One of the biggest problems with the phrase "artificial intelligence" is that decades of criti-hyping sci-fi has endowed it with the meaning "simulated mind". But human technology is no closer to creating that than we were in the 1950s. As AI experts like #DavidChapman tirelessly point out, humans haven't even developed a philosophy of mind accurate enough to tell us what a simulated mind would be simulating.
Most of the existing and emerging tech we refer to as AI has nothing to do with stimulating minds. It doesn't need to do that to be useful, or deeply harmful.
But both salespeople and critics of AI implicitly assume that's what it's doing, or soon will be. So they talk about its potential to replace people, instead of its potential as a way of making new tools for them. It's like talking about the hope and risk of replacing tradesmen with power tools.
@strypey
You reminded me of Rainer Mühlhoff (here on the fediverse somewhere) and his paper about "Simulative AI" vs "Cybernetic AI." There's an interview with Chomsky somewhere about how AI lost its way by giving up on modeling how our minds might work and just going with probabilities. I think Peter Norvig tried to answer Chomsky but didn't seem coherent with the Supreme Justices shaking hands example...
@bsmall2
> AI lost its way by giving up on modeling how our minds might work
That would be a bit like saying robotics lost it's way when it gave up on modelling robots on how human bodies work. I think the little round robot vacuum cleaners are far more practical than building a humanoid robot to operate a standard vacuum cleaner.
Chomsky is talking in the context of Linguistics and Marr's work on Vision. The "simulative AI" he's talking about had the aim of developing insights about how our minds work. The cybernetic AI might be the equivalent of automated vacuum cleaners that you mention. I don't think the work robots (practical applications) were supposed to provide insights for a philosophy of mind. But now I'm betting human cleaners do a better job than autoVac s. BTW Auto lawnmowers irritate me...
@strypey
Chomsky has views like David Chapman's, maybe?:
> ... revival of the scientific question from which the field of artificial intelligence originated: How does intelligence work? How does our brain give rise to our cognitive abilities, and could this ever be implemented in a machine?
@bsmall2
> Chomsky has views like David Chapman's, maybe?
Not really. Have a read of Chapman's betterwithout.ai book, which I've been heavily quoting here over the last few weeks.
Chapman encourages pulling back from the dead end of backpropagation networks ("neural network / "machine learning"), and exploring a range of approaches to AI. Some of which could be mind-like, but he doesn't see it as a prerequisite to developing useful AI systems.
@strypey
> Chomsky argued that the field's heavy use of statistical techniques to pick regularities in masses of data is unlikely to yield the explanatory insight that science ought to offer. For Chomsky, the "new AI"—focused on using statistical learning techniques to better mine and predict data— is unlikely to yield general principles about the nature of intelligent beings or about cognition.
Auto-lawmowers tire me out with the need to control a sledgehammer urge. The size must trigger some primordial instincts or something. And they seem to distract from decent, living, social solutions like in Curitiba, Brazil:
> ... a municipal shepherd and
his flock of 30 sheep trimmed the grass in its vast parks.
This solution would contribute to Resilience too. After a earthquake (any grid-disruption) we could eat sheep, or be intense gardeners with manure. @strypey
I'm interested in programming computer languages and free software and decentralized SNSs.. But I've started to think that a lot of the tech discussions miss the main point that a lot of sensible solutions are social or even "bio-political" (a recent-for-me word I'm trying to learn from Amitav Ghosh)...
My point here is that sheep or some sort of animal browsing on grass would be better for the community and environment than any sort of tech. More Manure! Less E-Waste!!
OK, so moving on from our initial discussion of robotics as a point of comparison for AI dev strategy...
@bsmall2
> a lot of sensible solutions are social or even "bio-political"
💯%. When I lived in China, our apartment complex had a whole area of shared washing lines. The electric laundry machine they supplied included a dryer, but I hardly ever used it. Because the washing lines gave me opportunities to get outside and interact with my neighbours.
@bsmall2
> I'm betting human cleaners do a better job than autoVac
Depends on the human cleaner, the autoVac, how well it's configured by the end user, and how you define "better". If we had an one at my house, the vacuuming would certainly get done much often, even if not as thoroughly.
@strypey
Vacuuming might be over-rated anyway. Look on the bright-side: maybe we need a certain amount of dust so our immune systems don't get bored and start attacking other needed parts of our bodies. Besides, sweeping is quieter, better exercise, and can be done with tools that done contribute to micro-plastic, nano-plastic, and dioxin waste. It all seems like created-want trinkets to me The WasteMakers at work...
I'm guessing you don't have asthma or hayfever : P
I'll tell you what's overrated; wall-to-wall carpet. They mostly don't have it in China. I think it's one of a number of ways they're wiser than us (squat toilets is another). When you don't have carpet, you don't have to panic about spills, and can see at a glance whether your floors need dusting or not.
