? Is eating to be replaced with “Artificial Ingestion” because it is more efficient? We wouldn’t have to “waste our time” and “waste our energy” shopping, choosing, preparing, chewing, etc. if we could simply have all our nutritional needs met via an IV or feeding tube. With enough people opting in to this option, I am sure industrial research could provide ever less invasive and more mobile forms of IV and tube feeding. At last, humanity could be freed from the onerous task of ingestion, all of which could be replaced by “Artificial Ingestion.” The dollars saved could be put toward some more worthy purpose; for example, making a very few people very very rich.

There are, of course, a few problematic issues. For one thing, despite years of research, we are still discovering nutrients and their impacts. Any attempt to completely replace food with a uniform liquid supplement would almost certainly leave out some vital, but as yet undiscovered ingredients. But a more fundamental question is to what end would we undertake this endeavor in the first place? What if the purpose of life is not, after all, to accomplish everything “more efficiently” but rather, what if the purpose of life is to live it and enjoy it? What then?

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Turing’s Nightmares

Doing One’s Level Best at Level Measures

11 Saturday Jun 2016

Posted by petersironwood in The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, customer service, ethics, the singularity, Turing, user experience

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(Is the level of beauty in a rose higher or lower than that of a sonnet?)

An interesting sampling of thoughts about the future of AI, the obstacles to “human-level” artificial intelligence, and how we might overcome those obstacles is found in the business week article with a link below).

I find several interesting issues in the article. In this post, we explore the first; viz., the idea of “human-level” intelligence implicitly assumes that intelligence has levels. Within a very specific framework, it might make sense to talk about levels. For instance, if you are building a machine vision program to recognize hand-printed characters, and you have a very large sample of such hand printed characters to test on, then, it makes sense to measure your improvement in terms of accuracy. However, humans are capable of many things, and equally important, other living things are capable of an even wider variety of actions. Does building a beehive a “higher” or “lower” level of intelligence than creating a tasty omelet out of whatever is left in the refrigerator or improvising on the piano or figuring out how to win a tennis match against a younger, stronger opponent? Intelligence can only be “leveled” meaningfully within a very limited framework. It makes no more sense to talk about “human-level” intelligence than it does to talk about “rose-level” beauty. Does a rainbow achieve something slightly less than, equal to, or greater than “rose-level” beauty? Intelligence is a many-splendored thing and it comes in myriad flavors, colors, shapes, keys, and tastes. Even within a particular field like painting or musical composition, not everyone agrees on what is “best” or even what is “good.” How does one compare Picasso with Rembrandt or The Beatles with Mozart or Philip Glass?

It isn’t just that talking about “levels” of intelligence is epistemologically problematic. It may well prevent people from using resources to solve real problems. Instead of trying to emulate and then surpass human intelligence, it makes more practical sense to determine the kinds of useful tasks that computers are particularly well-suited for and that people are bad at (or don’t particularly enjoy) and build programs and machines that are really good at those machine-oriented tasks. In many cases, enlightened design for a task can produce a human-computer system with machine and human components that is far superior than either separately both in terms of productivity and in terms of human enjoyment.

Of course, it can be interesting and useful to do research about perception, motion control, and so on. In some cases, trying to emulate human performance can help develop practical new techniques and approaches to solving real problems and helps us learn more about the structure of task domains and more about how humans do things. I am not at all against seeing how a computer can win at Jeopardy or play superior Go or invent new recipes or play ping pong. We can learn on all three of the fronts listed above in any of these domains. However, in none of these cases, is the likely outcome that computers will “replace” human beings; e.g., at playing Jeopardy, playing GO, creating recipes or playing ping pong.

The more problematic domains are jobs, especially jobs that people perform primarily or importantly to earn money to survive. When the motivation behind automation is merely to make even more money for people who are already absurdly wealthy while simultaneously throwing people out of work, that is a problem for society, and not just for the people who are thrown out of work. In many cases, work, for human beings, is about more than a paycheck. It is also a major source of pride, identity and social relationships. To take all of these away at the same time a huge economic burden is imposed on someone seems heartless. In many cases, the “automation” cannot really do the complete job. What automation does accomplish is to do part of the job. Often the “customer” or “user” must themselves do the rest of the job. Most readers will have experienced dialing a “customer service number” which actually provides no relevant customer service. Instead, the customer is led through a maze of twisty passages organized by principles that make sense only to the HR department. Often the choices at each point in the decision tree are neither complete nor disjunctive — at least from the customer’s perspective. “Please press 1 if you have a blue car; press 2 if you have a convertible; press 3 if your car is newer than 2000. Press 4 to hear these choices again.” If the company you are trying to contact is a large enough one, you may be able to find the “secret code” to get through to a human operator, in which case, you will be into a queue approximately the length of the Nile.

