News - Bad and Good

The morning paper contains news of a tragic accident in Manitoba killing several seniors and wounding others. Their small community is grieving and we must join them. Hidden behind the main outline, though is another tragedy. The seniors were travelling two hundred kilometers to visit a casino - ‘for fun’.

As a senior myself, I would never suggest that seniors don’t deserve travel or pleasure. My guess is that the casino in question probably pays for the cost of the bus as they do in Ontario to lure seniors to casinos here. Sitting around a group some years ago, all of us confessed we had never been to a Casino and decided as a group to go one summer afternoon. We had agreed that our spending limit was $30 each. Among the six of us, we paid $180. One of us lucked out by winning $75. She noted that this gave a rush of pleasure, which made her feel guilty - but it didn’t occur to her to share the proceeds with the rest of us. Most of us were losers. We could, in fact, afford to lose the money on one afternoon of experiment. But what we learned was what a joyless place it was - subdued lighting, no sense of time or place, and too many vacant senior faces with no sense of joy or fun whatsoever - and less money than they came with, which most of them, unlike us, could ill afford. They had been brought in by a bus that probably cost the Casino about $300. Significantly the date was one day after old age pension cheques arrrived. To question it takes less than an ounce of moral courage to question this as a system on my part - but I do and more today than usual.

Better news came in a story about seven-year-olds learning about climate change in a school in New Jersey. The teacher had told the kids about penguins in Antarctica ; the warming of their environment meant that the penguins had to charge accordingly. What might they do?

Seven-year-olds are nothing if not inventive. Solutions ranged from penguins migrating to the US in winter to their building igloos. One thought she could keep a few in her fridge. It is the wife of the state governor who encouraged the school system to have children start to think seriously about the climate emergency, because they are the ones who will have to deal with it. Unlike others, who want to protect children from realities, this program encourages them to enter it now - not to scare them, but to become aware and to consider local solutions. While there were naturally dissenters, 70% voter in favour and the subject penetrates several curricular areas.

They are learning close to home:

“Outside, in a corner of the playground, there’s a fenced-in butterfly garden, a compost bin, and a soil bed where kids have tested which type of fertilizer, a chemical commercial variety or a natural blend, best helped plants (the natural one came out ahead).”

They are starting local and exploring a much larger framework. Would that we all did the same.

Misinformation

Misinformation

I enjoyed the article in this week’s Saturday Globe & Mail in which the author, a journalist, asked GPT-4 to write his biography in 1,500 words which it did in a few seconds. If I didn’t know anything about him I would think it was quite impressive and credible. But he has annotated it, and these are the things it got wrong from the beginning:

• Place and date of birth – both wrong.

• Beginning of writing career – wrong year.

• University from which he graduated – wrong one – there were actually two correct ones replacing the wrong one.

• Graduating degree: wrong one.

That was just the first paragraph.  The second went better.  It was correct in naming him as a journalist, but starting with his first job at a publication that went out of business 11 years before his writing career began. Then we are told he was offered a job at a rival paper – which he was never offered and would never accepted, he says.

Paragraph three states he is the author of 20 books. He wished that were true. The description of his first book actually describes another one written by someone else in 1939. He wishes he had written one on the Canadian wilderness – but never did. He notes that by now the bot is struggling to find 1500 words with fill like “The book was a critical success and helped establish  . . . . as a rising star in the world of Canadian literature”. – worthy of the kind of fill any keen grade nine student might produce.

In further paragraphs, GPT-4 expands his output to several books on noted Canadians - substituting books for a review and an article and it got a year wrong again. It went on to describe his teaching career at two universities – he never taught at either of them - and only one year as a lecturer at another one. But it ended with another nice filler platitude. “His courses were popular with his students and many went on to have successful careers as writers.” None of them were named.

Honours - and the lack of them, came next – a Governor General’s medal for writing – but the reality was a nomination for one book and the topic in its description was wrong. Awards supposedly for column writing also do not exist. Alas, he is also waiting for the Order of Canada mentioned in the GPT- Biography.  To make it worse, he is reported to have died in 2016 – though he is still here to write the article. With a bit more commendation the bio finally reaches its 1500 words – “as his legacy as one of Canada’s most beloved authors and journalists lives on.” He does say amen to that.

