As I make my way through my PhD, in the compact, corn-locked town of Champaign-Urbana, I find myself running into as many questions of ethics and aesthetics as I do questions of mathematics and computational modelling. My physics degree prepared me well for the latter, and classes such as the one you're in now prepared me well for the former. As well as can be expected.
I include this caveat because many of the questions I face, as a physicist-turned-computer-scientist-turned-roboticist, cannot be tackled with the same calm precision as mathematics. Every day, I am assaulted with media, friends and family that are questioning automation, artificial intelligence, backflipping robots.
Every day, something - the above backflipping robot was presented by Boston Dynamics without context of why such a thing was made nor any contextualization of the methods used and their limitations, at the same time the UN began meetings to make a plan to start talking about possibly making a statement about autonomous weapons. Never mind who is paying for those robots in the first place.
Every day, something - classifiers that can recognize people after gender transition, at the same time that governments are rounding up LGBT people and putting them in camps. It is impossible to not have your location tracked by your smartphone.
Every day, something - Elon Musk is painfully lonely, but responds to sexual harassment cases by emailing the entire company and saying that "We have had a few cases at Tesla where someone in a less represented group was actually given a job or promoted over more qualified highly represented candidates and then decided to sue Tesla for millions of dollars because they felt they weren’t promoted enough. That is obviously not cool." And yet, despite this strong claim about relative qualifications, Tesla does not seem to evaluate their own interviewing processes - a glance through Glassdoor shows that they ask the same old tired "how many ping pong balls would fit in a 747" questions.
But being struck dumb by this dystopian parade helps no one. Instead, I work, one termite among billions, to build the community I want to inherit the earth. I teach kind people how to use computers. I question my coworkers about the tools they are making. I live in a house with fourteen people and we feed each other, keep our house clean, invite strangers to Thanksgiving with us. I find other people in academia who agree that "to appreciate the vast capacity of our bodies (and minds!) and to contextualize technology’s role in them, engineers need to value qualitative methods and we all need to dance more." I make art, move my body, water my plants, remember that the fate of the human race and universe cannot hinge on one person. Remember all those thousands of scientists at Los Alamos, not just Oppenheimer. I research topics which are are beautiful, or useful - rarely are they both. Beauty often is called out as subjective, but rarely is usefulness, for some reason. I ask myself, if I could direct all human endeavors, what would be the most useful work to do? And often, the answer is to create beauty.
This was a wonderful post! Your observation that beauty is often considered subjective while usefulness is not was especially insightful. It made me think about what judgements are passed on a technology in what I thought of as the in-between period: its nascent days, before its usefulness is proved. Like backflipping robots.
ReplyDeleteThese grey areas, where we pursue scientific advancement that had not yet trickled down to day-to-day usefulness are what spawn the messiest types of questions. And it is all too easy to write off the messines; to be “struck dumb”, as you put it. But engagement is important. It is not enough to just say you don’t like AI, or robots, or facial recognition. Instead we must flounder in the messiness of why we don’t like these things, sometimes even when the downsides seem obvious (neural networks that can identify sexual orientation are what immediately spring to my mind: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/science/stanford-sexual-orientation-study.html?_r=0). We may never be able to understand a problem in its entirety, let alone find a solution, but when we seek to articulate our uncomfortability we create our own sort of beauty.
"Being struck dumb by this dystopian parade helps no one," is a statement that I resonate with. In the past, there were times when I was overwhelmed with pessimism about the state of the world. On the individual level, each of us could possibly have a brain aneurism at any moment. Instant death for no reason. On a global level, nuclear warfare could wipe out all life on the planet with the turn of a key and few codes; a single football in the hands of a blind quarter back who, like Jerry Smith, takes the stance that, "It's possible to disagree in science, Morty." Pessimism I learned though, helps nothing. It does nothing to contribute to change, other than point out all the problem's. With a pessimistic view, why bother to change it, its all fucked anyway...
ReplyDeleteRealism on the other hand, sees the problems, and with an optimistic attitude seeks to find some sort of solution. Here's the kick though, "with an optimistic attitude," because why bother looking for a solution if your pessimistic about the outcome. This sentiment really sticks out to me in your piece Alli, as you say, its about the little things. The little beautiful and useful victories. No one person can change the earth. But every individual plays a part in creating the future conditions of our existence on this planet, one insignificant act at a time.
Alli, thank you so much for this post. I always thought my reasons for becoming an engineer were rather selfish -- I wanted a job that paid well, would provide me with stability, and would hopefully keep me intellectually stimulated. But as I decide in the next few months what I want to do with the rest of my life, grad school or a job, I hope that I find something that is both beautiful and useful. I think there is beauty in conducting good science; that dedicating your blood, sweat, and tears to the pursuit of something which improves our understanding of the world and will hopefully make it a better place. There is also sometimes beauty in usefulness. I have always been a big fan of "sleekness"-- solutions which are so simple and clean that it seems shocking that no one else has ever thought of them before. Hopefully I will do something which is both beautiful and useful, without having to compromise on either.
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