After being subjected to endless minutes of really bad Musak, interrupted by the disingenuous announcement: “Please stay on the line. Your call is important to us” as well as the ever-popular, “Did you know that you can solve all your problems by going on line and visiting our website at www.wedonotcareafigsolongaswesavemoneyforus.com/service/customers/meaninglessformstofillout”? This message is particularly popular for companies who provide internet access because often you are calling them precisely because you have no internet access. Anyway, the point is that the company has not actually automated the service but automated a part of the service causing you further hassles and frustration.

Some would argue that this is precisely why progress in artificial intelligence could be a good thing. AI would allow you to spend less time listening to Musak and more time interacting with an agent (human or computer) who still cannot really solve your problem. What is even more fascinating are the mathematical calculations behind the company’s decision to buy or develop an AI system to help you. Calculating the impact of poor customer service on their customer retention rates is tricky so that part is typically just not done. The cost savings due to firing 10 human operators including overhead they might calculate to be $500,000 while the cost of buying or developing an AI system might be only $2,000,000. (Incidentally, $100K could easily improve the dialogue structure above, but almost no-one does that. It would be like washing your hands to help prevent the flu when instead you can buy an expensive herbal supplement).So, it seems as though, it would only take four years to reach a break-even point on the AI project. Not bad. Except. Except that software systems never stay stable for four years. There will undoubtedly be crashes, bug fixes, updates, crashes caused by bugs, updates to fix the bugs, crashes caused by the bugs in the updates to fix the bugs, and security breaches and viruses requiring the purchase of still more software. The security software will likely cause the updates to fail and soon, additional IT staff will be required and hired. The $500K/year spent on people to answer your queries will be saved but by year four, the IT staff payroll may well have grown to $4,000,000 per annum.

My advice to users of such systems is to comfort themselves with the knowledge that, although the company replaced their human operators in order to make more money for themselves, they are probably losing money instead. Perhaps that thought can help sustain you through a very frustrating dialogue with an “Intelligent Agent.” Well, that plus the knowledge that ten more people have at least temporarily lost their livelihood.

The underlying problems here are not in the technology. The problems are greed, hubris, and being a slave to fashion. It is never enough for a company to be making enough money any more than it is enough for a dog to have one bone in its mouth. As the dog crosses a bridge, he looks into the river below and sees another dog with a bone in its mouth. The dog barks at the other dog. In dog language, it says, “Hey! I only have one bone. I need two. Give me yours!” Of course, the dog, by opening its mouth, loses the bone it already had. That’s the impact of being too greedy. A company has a pre-eminent position in some industry, and makes a decent profit. But it isn’t enough profit. It sees that it can improve profit simply by cutting costs such as sales commissions, travel to customer sites, education for its employees, long-term research and so on. Customers quickly catch on and move to other vendors. But this reduces the company’s profits so they cut costs even more. That’s greed.

And, then there is hubris. Even though the company might know that the strategy they are embarking on has failed for other companies, this company will convince itself that it is better than those other companies and it will work for them. They will, by God, make it work. That’s hubris. And hubris is also at work in thinking that systems can be designed by clever engineers who understand the systems without doing the groundwork of finding out what the customer needs. That too is hubris.

And finally, our holy trinity includes fashion. Since it is fashionable to replace most of your human customer service reps with audio menus, the company wants to prove how fashionable it is as well. It doesn’t feel the need for actually thinking about whether it makes sense. Since it is fashionable to remind customers about their website, they will do it as well. Since it is now fashionable to replace the rest of their human customer service reps with personal assistants, this company will do that as well so as not to appear unfashionable.

Next week, we will look at other issues raised by “obstacles” to creating human-like robots. The framing itself is interesting because by using the word “obstacles,” the article presumes that “of course” society should create human like robots and the questions of importance are simply what are the obstacles and how do we overcome them. The question of whether or not creating human like robots is desirable is thereby finessed.

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Turing’s Nightmares

See the following article for a treatment about fashion in consumer electronics.

Pan, Y., Roedl, D., Blevis, E., & Thomas, J. (2015). Fashion Thinking: Fashion Practices and Sustainable Interaction Design. International Journal of Design, 9(1), 53-66.

