Monthly Archives: November 2023

Task 12 Speculative Futures

Dr. Shannon Vallor of Clara University in a 2018 presentation entitled Lessons from the AI Mirror describes AI as both a mirror and gasoline.  That is to say that it is both a reflection of human values and interactions as well as acting as an accelerant.  In 2023 these themes are now much more common knowledge; however, it is still hard to imagine where this will lead us beyond a few years horizon.  In the first chapter of the book Speculative Everything, authors Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby observe that somehow, we seem to have slipped away from dreaming and settled for hope.  The challenge is to reinstate dreaming future realities through speculative design.  One such creative exercise of the imagination can be played out through the game Thing From The Future by Situation Lab.  In this exercise we are given some variables in a future and asked to come up with a scenario that could exist based on these factors.  The world of science fiction has always fascinated me as a place to freely play with known real world factors and throw those into a sandbox where anything is possible in terms of how they could play out in the future.  This is perhaps more important for humanity now than ever before as we see technological change accelerate with both incredible opportunity and risk.  For task 12 we are given a speculative future in the form of a prompt and asked to dream up a vision.

Prompt:

Describe or narrate a scenario about a corporation found two generations into a future in which order is deliberately coordinated or imposed. Your description should address issues related to communication and elicit feelings of dread.

Figure 1. Adobe AI, Payne, 2023, D&D inc, (In 2080 there is a mysterious AI corporation based in Tokyo), https://firefly.adobe.com/

     In 2080 there is a mysterious company referred to by some as DHD&D Inc. or D&D for short.  The full acronym it is rumored stands for Don’t Hope, Dream and Design.  Most people don’t believe the company exists and believe it is a conspiracy to explain sudden incongruent behaviours of powerful people or black swan events that cannot be explained but alter the course of the future.  There was a known company in 2065 named DHD&D Inc. set up as a PR consulting network based in Singapore, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, and London.  The company claimed to be a consulting company and took on clients ranging from ultra rich housewives to powerful politicians.  They claimed to employ powerful AI that could analyze every aspect of a client’s digital life including all those around them whom they sought to influence and produce for that client a blueprint to achieve their desired outcome, which is legal.  In 2050 however the company went dark after a string of unusual scandals which I won’t go into involving the CEO and other execs.  Through media reporting the public widely accepted the villainy of these people, the execs were hunted down by the CIA and brought to the global cyber and morality crimes court and then the story went quiet.  As there is much secrecy around the ‘court’, it is only assumed were sentenced to work on the moon colony titanium mining operations.  There is a great demand for highly technically qualified personnel to operate the autonomous drone mining operations on the moon, so many white-collar criminals end up on the undesirable moon colony.  Now, it 2080 investigative journalist-content creators have uncovered through recently declassified CIA documents that DHD&D was under investigation and the scope of their business went way beyond ‘consulting’.  DHD&D used AI to directly influence individuals or groups through all aspects of their digital life to do any desired action from voting a particular way, to believing in a certain cause, to declaring war, or even to taking their own life.  Around the same time this investigation was going on was when these public scandals came about, and the company went dark and vanished from the public eye.  It is rumored on the dark web that there still exists an operator by the name of D&D which hoovers up information and weaponizes it for the purposes of unknown clients.  Seven out of the eight investigative journalist-content creators investigating this have mysteriously disappeared or had deadly accidents in the last four weeks.  I am the last of these investigators.  As much as it possible in 2080, I have attempted to go off grid and continue my investigation into D&D through sources and will build this case offline until it is ready to be revealed to the world.  If my sources and I are successful in building the case and our suspicions are true, the question is, how do you go up against an AI propaganda machine and who is now controlling it?

References

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. The MIT Press.

Lab, S. (n.d.). The Thing From The Future. Situation Lab. Retrieved December 14, 2022, from https://situationlab.org/project/the-thing-from-the-future/

Santa Clara University. (2018, November 6). Lessons from the AI Mirror Shannon Vallor [Video]. YouTube.

The perfect ending to a perfectly frustrating excercise, the Carlton dance.

In this module we are looking at the fascinating topic of user interface.  In task 10 this website game cheekily challenges all your assumptions which now come as second (clicking) nature, to make your way through a webform in which everything seems designed against your intuition, aptly named ‘User Inyerface‘.  Full disclosure, I am publishing this late, not because I didn’t start on time, but because I tried so many times initially I gave up.  I knew it was an option not to finish, but that just didn’t sit well with me.  Upon reading one of my classmate’s (thank you Jerry Chen) submissions, I saw the “You Are Awesome” (similar to above) screenshot, and I thought, ok, it can be done!  I took a deep breath and through the power of peer pressure, I accomplished the first time what I had been fighting with many times before.  I had thought it was a race against a clock, in reality what I needed to do was slow down, read carefully and not follow any of my ‘instincts’ that have been developed in my mind over the years of surfing a webspace designed by people.  Regardless of the motivations of these designers, over time, they have now created a set of expectations.  Humans function on heuristics, learned mental short cuts, all the time as the world is far to complex to think about the why of every decision we make.  It dawned on me through doing this excerise that the very same is true for the virtual landscape.  We learn what is normal, we create the mental short cut and default to it.  A number of assumptions becomes our second nature.  With this knowledge UX designers can use that for good or ill user manipulation.   The creator of User Inyerface deriberately designed everything to be difficult to demonstrate the phenomenon, but how and why was it difficult?  Let’s take a look at a couple of user assumptions:

1. The timer!  This perhaps was the simplest and effectively deceptive to me.  “Hurry up!  Time is ticking” it says, giving you a sense that there is a time limit and rushing you so as you do not read carefully, relying on your mental shortcuts.  But the timer is ticking up from zero to potentially 99hrs 99minutes, 99 seconds, but your brain quickly assumes it is a countdown.  In actuality there is essentially no time limit.
2. The default.  When we are presented with a ‘choice’ the default is set to be the affirmative and made easy to choose.  The designer will do this perhaps most frequently when asking you to agree to terms.  It is really not a choice as it is most often waiving a legal liability or disagreement in order to continue.  Should you not agree, you cannot continue.  But we must go through the theatrics for some legal purpose.  Do you agree to this 100 pages of small print to update your privacy settings:  YES & CONTINUE.  no & exit.   