@strypey I saw somewhere that carpets are great for bad microbes or bugs or something. We mostly have tatami and wood floors. My wife bought some carpets but we can hang them outside. Fascinating to see the clouds of stuff that keeps coming off them no matter how long you pound them. I forget how much simpler things can be in Japa. Even with the volcanic dust. I'm wondering if I've had less trouble with allergies since we got less hygienic with chickens and an old house. Just an unfounded guess.
I'm jealous. I now find wall-to-wall carpet gross.
> I'm wondering if I've had less trouble with allergies since we got less hygienic with chickens and an old house
It's possible, but I wouldn't extrapolate too much from that. I grew up with an organic backyard and spent plenty of time playing in the dirt. I had really bad allergies anyway. They dropped off a lot when I stopped eating dairy, and even more when I stopped eating sugar.
@bsmall2
But I don't think any of that is a good argument for dusty carpet. If there is wall-to-wall carpet, it needs to be vacuumed regulary.
For people with busy lives, or disabilities, or both, a robot vacuum can make a huge difference to whether or not that happens. For roughly the same production cost as making a manual vacuum. It's a no-brainer.
A neurodivergent couple I know with kids, and chronic pain conditions, recently got one. It's been life-changing for them.
@strypey
I was trying to be funny more than trying to justify dirty floors. But living in Japan the way I do got me to do notice that changing any one thing requires changing pretty much everything. The shoe thing at the doorway seems like a pain at times, but it's part of what lets us get by without vacuuming too much. One of the environmental speakers now runs his own company building houses for people with sensitivities to chemical and Electro-Magnetic radiation with nice, expensive wood.
@bsmall2
> The shoe thing at the doorway seems like a pain at times, but it's part of what lets us get by without vacuuming too much
OMG yes! What's up with people wearing shoes inside the house? Especially when there's wall-to-walk carpet hungrily soaking up everything on the bottom of the those shoes. No wonder Ghandi responded to that question about "western civilisation" by saying he thought it would be a great idea : P
@strypey
I get the feeling that we need a "care and repair" society more than tech, robotic solutions to the various problems. You humanoid robot pushing a lawnmower example got me imaging how that could happen, if it became a status symbol: higher than a retinue of Bullshit Jobbers. Like commercial airlines came out of military budgets for bomber aircrafts. The robot-dev budgets would start off with Pentagon excuses then find commercial outlets. Like most tech, I guess?
@strypey
People would forget that the humanoid lawn-mowing and vacuuming robots started out as research on how human balance and joints work, or prosthetics for the battlefield and it would just seem economically feasible to have a certain number robot-induced deaths every year. I've already seen a few reports (from Germany and Korea maybe) of vegetable-washing (and parts-assembly?) robots killing repair people. Arendt talked about the importance of work too, and Graeber comes to mind...
@strypey
I got paid for push-mowing lawns as a teenager. I'd end up doing storm-windows and stuff for the old ladies too. Half the benefit was social I guess, talks to think on. Was it Graeber's example that eplacing subway ticketers with automation leaves the lost, the elderly, and disabled with less access to help. With more leeway and less bullshit in the economy taking care of the floors and what-not could be nice for some. In the 70s a 1-kid nieghbor would help my 5-kid Mom w/ housework.
@strypey
Wendell Berry has an essay about seeing work as Drudgery and how it makes everything more miserable. His example was the community getting together to do boring tasks together, like harvest tobacco or shuck corn: stuff like that. Local organic farmer friends organize events to get together and hang rice out to dry, or to pound sticky rice into chewy cakes. There are chewy-rice cake machines but their carbohydrate mounds aren't as good: same pattern as "cybernetic AI" texts and photos?
@bsmall2
> Wendell Berry has an essay about seeing work as Drudgery and how it makes everything more miserable
Spoken like someone who's never had to do any. Soft-handed middle class people like us love to valourise work, particularly those of a conservative or marxist persuasion. I'm for the abolition of work, and proud of it;
@bsmall2
> I got paid for push-mowing lawns as a teenager
Me too. But robotic lawnmowers won't put teengers out of casual work. A neighbourhood has a certain amount of disposable income to put towards employing the local youth, and if they all have robotic lawnmowers, they'll pay them to do something else. This is true of the economy in general; automation has never - in itself - changed the amount of work people can get paid for. Because it's not determined by the amount of work to be done.
@bsmall2 In my cyber-socialist utopia, automation might result in women finally starting to get paid for the caring work they've been doing without pay for centuries. Before it finishes evolving into Fully Automated Luxury Communism and abolishes wage-slavery altogether.