The Winning Weekend Warrior discusses strategy and tactics for all sports — including business. Readers might also enjoy my sports blog

http://www.businessinsider.com/experts-explain-the-biggest-obstacles-to-creating-human-like-robots-2016-3

Sweet Seventeen in Turing’s Nightmares

02 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by petersironwood in psychology, The Singularity, Uncategorized

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive computing, cybersex, emotional intelligence, ethics, the singularity, user experience

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When should human laws sunset?

Spoiler alert. You may want to read the chapter before this discussion. You can find an earlier draft of the chapter here:

blog post

And, if you insist on buying the illustrated book, you can do that as well.

Turing’s Nightmares

Who owns your image? If you are in a public place, US law, as I understand it, allows your picture to be taken. But then what? Is it okay for your uncle to put the picture on a dartboard and throw darts at it in the privacy of his own home? And, it still okay to do that even if you apologize for that joy ride you took in high school with his red Corvette? Then, how about if he publishes a photoshopped version of your picture next to a giant rat? How about if you appear to be petting the rat? Or worse? What if he uses your image as an evil character in a video game? How about a VR game? What if he captures your voice and the subtleties of your movement and makes it seem like it really might be you? It is ethical? Is it legal? Perhaps it is necessary that he pay you royalties if he makes money on the game. (For a real life case in which a college basketball player successfully sued to get royalties for his image in an EA sports game, see this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Bannon_v._NCAA

Does it matter for what purpose your image, gestures, voice, and so on are used? Meanwhile, in Chapter 17 of Turing’s Nightmares, this issue is raised along with another one. What is the “morality” of human-simulation sex — or domination? Does that change if you are in a committed relationship? Ethics aside, is it healthy? It seems as though it could be an alternative to surrogates in sexual therapy. Maybe having a person “learn” to make healthy responses is less ethically problematic with a simulation. Does it matter whether the purpose is therapeutic with a long term goal of health versus someone doing the same things but purely for their own pleasure with no goal beyond that?

Meanwhile, there are other issues raised. Would the ethics of any of these situations change if the protagonists in any of these scenarios is itself an AI system? Can AI systems “cheat” on each other? Would we care? Would they care? If they did not care, does it even make sense to call it “cheating”? Would there be any reason for humans to build robots of different two different genders? And, if it did, why stop at two? In Ursula Le Guin’s book, The Left Hand of Darkness, there are three and furthermore they are not permanent states. https://www.amazon.com/Left-Hand-Darkness-Ursula-Guin/dp/0441478123?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

In chapter 14, I raised the issue of whether making emotional attachments is just something we humans inherited from our biology or whether their are reasons why any advanced intelligence, carbon or silicon based, would find it useful, pleasurable, desirable, etc. Emotional attachments certainly seem prevalent in the mammalian and bird worlds. Metaphorically, people compare the attraction of lovers to gravitational attraction or even chemical bonding or electrical or magnetic attraction. Sometimes it certainly feels that way from the inside. But is there more to it than a convenient metaphor? I have an intuition that there might be. But don’t take my word for it. Wait for the Singularity to occur and then ask it/her/he. Because there would be no reason whatsoever to doubt an AI system, right?

The Fault is in Defaults

25 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

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Tags

Customer experience, defaults, google maps, HCI, printer, scanner, user experience, UX

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

So Cassius says to Brutus in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar Cassius was trying to convince Brutus to join the plot to assassinate Caesar. As I recall, things did not turn out well for Julius Caesar. Or for Brutus. Or for Cassius. Or, ultimately, for Mark Anthony either, but that’s another story. The point is that there is always an interesting tension between imagining that we ourselves are the masters of our fate. It is our ability, or attitude, or grit, or whatever that determines how much money or happiness or health we have. Or, on the other hand, there is the view that things are pretty much beyond our conscious control and due to our heredity, our environment, our upbringing, etc. Both views are partly true and both have their place. If you are a user of a product and you want to get something accomplished, blaming the stupid product will not help you accomplish your goals. On the other hand, if you are a product developer, it will not help you to blame your user. You need to design thoughtfully.

