Tuesday 5 February 2019

Floridi and Williamson on AI; Bohm and Simondon on Thought

There's a very interesting interview here https://conditiohumana.io/floridi-interview/?utm_campaign=direct with Luciano Floridi about AI. Floridi's seminal work on the nature of information, although rather too cognitivist for my liking, is something that one cannot think without today. His contribution to the ethics of information, which sees information ethics as a variety of environmental ethics, is highly important. Floridi has been talking a lot about AI, and in the interview he proposes that the most interesting aspect of AI is that it is used as a mirror of nature: that we come to know ourselves through the technology. I agree. I would go further to say that the essence of information lies in intersubjective engagement (and by extension, consciousness), not in some abstract "stuff" that exists between us. The power of "information" as a topic is that it gives us all something to talk about, where everyone is uncertain about what it is they are trying to grapple with. It's all rather scholastic - and I quite like that.

AI is, I think, also like this. It is a shared disruption to our ways of thinking which gives us all something to talk about. When we see AI as a "tool", we get it wrong. That our institutions see AI as a "tool" says something about our institutions, with their rigid hierarchies, than it does about the technologies of AI.

Ben Williamson's post here, https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/education-for-the-robot-economy/ articulates some of the institutional problems with AI. Here the institution in question is the OECD, but really it could be anyone. They are all struggling to maintain their position and status in a world which is being turned upside down by technology. And it is interesting that "education" becomes the sticking point - the point at which these large hierarchies focus on to say "this is what we have to do". As if they know! As if anyone knows! As if the cult of expertise has escaped the massive explosion of options that technology has given us. As if expertise itself isn't under threat from technology. Which it is.

I am having a personal reminder of this, because last week I self-published my book "Uncertain Education". Since I've been writing it, or thinking about it, for nearly 8 years, it was time to go public with a document that bore the scars of its gestation. I self-published with a combination of Overleaf for typesetting (in Latex) and Blurb for printing and distribution. Both work very well, and the printed result is indistinguishable from a normal printed book (even printed at Lightening Source, which also prints "ordinary" books for Amazon). The print-run thing is over. And with it, the artificial scarcity of the "final document". Everything can be changed very easily in an agile way.

So what of the expertise of the editor, the typesetter, the reviewer, etc? The cloud takes over. The expertise becomes distributed. Many eyes looking at this thing, alongside my own eyes which see a thing now in the environment which once only existed within my own private world, are a powerful driver for making small incremental improvements. What matters are the ideas, and they tend to survive awkward moments.

The cult of the expert is one of the reasons that education maintains its structures and practices and its hierarchies. It is because a teacher is seen as an expert to mark a piece of work that we have double-marking, exam boards, quality procedures, and so on. Individual teachers are not trusted, so there has to be a cumbersome mechanism to keep everything in check to ensure that the stamp of quality can be granted. So what if we do Adaptive Comparative Judgement on a cloud-scale for marking student work? What if we create distributed databases of judgements from peers and teachers all over the world about the quality of work? This is what technology affords. It's not AI as such. And yet, its fundamental mechanism is the essence of what Warren McCulloch realised his neural networks were: a heterarchy (see https://vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/mcculloch_heterarchy.pdf)

It is the cult of the expert which drives the OECD to make proclamations of scarcity about education. They declare knowledge to be scarce, and so maintain the fiction of the "knowledge economy" - what do they mean by "knowledge"? What do they mean by "economy"? They declare "coding skills" to be scarce - really? They declare the "right metrics" to be scarce, without any consideration as to what a correct data analysis might be. Worst, they essentially declare "being human" to be scarce. What nonsense! Why do they do this? Because they want to keep themselves in business.

Take the expert out of all of this and the system reorganises itself naturally and heterarchically. There is no scarcity of knowledge. There is no scarcity of metrics, because every metric is merely an alternative additional description of reality, not a commandment. There is no knowledge economy because what matters is not what is known, but the uncertainty that accompanies it. Coding itself is merely a technique for amplifying artificial descriptions of the world and creating objects and new options to act. It is not scarce either.

What are we left with? It's very similar to my process of publishing and gradually improving my book. It is moving away from the objects of knowledge - final statements, artefacts, etc - and moving towards expressing thought as a process. There's a lot of stuff in my book on David Bohm's ideas about dialogue. How right I think he was. Dialogue is about inspecting thought as process, because all the stuff around us is produced by thought. Organisations like the OECD (and our universities for that matter) have become pathological because they do not see themselves as the product of thought. But they are.

If Bohm is right, then so too is Gilbert Simondon. Thought is transduction - the process of making and maintaining categories. The objects that we have are the result of transductions being configured in a particular way. If we want a better world, we need to change our transduction processes. Simondon's genius is to see that the highest levels of human development are tied up with the realisation of the capacity to control the transductions which make us "us". Particularly, it is the capacity to make us "us" - the capacity for individuation - within a technological environment, which is at the heart of the educational and technological challenge of our time.


3 comments:

Unknown said...

"The cult of the expert is one of the reasons that education maintains its structures and practices and its hierarchies. It is because a teacher is seen as an expert to mark a piece of work that we have double-marking, exam boards, quality procedures, and so on. Individual teachers are not trusted, so there has to be a cumbersome mechanism to keep everything in check to ensure that the stamp of quality can be granted. So what if we do Adaptive Comparative Judgement on a cloud-scale for marking student work? What if we create distributed databases of judgements from peers and teachers all over the world about the quality of work? This is what technology affords. It's not AI as such"

Von Hayek would say that this is exactly what markets do. The problem is that, historically speaking, markets are designed and maintained by the states. Secondly, markets generate even more uncertainty, which triggers defensive mechanisms, which Bohm would say brings us to non-dialogical situations.

Mark Johnson said...

The Hayek thing is interesting. Dialogue is fundamentally about giving, where Hayek was really interested in exchange (catallaxy). However, Hayek was right that knowledge cannot be centralised because knowledge isn't distributed evenly. As you say, he was wrong to say that markets could decentralise knowledge - states simply centralised the coordination of the market. But then the question is about the state metasystem coordinating the system. What Thatcher, Reagan and Pinochet all adopted in the face of the free market was an ideology of financialised exchange: everything was turned into money, exchange and rational action... and in 2008... bang!

We've got to deal with the Homo Economicus ideology of the state metasystem, and I think the university has a similar commodified metasystem. Financialisation is a codification process whereby the uncertainties of existence (like education) get turned into money and rational action. I would argue that you cannot codify uncertainty, and we need government (and university) functions which see that instead of codifying uncertainty in prices (as Hayek saw), it needs to be managed by coordinating civil dialogue. In other words, gifts become an equal tool to manage uncertainty as codified exchange (it is not to do away with exchange altogether).

We need a metasystem in education that sees humans as "Homo Meta-Economicus" - who manage a balance between gifts and exchange. The giving bit is really important because it is how a university learns about its environment, and so learns to adapt. In today's current financialised university, there is very little awareness of the environment, and the institutions are very vulnerable to changes in political temperature. Universities are endo-symbiotic in the end: they adapt by absorbing components in the environment.

I'm experiencing a lot of giving in response to my book (for which I am relieved!). And your comment and my response are also acts of generosity, aren't they?

Unknown said...

Yes, they are, Mark :-)