@strypey
My robotic lawnmowing probably helped end most of my hearing.. In Japan I don't see casual work for kids, not even babysitting. It is a shame. And I'm fascinated by the meme I see about replacing grass lawns with shrubs and wildflowers and gardens. Maybe there is a pattern here somewhere. If it can be done by robots we shouldn't be doing it? design houses to be swept not vacuumed, lawns for local biodiversity not grass, texts for thinking not rote repetition.. Maybe I'm a peasant.
@strypey
Along with Arendt on labor/work the intro to John Bergers Peasant trilogy books (Pig Earth...) comes to mind. He says that the peasant paradise is work without exploitation. We will always have to work. Life and the real world will always need the human touch and judgement no matter how elegant the mechanical solutions seem in some areas.
Yes, but again, that's not because driven by the amount of work to be done, but by our desire.
> Life and the real world will always need the human touch and judgement
... in some areas more than others. Having robots harvest food, for example, frees people up to do caring work, and again, increases the chances it will finally be valued as "real" work as much as farming is.
@strypey
In Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth they showed people asking to have their land back so they could grow food. Growing, harvesting food could be part of the care we need to be doing: connecting to the land, the place. All that good stuff. Chomsky mentioned how bad it is to be losing peasant knowledge of place. It's like Rebecca Solnit said about AI being used as solutions to things that aren't problems. There are a lot of writers, AI is not needed to produce rote material...
@bsmall2
> In Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth they showed people asking to have their land back so they could grow food
Again with the romanticisation of grunt work. Sure, there are people who enjoy the work of gardening and all power to them. By all means, give them all the land they can manage.
Most people don't enjoy gardening, or we wouldn't see so much green desert in backyards and public parks. Most of it would be turned into gardens as it was in Cuba during Special Period.
@bsmall2
My point was that tech can be used to automate any work that needs doing, but that nobody wants to do. It's an alternative to living more impoverished lives because it's not done, or coercing people into doing it. Directly, as feudalist systems do, or indirectly as capitalist, state-socialist, and techno-feudalist systems do, using wage-slavery.
@strypey
Maybe we can't look at growing food as grunt work, drudgery is the work you don't happen to like? Farmers adjust their land as they go about working. It took a lot of violence to move people away from their land and "gardens." In some places the green deserts are legislated, and I'm guessing they're part of a techie view that everything works like a factory and should look like one. I'll add Kirkpatrick Sales as someone to look to along with David Noble. Michael Pollan helps me too,
@strypey
But I don't think automation, robot-servants can work without a huge industrial infrastructure? Unless you are imagining a way that local communities will be able to design and produce the machines that will fit their needs: societies where people can choose between the carpet loom and power loom... But I don't think we are matching our umps from the Now to the Better Futures visions.. That's why the conversation has fallen into some sort of debate mode? maybe?
@bsmall2
> Unless you are imagining a way that local communities will be able to design and produce the machines that will fit their needs
Some sort of... open source hardware... 3D printing... fab lab kind of approach to manufacture? Yes, this is what I'm imagining. It may not be viable. Semiconductors may be impossible to make without industrial society.
Just like reimplementing UNIX under a free license, we won't know if it can be done until we try. But check out;
@bsmall2
> Maybe we can't look at growing food as grunt work, drudgery is the work you don't happen to like?
Correct. For most people, food production work is drudgery and there are plenty of other kinds of work we'd rather be doing.
> In some places the green deserts are legislated
Maybe, but if that was the only thing maintaining them, they would have disappeared with the emergence of democracy. Most of them are on private land, eg suburban backyards.
@strypey
In some neighborhoods in the States home-buyers have to agree to keep their lawns at a certain height. I think Pollan mentions it, so I noticed it in conversations in USA's PA too. I get the impression that a lot of people are excluded from farming, driven from it because of the susbidies for automation and what-not that make large-scale concentrations possible. Robotic Automation now will just worsen bad trends. Maybe we're disagreeing because of switches between now and a future?
@bsmall2
> a lot of people are excluded from farming, driven from it because of the susbidies for automation and what-not that make large-scale concentrations possible
You're really clutching at straws now. None of this prevents people from ploughing up their lawn and growing veges. Or apartment-dwellers growing herbs and tomatoes on balconies or in window boxes. Why don't I don't I do that? Because as I've said, over and over, I don't want to.
@bsmall2
> a lot of people are excluded from farming, driven from it because of the susbidies for automation and what-not that make large-scale concentrations possible
Switching to people who do enjoy growing food, and would quite happily run a market garden, or an organic smallholding. This is where we agree.
A lot of those people are driven out of business, or kept from making a decent living or scaling up as much as they'd like to, by all the ways industrial farming is subsidised.
@bsmall2
> Robotic Automation now will just worsen bad trends
Again, this depends on whether we're talking about robots developed by neo-feudalists or neo-Luddites.