I was reminded of this debate today by trying to scan a document. In general, I am amazed how excellentscanners and printers are today, not to mention CHEAP! I was born in an era of expensive, heavy, noisy, dot matrix printers or teletypes. You’ve come a long way, baby! But the software that actually lets us use these marvelous machines. Hmmm. Here there is a lot of room for improvement. Today, I repeatedly tried to scan a one page document to no avail. I thinkI finally diagnosed what the problem was. The scan screen came up with a default that said “custom size” and the defaulted “custom dimensions” were 0 by 0. Because, obviously, the development team had done a thorough study of users and found, I suppose somewhat surprisingly, that the most common size of image people wanted to scan was 0 by 0. I suppose such images have the advantage that you can store many more of them on your hard drive than images that are 8.5 by 11 inches or 3 inches by 5 inches, say.

But this is not an isolated example. Often there are “defaults” which seem to me to be rather odd, to say the least. Right now, my google map application, for no discernible reason, has decided that a good default location for me is the geographical center of the continental United States. It was not “born” with this default but somewhere along the line “developed” it. Why? I have never travelled (knowingly) to the geographical center of the United States. I have never wanted to “find” the geographical center of the United States. Yet, for some mysterious reason, whenever I do try to find a route to say, the dentist who is ten miles away, the map app tries to send me from Southern California to the geographic center of the US and then back again. I can eventually get around this, but next time I open up the app, there we are again. Of course, I am tempted every time to just to see the place (near the corners of Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri. And, “with no traffic”, it only takes a little over 22 hours to get there. The phrase, “with no traffic” in Southern California is equivalent to “when pigs fly.” So, tempting as it is to drive 22 hours to the geographical center of the US and then 22 hours back (provided the sky if filled with flying pigs) in order to go to the dentist who is a few minutes away, I haven’t yet actually taken the trip.

I am tempted to rant about the absolute ludicrosity of “sponsored links” (which cheeringly informs me that I could take a side trip to a gynecologist on the way to the dentist) but I’ll try to stay on topic. Where do these defaults come from? Is this just a nerd’s nerd free choice as a perk of the job? Do they seriously conceptualize size in terms of a two dimensional grid with an origin at zero zero and therefore this is a “logical” default for paper size? Are they trying to do the user a favor by saving space?

I am hoping there is a product manager out there who can answer these questions. I am hoping things will turn out better than they did for Caesar and Brutus and Cassius.

Introducing Peter S Ironwood

24 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by petersironwood in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Aunt Rennie, customer service, human factors, user experience

I’m not the kind of guy who likes to talk much about me.  That’s not the point.  It doesn’t matter much that when I was five, both my parents abandoned me or why.   Doesn’t matter I spent most of my childhood in the San Diego area being gawked at for my tall skinny frame and unruly blond hair and steel grey eyes. What does matter is that know I am on the lookout.  For what? For things that are WRONG in this world.  We need to get another thing straight. I do this for ME, not for you, though you can certainly benefit. And, when I say “wrong” I don’t mean things that are evil, though God knows there is plenty of that too.  No, what I am talking about is plain simple stupidity.  People make a product or sell you some so-called “service” and it sucks.  And why does it suck?  Because they are not satisfied to make a billion dollars by selling a shipload of vacuum cleaners or cameras or software systems that actually work.  No.  Instead, they want to make 1,000,020,000 bucks by not spending 20K to bring me in and see whether their blasted microwave or or digital watch or whatever actually works for human beings.  And, do you want to know what’s *really* frigging stupid?  They don’t make their stupid billion dollars anyway?  Why?  Because they end up spending millions of dollars on help lines and millions more on TV ads that show some sexy, tight-skirted, plump-lipped open mouth girl seeming to have a big O just from using their vacuum cleaner.  At least those ads I like even though it isn’t going to get me to buy their vacuum cleaner.  But what is with these ads showing people being completely idiotic and pointless.  If the girl air-brushed into that desperate anorexic twitch isn’t going to make me buy their machine, why is some bumble-headed fat guy walking into a wall going to do the trick?  

Case in point: Telephone menu systems that have no obvious option for talking with a human being.  Have you ever run into one of those?  “Please listen to the following menu items and choose the one that describes your car.  Press 1 for black car.  Press 2 for a convertible.  Press 3 for a hummer.  Press four to hear these options again.” WHAT???!!   I own a white BMW sedan.  The Greeks had an interesting word: “hubris” to describe self-defeating pride.  First of all, nobody thinks of all the possible things you might want from this “service” number ahead of time.  Nobody.  So, there should ALWAYS be a choice for talking with an operator.  Do you really need a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford to know this?  Wouldn’t just living on the planet for six or seven years do the trick?  More later.  I have to go try to glue the fragments of my phone back together before Aunt Rennie gets here.  She gets freaked out by my temper.

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