Artificial intelligence as partner

Some notes on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, tech­nol­o­gy as part­ner and relat­ed user inter­face design chal­lenges. Most­ly notes to self, not sure I am adding much to the debate. Just sum­maris­ing what I think is impor­tant to think about more. Warn­ing: Dense with links.

Matt Jones writes about how arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence does not have to be a slave, but can also be partner.

I’m per­son­al­ly much more inter­est­ed in machine intel­li­gence as human aug­men­ta­tion rather than the oft-hyped AI assis­tant as a sep­a­rate embodiment.

I would add a third pos­si­bil­i­ty, which is AI as mas­ter. A com­mon fear we humans have and one I think only grow­ing as things like Alpha­Go and new Boston Dynam­ics robots keep happening.

I have had a tweet pinned to my time­line for a while now, which is a quote from Play Mat­ters.

tech­no­logy is not a ser­vant or a mas­ter but a source of expres­sion, a way of being” 

So this idea actu­al­ly does not just apply to AI but to tech in gen­er­al. Of course, as tech gets smarter and more inde­pen­dent from humans, the idea of a ‘third way’ only grows in importance. 

More tweet­ing. A while back, short­ly after AlphaGo’s vic­to­ry, James tweet­ed:

On the one hand, we must insist, as Kas­parov did, on Advanced Go, and then Advanced Every­thing Else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess

Advanced Chess is a clear exam­ple of humans and AI part­ner­ing. And it is also an exam­ple of tech­nol­o­gy as a source of expres­sion and a way of being.

Also, in a WIRED arti­cle on Alpha­Go, some­one who had played the AI repeat­ed­ly says his game has improved tremendously. 

So that is the promise: Arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent sys­tems which work togeth­er with humans for mutu­al benefit. 

Now of course these AIs don’t just arrive into the world ful­ly formed. They are cre­at­ed by humans with par­tic­u­lar goals in mind. So there is a design com­po­nent there. We can design them to be part­ners but we can also design them to be mas­ters or slaves.

As an aside: Maybe AIs that make use of deep learn­ing are par­tic­u­lar­ly well suit­ed to this part­ner mod­el? I do not know enough about it to say for sure. But I was struck by this piece on why Google ditched Boston Dynam­ics. There appar­ent­ly is a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between holis­tic and reduc­tion­ist approach­es, deep learn­ing being holis­tic. I imag­ine reduc­tion­ist AI might be more depen­dent on humans. But this is just wild spec­u­la­tion. I don’t know if there is any­thing there.

This insis­tence of James on “advanced every­thing else” is a world view. A pol­i­tics. To allow our­selves to be increas­ing­ly entan­gled with these sys­tems, to not be afraid of them. Because if we are afraid, we either want to sub­ju­gate them or they will sub­ju­gate us. It is also about not obscur­ing the sys­tems we are part of. This is a sen­ti­ment also expressed by James in the same series of tweets I quot­ed from earlier:

These emer­gences are also the best mod­el we have ever built for describ­ing the true state of the world as it always already exists.

And there is over­lap here with ideas expressed by Kevin in ‘Design as Par­tic­i­pa­tion’:

[W]e are no longer just using com­put­ers. We are using com­put­ers to use the world. The obscured and com­plex code and engi­neer­ing now engages with peo­ple, resources, civics, com­mu­ni­ties and ecosys­tems. Should design­ers con­tin­ue to priv­i­lege users above all oth­ers in the sys­tem? What would it mean to design for par­tic­i­pants instead? For all the participants?

AI part­ners might help us to bet­ter see the sys­tems the world is made up of and engage with them more deeply. This hope is expressed by Matt Webb, too:

with the re-emer­gence of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (only this time with a bud­dy-style user inter­face that actu­al­ly works), this ques­tion of “doing some­thing for me” vs “allow­ing me to do even more” is going to get even more pro­nounced. Both are effec­tive, but the first sucks… or at least, it sucks accord­ing to my own per­son­al pol­i­tics, because I regard indi­vid­ual alien­ation from soci­ety and com­plex sys­tems as one of the huge threats in the 21st century.