We don’t need to fear GPT-4 for accuracy any time soon. But if I had read the bio without the annotations, I could well have believed at least some of it. That’s the danger. In the meantime, I’ll request my own 1500 word biography and see what happens. I just hope I am still alive.

Thinking About Data

Recently a friend noted that he wanted to talk soon about his use of Chat GPT for better writing and I’ll be interested to see the results = without being tempted to try it out for reasons that follow..  My first encounter with artificial intelligence was through Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable, Understanding the 12 technological Forces that will Shape our Future,  which I read soon after its publication in 2016. AI came in as number two in a chapter called Cognifying – after a chapter called Becoming – dealing with the inevitablity of always having to upgrade our devices.

I’ve just read a bit of the book again.  I enjoy telling young persons advising me on the latest technology that I first turned on a desktop in 1983, was on CompuServe by 1989,  added the web the next year, and had my own website in 1995 – a one pager with no images. Kelly was a couple of decades ahead of me, but I relate well to his sense of excitement of where we have been – and take seriously his notions of where we might be going.  Like Brian Arthur, he notes that technology frames us after we adapt it for our own purposes and it creates the cultural era.  I look forward to re-reading the whole book again.

Kelly points out that AI technology was already here as a force when he wrote the book – because of the networks of information already in existence. He said, “It will be hard to tell where its thoughts begin and ours end.” He also pointed out how its utter ubiquity hid it from us even then. AI is the ultimate disrupter and suddenly the ability to deal with quantities of data is in our hands. I can remember when a mainframe was the size of a dining room and now I have instant data available on my phone. As Kelly points out, it was the magic of combining computer/phone/internet that has happened during less than half my lifetime.

When the latest New Yorker came through the door, I tried not to add it to the pile of others immediately and turned to the article by Jill Lepore, their excellent staff writer who tackles many current topics. Lepore received her Ph.D. in American studies from Yale in 1995 and is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University.  The article’s title is Data Driven and it resonates particularly as I serve as a volunteer secretary for an institution which is reviewing its immediate past and deciding where it wants to go. Online Zooms and surveys have become part the scene and its steering group has been given quantities of data to sort through.  I don’t have to read it, but like the other volunteers, I browse through. From workers recovering from the pandemic, there are many responses of “poor me”. There is also dissatisfaction with reduced revenue and attendance, a typical desire for more from the young and a general sense of foreboding.  It’s hard to find the desired glimmers of hope – and one solution has been to turn the data over to a  bot to sort it out.

Not precisely a bot – it has been turned over to an outside consultant with a bot that attempts to put single words in larger contexts. “Day” is a simple word. “Good day” and “Bad day” mean something different. I was pleased to see the observation that the coding of the data into larger sets was something that she had done totally subjectively. Putting the data through this process was helpful even when the sample of the total population she was drawing from was very small – about 2.4%. But we are encouraged to listen to the data to predict the future. even as we really know we can’t.

Lepore starts her article with an entertaining fantasy of a millionaire trying to develop a new plan for universal knowledge. He recruits 500 college grads to read three hundred books a year for five years. Instead of being paid for their efforts, when they turn up to be paid, their brains are removed and wired up to a radio and a typewriter. Lapore then turns to the latest gismo for universal knowledge, Chat GPT and asks it to write an essay on toadstools. It comes out right away. She liked what she saw, but also imagined a missing shadow side of the instruction to eat them – some toadstools are poisonous.

She  goes on to imagine an old fashioned small steel case, like the one in my closet still holding dcoument-filled file folders and also serving as the base for an all-in-one printer that is used less and less. Her cabinet has four drawers labelled “Mysteries”, “Facts” “Numbers” and “Data”. The labels might suggest the contents are similar but each follows a different logic. She describes them:

• Mysteries are things that only God knows – top drawer because it is closest to heaven. The point of collecting them is the search for salvation and the discipline to study them is theology.