Is the design goal collecting rents with proprietary tech, from even larger monocrop farms, employing even fewer people? Or is it a more solarpunk vision, of creating small, non-proprietary robots that can assist home growers and small farmers, making heritage varieties more economic?
@strypey
Michael Pollan talks about the efforts that went into getting people away from cooking, doing something creative. It took a lot of PR attempts. Growing food at the smaller, intense scale that doesn't kill everything is creative work, right? Maybe it takes a while to notice after getting used to cities and suburbs? The people I remember in Dirt! were from rural India I think. Berry and people in Japan mention the importance of the little things that get done while people work land.
@bsmall2
> Growing food at the smaller, intense scale... creative work, right? Maybe it takes a while to notice after getting used to cities and suburbs?
I grew up with an organic garden in the backyard. My parents and a couple of my siblings grow their own veges and have fruit trees, as do many of my friends. They enjoy it and all power to them.
I got my Permaculture Design Certificate. I can grow food if I need to. There's other with I'd rather do, work that they would consider drudgery.
@bsmall2
> If it can be done by robots we shouldn't be doing it? design houses to be swept not vacuumed
Robot vacuums are just as useful for hard floors as carpeted ones. Sweeping is just as time-consuming, and just as difficult for people with disabilities, as vacuuming.
> Maybe I'm a peasant.
You're a neo-Romantic. A fan of the Earth Steward scenario, to quote David Holmgren's work on Future Scenarios. Fair enough.
@strypey
Thanks for the diagnosis: Luddite would have felt less fearsome. And conversation, it's helping me notice where my attitudes are come from. Berger got me wondering if we mix up labor and exploitation. And Amitav Ghosh keeps mentioning, along with Free Trade, Progress as one of the excuses for colonial destruction of other societies. Tech progress might not support greater diversity or decent leisure as much as we've been sold. Communities might solve things more directly, with grace.
I'm a neo-Luddite. Like the original bunch, we're fine with technological progress, but opposed to its use as a way of concentrating power in the hands of a neo-feudal class.
> Berger got me wondering if we mix up labor and exploitation
Exactly. Putting machines in service of people extends what we can do with the same amount of labour. Putting people in service of machines extends what the owners of the machines can do to those people.
@bsmall2
For a history of the Luddites and its implications for us as technologists, see Kirkpatrick Sale's excellent book 'Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age'.
@strypey
Getting things done directly with grace is an idea from Paul Goodman. And he mentions Borsodi's work on how every gain in scale is lost in packaging and transport. I can't find Langdon Winner's list of judging if tech is democratic(?) or not. It might help me think about why I can't see robot vacuums empowering communities. A 99 year old guy walks by the house every day. A 70 year old woman does housework from him a few days a week. I chat with her at Community events...
@strypey
I wouldn't know that the guy will be a 100 next month if she didn't visit him to help with housework a few times a week. She tells me he can cook our SIlky eggs by himself too. The people that do the care work should be paid more.. but I don't think robots will help with any of this, but just be an excuse to cut off more relationships. Arundhati Roy's basic attitude:
> .. But people could be looked after now, as we know there’s enough surplus.. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/17/arundhati-roy-interview-you-ask-the-questions-the-point-of-the-writer-is-to-be-unpopular
@bsmall2
> ... But people could be looked after now, as we know there’s enough surplus..
Roy is right. The robot vacuum could be used to replace the woman providing care and company to that old man. Or to extend what she can do for him in the time she spends there (they still need emptying). Which it is, depends on whether the economy producing and supplying the robot vacuum is controlled by techno-feudalists, or by neo-Luddites.
At present it's the former. That's the problem, not the robots.
@strypey
My guess is that robotic lawnmowers and the involved infrastructure they'd require will eat up more of the neighborhood's income/wealth: it'll go to pros not kids. A lot of tech is used, if not designed for, sucking the wealth out communities to enrich whoever controls the longer supply and development lines, like why dev moved from watermills, to coal-fired steam engines, then to oil.
@bsmall2
> My guess is that robotic lawnmowers and the involved infrastructure they'd require will eat up more of the neighborhood's income/wealth
You keep sneaking in an implicit assumption that newer tech uses more resources. My guess is that a robot lawnmower will use massively less resources than a petrol-powered manual one, and about the same as resources to make and fuel as an electrically-powered manual one.
@bsmall2
> I get the feeling that we need a "care and repair" society more than tech, robotic solutions
This is a false dichotomy. Unless we intend to endorse a Great Leap Backwards to pre-Enlightenment levels of tech, there's absolutely no reason we can't have both. As I said, we can make a robotic vacuum for roughly the same production cost as making a manual vacuum. So why insist on everyone having manual ones? It seem a bit like #WaldenPonding to me;
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