We see this default ‘flipped’ many times in the User Inyourface game.  Here is but the first two examples:

What I loved about this game is that the designer demonstrated to you what you expect by challenging you to move through a webform in which everything is the opposite of what you have come to expect.  This then presumably should challenge the user to question, why are things laid out the way they are, what is the designer’s goal and is that truly in line with the user’s goals?

Our readings go on to delve into the most common goal of designers today and that is attention, your attention!  In an educational setting it is very relevant today to empower young learners with the tools to understand where, why, and how their attention is being directed.

 References

• Bagaar. (2019). User InyerfaceLinks to an external site. [web game].
• Brignull, H. (2011). Dark patterns: Deception vs. honesty in UI design.Links to an external site. A List Apart, 338.

Task 9: Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data

In task eight our class of 23 students took the Golden Record compilation of 27 of earth’s greatest musical hits selected for Nasa’s Voyager satellite and were tasked with narrowing that selection down to 10.  To do this, one had to employ some bias or methodology, whether that be by personal preference or some set of metrics.  This week in task nine, we got to explore our choices in relationship to others.  With the aggregate meta data of the survey provided by our professor we utilized the Palladio tool developed by Stanford University Humanities department through a grant project.  This tool allows us to see graphical connectivity in a unique way from other tools.

When we upload our data set the default graphical representation is based on the community including both the target (songs) and the sources (students) and the edges or the connective relationship between them.  This is an undirected, weighted graph as the spatial representation is abstract, but the size of the nodes and the number of edges is directly correlated to the intersecting relationships.  From this representation we can start to have a different understanding of our own data that we could not otherwise.

We can manipulate this representation to show different types of relationships in a graphical representation.  For example, if we filter this down into ‘communities’ of targeted music as a function of the quantity of edges connecting the nodes, we can almost see a representation of musical genres take form.

If we want to analyze the relationships between participants and create a community of nodes that represents a common thread of edges, we can do that too.  If we want to filter it down further using the facet function which allows you to filter a subset of the data, we can.  For example, if we want to look at the relationship between the two most popular songs (Track 25: Jaat Kahan Ho and Track 18: Fifth Symphony) first and second respectively, who selected them and the connections between who selected them both it would look like this.

Interestingly I find myself at the adjacent node between two of the least popular selections (Track 27: String Quartet No. 13 In B Flat, Opus 130, Cavatina and Track 17: Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier.

I spent a long time playing with the functionality of this tool and had a hard time disassociating my mind from trying to identify a correlated spatial representation of the data, but at least in the graph tab this data is a representation of relationship.  While it is weighted and counted it is not a directed graph regarding points and places between nodes.  Had we included such data at the geographical location of both the songs and the timeline of the music, we could have used Palladio to Map out the spatial relationship over time and space in a directed graphical representation.

The Palladio tool helps us to identify relationships, but it cannot identify the reasons why those exist, only that they do.  To establish the why, we would need to survey each participant about the method they used (if at all) to make their selections.  Reading some of my colleague’s work, I believe they did use a set of criteria.  Admittedly, I went on pure feeling, however I now realize that my choices were not consistent for task of submitting the survey which I did on a different day than my reflection piece in my blog. In the absence of a strict methodology, like in my case, perhaps an in-depth survey about why the person felt they way they did about the pieces of music along with metadata about their background might shed light on a theory that could be represented using this tool.  Palladio as powerful as it is, can only find, filter and represent relationships using graph and network theory.

I do not believe there is a large enough data set for me to draw any conclusions about the political implications of the music selection groupings.  I find it impressive that of the 23 participants all 27 pieces of music were selected multiple times.  I believe this is a testament that every piece of music selected by the NASA scientists was no doubt a beautiful representation of humanity.  I do wonder however how much they would have access to globally in 1973 as opposed to 2023.  For example, there is a lot of African music I love, but I didn’t select the pieces from the Voyager selection, they just weren’t the best examples to me of some of the incredible representations of African music.  Even with the European classical, as I mentioned in my last blog post, none of those pieces would have been my first choice and it was hearbreaking that some of the best materpieces were left out in my opinion.  I think it is a very subjective matter.  The fact that there is such a wide representation, clearly speaks to the spirit of hope and unity.  Even at the height of the cold war, they included pieces from radio Moscow.  I wouldn’t dare to assume any political implication.  Perhaps if each participant were now asked to select their own 27 pieces, it would be fairer to draw certain inferences.

Resources

Backgrounder on the Voyager Golden Record: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/music/

Palladio Tutorials & FAQs: https://hdlab.stanford.edu/palladio/help/ 

References

Systems Innovation. (2015, April 18). Graph theory overview [Video]. YouTube.

Systems Innovation. (2015, April 19). Network connections [Video]. YouTube.