• One collects Facts to find the truth through discernment and in contrast to the previous drawer. they are associated with secularization and liberalism; the disciplines are law, the humanities, and the natural sciences.

• Numbers are associated with the gathering of statistics by measurement, These are associated with administration; their disciplines are the social sciences.

• Feeding Data into computers leads to the discovery of patterns to make predictions. Data is associated with late capitalism, authoritarianism, techno- utopianism – and the discipline known as data science.

All of these, LePore points out, are good ways of knowing – and the best thing to do in any situation is to open all four drawers. But we are now in an era where we tend to want to open only the bottom one. In citing a recent book, How Data Happened, A History from Reason to the Age of Algorithms, by Chris Wiggins and Natthew L. Jones, she notes how statistics, numbers and data have been used to support previous biases in fields like intelligence, race, crime and eugenics. Some of us are old enough to remember sets of Books of Knowledge and Encyclopedia – often bought by parents on the installment plan in the hopes that their offspring would thrive.  Now the alleged cryptologist Sam Bankman-Fried is quoted as having famously said, “I would never read a book”.

Technocrats – chiefly engineers – promised a new world following the depression, though it fell out of favour in the 40’s. As data storage became more available and information became digitized,  data science has started to be perceived as the only tool in the storage case.

But should it be? Tatum Hunter notes three things that everyone is getting wrong in an article yesterday in the Washington Post. One thousand people have asked AI experiments like these large language models to slow down – though Kevin Kelly would probably wish them good luck. There may be other necessary ways to deal with them.

First and most important, we should not project human qualities on AI.  When my Iphone really basic AI prompts me to change a word as a write, I’m tempted to say, “Don’t be stupid, that isn’t what I mean” – as though I am talking to another human being.  Instead I should be saying, “This platform’s algorithm is not sound in the information it has searched for.” I’m not ever likely to look to AI for emotional support. Sadly the most vulnerable are those that receive their information from questionable real people and they are the ones likely to put their faith in words drawn from equally questionable sources by a machine.

Second, what is coming down the pipe is not one technology but a whole sequence of them with different building blocks. Who the builder is and what the purpose is will vary.  Different AI platforms will have different values, rules and priorities. Some specialized ones may indeed have their positive uses. Some will start well with high values and become commercially greedy.  Hello Facebook, Hello Google.  We are not very good right now at holding the creators of algorithms to account for all those advertisements on the social media platforms we use every day. That might not be a bad place to start educating ourselves.

Third – and following from this – always be skeptical.  As I learn today of the indictment of a former US president. I can only imagine what a chatbot might come up with as an answer to a question about it. The danger that I see immediately in an amalgamation of information, neatly returned in good English and paragraphs is to trust its accuracy when it looks so professional. I use Google all the time to research a topic, but at least I can see the source it is drawing from, and I can make judgments about the source. I won’t say that I am without bias, but at least I know what the source is. Tatum Hunter at the end of her article rather optimistically states these sources as reliable ones – newspapers, government and university websites, academic journals. Sometimes, yes. What she might add in all these cases is to look for a diversity of views within the sources themselves and clear attribution.  As I write, you can at least see mine.

Gatherings

Gatherings

Historians may one day examine many institutions under the categories of pre-pandemic and post pandemic. Quick development of vaccines created a very different trajectory from earlier plagues.  Many of us, pre-pandemic might have encountered webinars in the business world, or tried new learning on Coursera.  Most of us never heard of live-streaming before the pandemic hit – and suddenly education, performing arts and churches entered a new world.

The kind of streaming we experienced was described technically as OTT – “over the top” was not a comment on the quality of the experience, but instead the ability to receive it from any device with internet access. Suddenly the selection and choices were huge.  We paid less attention to the reality that the performance might be hampered by receiving it via a digital medium.

