I am story, not data

Maria Isabel Garcia

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

'We live and die as stories, not as data'

Three days ago, I was face to face with “Alter” and it was not just looking at me, it was sensing me and its environment. Alter is a humanoid robot stationed in Miraikan, the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. Alter’s insides are laid bare but it had a face and arms that moved in patterns that it “thinks up” by itself.  It senses noise, humidity, pressure and temperature around it and reacts to these elements. And since those things change minute to minute, Alter builds up on its own learning and reacts to it in ways that are not predictable. What you see is a humanoid that moves, not quite like a human does, but you get a sense that it is no longer mechanical, that it is alive in its own right, even if in the place of a beating heart, it has “coupled pendulums” that mimic neural signals.

I participated in the Science Center World Summit held last week so in that same day, I also listened to the Chief Scientist of Hitachi, Kazuo Yano, with great optimism, about the role of AI in promoting human well-being. He is involved in AI technology that examines the link between human happiness and movement. One big finding he revealed was that people in call centers who are active, are able to sustain their activity more, and report (through the sensors they were fitted with) being happy more than those who stay at rest more. The goal of this study was not to measure happiness per se but to link it with productivity since it has been pretty much established in studies that happy people are more productive.

It would have been so easy to accept the robust link between productivity and happiness if human productivity only included call centers or sales performance. An Italian researcher, Daniel Archibugi, who sat in the same panel as Dr. Yano, did raise a challenge to the latter as to what we will do with poets whose obvious productivity, as seen in their works, are, in great part, attributable to their inner capital: “unhappiness”.

In a session that I moderated, I had presenters who demonstrated technologies like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, robots and learning trackers not only as they are today but what they would probably look like at least 10 years from now. Maholo Uchida, the one in charge of the robots in Miraikan, spoke of their robots as members of their team, even taking great care of the humanoids when they would be lent to other institutions, to the extent of having fashion and hair stylists for these humanoids.

Towards the end of the summit, I had a chat with the first Japanese astronaut, Dr. Mamoru Mohri, who also headed Miraikan – the science museum of new and emerging technologies, especially AIs. At the summit, he showed us videos of when he was in space looking at the Earth, giving us a keen sense that the Earth was indeed a lonely planet – there is no neighboring planet that could save it or save us. He was born of the Earth and as an astronaut, has risen above it to contemplate it and to share that wisdom with the rest of us, who most likely will remain grounded.

He possessed this wisdom that also seemed unabashed to welcoming AIs as complementing human lives. He noticed my earrings. I was wearing a pair of astronaut earrings given as a gift by someone whom I treated like my own son. Dr. Mohri pointed to them and said “Is that Asimo?” (Asimo is the Honda resident robot of Miraikan.) I said, “No, Dr. Mohri, it’s you.”

My head spins imagining our common future with AIs. AIs are the chief sense-makers of what has come to be called “big data” that everyone wants to collect. My head did not just spin with the prospects that are already articulated in the news and current literature: “AIs will eliminate jobs”, “AIs will augment jobs”, “AIs will annihilate humans and the world”, “AIs will transform the world for the better”. I get worried when Stephen Hawking, who has contemplated the death of stars and planets and Elon Musk, a revolutionary technologist, rise as top voices that warn against an uncontrolled AI future. But my AI anxiety is also tempered when I hear Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg be more optimistic about what AI can do to make us better humans or a force for good. But then, there is also what critics too say about Musk and Zuckerberg standing where they do, because it is consistent with their branding.

But even without the hyped debates of these tech celebrities, there is no escaping future days and nights with AI. Robots  do not only do backflips, or animate science museums. They are also now embedded in the pillars and peripherals of human work and life including transport (yes, ride-sharing apps like Uber and Grab rely on AI), defense, food, and commerce. In the future and some say in the near-future, self-driving cars and trucks will be familiar.  Food will be tailored and made according to detected requirements, and stores and supermarkets will be characteristically human-less, save for the shadow humans who designed the AIs that run them.

I am fascinated by AI prospects.  I am also anxious about them. This is the nature of a non-AI. I am very conscious that I was not raised to look at machines as living but I also am aware that some cultures do not differentiate or they do not find it hard to look at AIs as a genuine part of human lives. I know that their view is as valid as mine. But maybe there are profound questions that we all can agree on posing, regardless of culture or level of technological development.

Like any technology, AI could go spectacularly well in some aspects or gloriously fail us in others. But aside from those, it would also have unintended consequences.  Would we be ready to reverse the consequences if they do not turn out to be good? Just as an earlier study this year has shown, AI could also learn human biases and operate with them. Then, would AI just be a mere technological mirror of the human designers in First World countries and their own biases – a repeat of our imperial and colonial past?

Will AIs be able to make imaginative leaps in thought and action that our most profound human stories are made of? Would an AI have made that leap that Einstein did, given data that was only Newtonian? Would slavery have been outlawed by AI given only data from slave owners? Would AI ever do the neural razzmatazz that would make it even come close to the literary and musical genius of say, a Lin-Manuel Miranda?

Data is not narrative. It is only part of it. A narrative is a story we tell ourselves to keep ourselves together so we know who we are and can imagine who we can become, joined by all the other selves that we scoop and tuck in the folds of our own lifetimes.  We live and die as stories, not as data.  – Rappler.com

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