AI History and Metaphors
AI History and Metaphors
In the wake of ChatGPT3 and since I am working with “technology comprehensions”, I find this site in many ways groundbreaking.
Blueprints for intelligence and how language matters when we identify artificial intelligence: https://philippschmitt.com/index
At the site you find “Introduction to blueprints for intelligence” (https://philippschmitt.com/blueprints-for-intelligence/introduction) by Philipp Schmitt (https://philippschmitt.com/about).
It is extremely interesting to visually see how imaginaries of artificial intelligence have evolved over time.
I believe this site can inspire critical pedagogical teaching activities related to AI; and critical as well as relational and complex approaches to technology comprehension.
In my opinion (and recent educational debates and responses to ChatGPT3 in Denmark illustrate this), critical pedagogical teaching activities looking into technology history, as well as looking into technologies-as-practices are seriously lacking (if you read this and disagree please enlighten me with your great examples 😄).
There is no existing knowledge that AI generally will make us e.g. more creative or loose our jobs
Together with this, there is also a really interesting article “Between metaphor and meaning: AI and being human” by Maya Indira Ganesh (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ecpe/faculty/maya-indira-ganesh/ ) on how language and culture matters when we identify artificial intelligence. In the following I will refer to this article.
I find this sentence central: ”As we encounter AI, we might serve ourselves better by acknowledging how its metaphors both shape and limit how we make meaning of our shared yet also separate, lived, material human realities.”
Ganesh tells us to be alert towards the ways metaphors about AI also become part of creating “what the world is and how we act in it”. This she calls “the performative force of AI imaginaries”.
Here are some examples from her article (metaphors that she together with research colleagues have found when looking into 13 countries):
“A rising sea”, “A train that you cannot miss”, “A hammer”, “A silver bullet”, “A police officer”, “A gorilla”, “A superhuman”, “algorithmic optimization”, “extreme spreadsheet”, “automated capital”, “automated compliance”, ”software”, “autopoietic system”, “infinite game”.
According to the author, when it comes to business and development, metaphors like "golden tool” and “data is the new oil” are spread - even in countries like Africa when in fact “human data is extracted with little attention to its costs for marginalized people“.
“Bureaucrats and policymakers in India, Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa hope to capitalize on data to "reset the future" and "catch up" (with the West) with data as the fuel for AI ….. AI is a train that you "cannot miss." These metaphors suggest a clock or meter of progress that circumvents the past and the present to miraculously catapult these economies into the future.
AI will never redound to Africans' benefits so long as African governments continue to function as inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies that stymie actual innovation and local development [11]. So, AI development cannot be separated from research and practice that is continuous with digital access, freedom of expression, democracy, and social and political equity.”
Just like we have seen with digitalization more broadly, Maya Indira Ganesh explicits that AI may become “an economic opportunity in one part of the world, it presents anxieties elsewhere”.
What I see as central is, that there is no existing knowledge that AI generally will make us e.g. more creative or loose our jobs.
Metaphors are many, and they have effects, Maya Indira Ganesh tells us. For instance, in Japan, where they want to resist immigration, robots have become a supplement for cleaning and the care workforce.
The interesting question is therefore NOT, according to Maya Indira Ganesh, whether e.g. ChatGPT3 is artificial intelligence! She provides the example, that “Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology says it will never use the words AI or machine learning because they are misleading and obfuscating marketing-speak”.
“The study of metaphors should give us pause to consider how the uncertainty and not-knowing about the human condition that AI provokes are being filled in.”
The AI metaphors we use “reinforces specific aspects of being human”, so Maya Indira Ganesh REMINDS US:
“Human relations with other humans, and nonhumans like animals, the planet, and machines, are largely incomputable, not because they are mysterious, but because they are complex, affective, fragmentary, and difficult to frame as computationally legible formulations.“
AND THEREFORE THE REAL QUESTION is what DOES AI DO?
According to Maya Indira Ganesh it: “…is not about the emergence of consciousness in artificial intelligence. The question is the emergence of experience, meaning, and reality in and as the material world… that meaning is the result of experience, at all levels of being.”
I hope you find inspiration too in reading these lines, and perhaps even feel inspired to do some of your own diving into the online resources I have hinted at 😃