I am remind­ed of the mixed-ini­tia­tive sys­tems being researched in the area of pro­ce­dur­al con­tent gen­er­a­tion for games. I wrote about these a while back on the Hub­bub blog. Such sys­tems are part­ners of design­ers. They give some­thing like super pow­ers. Now imag­ine such pow­ers applied to oth­er prob­lems. Quite exciting.

Actu­al­ly, in the afore­men­tioned arti­cle I dis­tin­guish between tools for mak­ing things and tools for inspect­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty spaces. In the first case design­ers manip­u­late more abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the intend­ed out­come and the sys­tem gen­er­ates the actu­al out­put. In the sec­ond case the sys­tem visu­alis­es the range of pos­si­ble out­comes giv­en a par­tic­u­lar con­fig­u­ra­tion of the abstract rep­re­sen­ta­tion. These two are best paired. 

From a design per­spec­tive, a lot remains to be fig­ured out. If I look at those mixed-ini­tia­tive tools I am struck by how poor­ly they com­mu­ni­cate what the AI is doing and what its capa­bil­i­ties are. There is a huge user inter­face design chal­lenge there. 

For stuff focused on get­ting infor­ma­tion, a con­ver­sa­tion­al UI seems to be the cur­rent local opti­mum for work­ing with an AI. But for tools for cre­ativ­i­ty, to use the two-way split pro­posed by Vic­tor, dif­fer­ent UIs will be required.

What shape will they take? What visu­al lan­guage do we need to express the par­tic­u­lar prop­er­ties of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence? What approach­es can we take in addi­tion to per­son­i­fy­ing AI as bots or char­ac­ters? I don’t know and I can hard­ly think of any good exam­ples that point towards promis­ing approach­es. Lots to be done.

Learning about emergence from games

A game of Go

I’m still try­ing to get a grip on why I think games are such a good ref­er­ence point for IAs and IxDs. I’ll try to take anoth­er stab at it in this post. Pre­vi­ous­ly I wrote about how games might be a good way to ‘sell’ algo­rith­mic archi­tec­tures to your client. Even if you’re not active­ly push­ing your clients to adopt ideas such as on-the-fly cre­ation of site nav­i­ga­tion, soon­er or lat­er I’m con­vinced you’ll find your­self con­front­ed with a project where you’re not asked to devel­op a defin­i­tive infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture. Instead you’ll be charged with the task to come up with mech­a­nisms to gen­er­ate these pro­ce­du­ral­ly. When this is this case, you’re tru­ly fac­ing a sec­ond-order design prob­lem. How can games help here? 

One of the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of games are their com­plex­i­ty. A few years ago Ben Cer­ve­ny gave a bril­liant talk on play (MP3) at Reboot 7.0 and men­tioned this specif­i­cal­ly — that much of the plea­sure derived from game-play is the result of the play­er com­ing to terms with com­plex pat­terns. This com­plex­i­ty is some­thing dif­fer­ent from pure ran­dom­ness and most cer­tain­ly dif­fer­ent from a ‘mere’ state machine. In oth­er words, games show emergence.

There are many exam­ples of emer­gent sys­tems. The Game of Life springs to mind. This sys­tem isn’t real­ly a game but shows a remark­able rich­ness in pat­terns, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that it is based on a set of decep­tive­ly sim­ple rules (which appar­ent­ly took its cre­ator, John Con­way, over 2 years to per­fect!) The thing is though, The Game of Life is not interactive. 

A won­der­ful exam­ple of a com­plex emer­gent sys­tem that is inter­ac­tive is the real game Go. It has a set of very sim­ple rules, but play­ing it well takes a huge amount of prac­tice. The joy of play­ing Go for me (an absolute begin­ner) is large­ly due to dis­cov­er­ing the many dif­fer­ent per­mu­ta­tions play can go through. 

So get­ting back to my ear­li­er remark: If you’re con­vinced you’ll need to get a bet­ter han­dle on solv­ing the sec­ond-order design prob­lems pre­sent­ed by the design of com­plex emer­gent sys­tems, games are an excel­lent place to start learn­ing. They are emer­gent first and inter­ac­tive sec­ond, the per­fect twin to the web envi­ron­ments we’ll be shap­ing in the future.