There were all kinds of advantages initially. Social distancing cannot be accomplished in rows of close seating. We could join in from anywhere and visit places we had not frequented in years. We could reach out to people who were ill or house-bound. Rather than leaving home and having to drive or take public transit with several transfers, we could join in an instant with the pressing of a key or button. If we didn’t want to participate at the assigned time, we could even choose one of our own to go to church or attend a concert. Convenience rules

But what was perceived as a short term solution has become a permanent one for many. At the moment we perceive a need to operate in two worlds even though the online one is shrinking considerably while the in-person one may not be growing. Those eager to help us enhance our life streaming presence are now educating us in “online marketing” for church and concert lands. People like to worship or listen to music alone, they tell us. “Going” is a hassle, when it’s so much more comfortable to stay put. More and more people prefer to “watch” online. You can even do it from the coffee shop or at brunch - and on your mobile phone. Video is replacing text anyway – even on FaceBook.

But what about the disadvantages? Is the kind of community experienced when sitting among others a different one?  Is a physical sense of place – school, concert hall, place of worship - important to a community as a living entity rather than a shuttered place - or one with many unfilled speaces? Is moving our bodies out of doors important to maintain our physical, emotional and spiritual health? Are fixed rituals in place and time necessary to experience life fully? Is “watching” the best way to maintain a civil society? What will be the outcome? Will more of us end up sick and shut-in?

Social - Really?

Social – Really?

Remember when you were a little kid when you were daydreaming, and a voice broke through and ordered, “Pay Attention.”  Remember when we were asked to “Stand at Attention”. In those days we would have interpreted such commands as an order to focus.  Now attention is a feature of the economy. 

• When I was musing on the role of social media during the pandemic and why a study in process has more or less ignored it thus far, the first thing to do was to have a look at my own Facebook use.  Since too much scrolling down is wasting time, I limited myself to the first ten entries which were as follows: ·      

• Photos from a son on holiday from his university teaching post in Hong Kong in Vietnam. Well worth seeing.

• Suggested: People I may know.  I don’t.

• Suggested: post from Julia’s Violin Academy. Not an instrument I play.

•  Suggested: An advertisement for a condo coming several miles north of where I live. I am not in the market for a move or purchase.

• Pictures from a woman I know of herself and her sisters from several years back.

• A cartoon posted by someone I know – somewhat funny

• More pictures from the Vietnam visit

• A somewhat sentimental piece from a family member about people he has known.

• Suggested: A grocery store ad

• Suggested: post of famous pianists’ hands

Perhaps 20% of this was worth my attention and time. Half were ads, none of which were appropriate.

Remember when we thought social media was wonderful and would unite us all in peace and “person-hood”.  First we grabbed accounts as individuals and shared our dog, cat and children in photos. After our organizations had websites, we had to add links to social media in the hope that our world would expand far and wide.  We wonder if we should boost our posts to get better readership – instead of thinking of how were are sending even more money to Meta.  But is all our attention to our own bubbles blinding us to how social media has turned us as individuals and organizations into commodities? Do we just think we are promoting our personal or organizational brands while Meta laughs all the way to the bank?

The purpose of social media was never to bring us together in world peace – but to make money. Most it is owned by just one company – Meta – while a few others compete with it. The advantage over conventional advertising is the ability to direct targeted ads to specific audiences. The purpose is not to sell advertisements to us – but to sell us to advertisers.

When we don’t like all those ads they send us, we can pay to omit them or buy premium versions– thereby replacing the revenue lost from advertisers. Then they suggest boosting our organizational posts to wider audiences. Often this will include a headline only – since it is already known that 80% of headlines are the only thing read to get the brand  imprinted in our brains. All the while, these companies are engaging in what is termed “surveillance capitalism” – telling the advertisers how many people are looking at their messages. Twitter apparently makes 13% of its income this way by selling the infomation back. Meanwhile the company tries to get the mix of ads and real messages just right in a Goldilocks arrangement; It looks as though from my own above history that I am a real sucker for ads, since mine start right away after the first message.

Studies have already suggested that social media is as addictive as many drugs.  Younger inexperienced users are far more vulnerable that older ones to bullying and many of us have never had to endure hate messages. But we might ask why we turn to social media?  Are we anxious? Lonely? Or just Bored? Do we need affirmation from others? A need to show off? People I know appear to demonstrate all these characteristics now and then. That’s their choice. But before I log in and scroll down, do I ask myself why I am there instead of somewhere better?