JellevanDijk.org

A thought: tools, like hammers and such, used to be the things that a skilled craftsman would have in order to be the autonomous, respected, skilled craftsman he was. And the thing this craftsman could do, he could only do, and so this would put him in power with respect to the boss, or the customer, or the city council, etc.., since they needed the carpenter (and the other crafts). The tool was part of that power structure. But now, many tools (ICT tools, like e.g. Microsoft Outlook, but also an office desk or chair) are tools that are *used* by office workers but they function actually to put *other* people in power over those office workers. So the power relations have changed dramatically. Suddenly the tool you use in your work has become part of the system that puts you down, and makes you less autonomic. Of course this only goes for certain tools. Many very complex tools (programming languages, 3d studio max, and so on) still basically function as craftsman tools like the hammer did. But for the non-technical office worker, there is no tool anymore and basically no craft, and so no power.

Poor office worker. I think I am going to learn 3d studio max next.

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This classic book has been on my reading list for a long time. I still haven’t found the time to read it cover to cover. This morning I started reading the introduction, via Google Books (see link below). Winograd & Flores are interesting people. I was kind of dissapointed that a newer book of Terry Winograd (Bringing Design to Software) was not available, since he is closely affiliated with Google (one of his Phd students is Larry Page one of the co-founders of Google). Fernando Flores is also interesting since he was part of Salvador Allende’s government and this gives the philosophy and engineering story a nice political touch as well. But anyway, the introduction of Winograd&Flores’ groundbreaking work (in 1986!) already contains many sentences that I would like to copy directly into my thesis. Winograd has been strongly influenced by Hubert Dreyfus as well. They write in the introduction:

we came to the realization that although our formal training was in the technical fields of mathematics and computer science , many of our guiding intuitions were not compatible with the traditions in those fields. We found ourselves in much closer accord with writers … who identified their interests as biology, hermeneutics and phenomenology. One of the … attractions of this work was the understanding it provided of the larger human context in which the study of cognition has meaning.

Or read for example the elegantly simple way in which they think about the question: what is a word processor? In reading the answer I recognize many things that I discuss with students and colleagues: how a software program plays its part in a practice, and how it even changes our own basic understanding of the words we use in order to describe our own practice, up to the point that new technologies ask us to redefine questions like: what is knowledge? what is language? what is communication? Too bad today I have to finish the data processing of my experiment: I want to read more!

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Some people at the conference asked to post the video’s. I will do that here.This is online already:Scenario of Use: Floor_It from Gerrit Willem Vos on Vimeo.FLOOR-IT first concept (Gerrit-Willem Vos)FLOOR-IT future scenario (Sijme Geurts)Here’s a video in Dutch but in which you can get a feel of the actual prototype we built and tested in the experiment:Update: this is the use-scenario video of NOOT:

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O no. They’re doing it again. There are people discussing whether or not the “Google car” is conscious. Apparently nobody stopped them short. It brings back good old memories about good old artificial intelligence, and all the moderner types (connectionism, Alife, behavior-based robotics, etc…).

So I was thinking, we can either answer this question from an ‘engineering’ perspective, or from a ‘philosophy of mind’ perspective.  The philosophical answer I already know: the car will never be conscious, no matter how many special features it has. There’s simply too many hurdles to take. (Frame problem, symbol grounding problem, qualia problem, Chinese Room problems, Fodorian problems, the list goes on…). So let’s first look at the engineer’s point of view, because it seems a little bit more straightforward

Engineers will ask: what is the car’s performance? Can it do things? More specifically: can it do the *right things*. More specifically: Is it capable of doing whatever it is that you need to be able to do if you want to show that you’re sentient?

Here trouble starts already. If we have a good test measure, then we’re happy. Engineers can design a good test to find out whether the car meets its challenge, provided that the challenge is measurable.

So what do you need to be capable of if you should want to be conscious? We don’t want this question turn into a philosophical one of course, so we need to look at observable measurable behaviors. Do we have examples of conscious systems? What do they do, typically? Well, *we’re* conscious. So what do we do?

More problems. We do SO MANY THINGS. What is the relevant aspect of our behavior? What is the property of our behaviors that signals consciousness? Hard one to answer.

Let’s turn it around. What do systems do that are NOT conscious? Perhaps we can substract all of their regular behaviors from the set of our behaviors and see what’s left.

Rocks. For example. Rocks are not conscious. What do rocks do? Well, they sit still. They wear out and turn into sand. And they respond to gravitational forces in the Newtonian way (throw one and see).

We also sit still. So we shouldn’t take that as a sign of consciousness. And the fact that we turn to sand at some point (ashes to ashes) also should’t be of interest. And our response to gravity: not important. Right: we can cross of at least some from our list. Let’s see what’s left. Anywhere near the crash-test laboratory set-up?

Bummer. Still too many behaviors left potentially relevant for consciousness. And apart from rocks, I don’t know many other examples of systems of which I can safely say  that they are definitely NOT conscious. Insects for example. Do I know for sure they are not conscious? I’ve read papers arguing for the consciousness of E.Coli bacteria. There are actually people (mainly in the 19-seventies though) telling me that the earth itself is somehow sentient, and that’s a rock!

I’m sorry. I cannot give the engineer any good definition of conscious behavior that he could use in a test. We’re thrown back into philosophy, even if we deliberately tried to avoid it.

Reflecting on this exercise I think perhaps the question “Is the Google Car conscious”, should be reinterpreted as aiming for something different altogether. Up until now, we’ve been discussing what would be a reasonable argument for or against the thesis that the car is conscious. Perhaps the whole idea of a reasonable argument is the problem. We’ve just found out that it is very difficult if not impossible to give reasonable arguments, simply because we have no clue what would count as conscious behavior and what not.

But we could also use the ‘case’ of the Google Car a different way. We could ask ourselves, on our gut-feeling: “Right from the hart, is the car conscious or not?”. Personally, I would say no. Perhaps you would say yes. We could either decide democratically (ask 1000 people). Or we could ask the most emininent professor in the room, provided s/he’s able to give us an skilled expert, gut-feeling answer (and not an argument based on reason).

Then, once we’ve decided first whether the car is conscious or not, we now have a different situation and a different engineering question to ask. Suppose, for example,  we decide the car is conscious. We now have a system, completely open to us (since we’ve built it ourselves), and we know it’s conscious. So now the question becomes: what made it conscious? That is an interesting question. And in our attempt at answering it we actually might learn a lot about consciousness.

I think it is the sort of question cognitive science actually has been trying to answer all along, be it about consciousness, or memory, intelligence, emotion, or motor planning. It is a question that stems from creating a working hypothesis about  a mechanic model (this model *has* quality A) and then doing the reverse engineering job of trying to find out what in the mechanics made it such that A is present.

It’s not really about the real thing though. It is a thoroughly pragmatic affair. We’ve first *decided* (based on no rational argument) that the model has A, and only given that hypothesis we analyse the system in the way we do. But I think it is a good way of doing science.

And quite designerly at that! Cowabonga!

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ID graduate Sijme Geurts’ Master project TRACES, which was part of my Phd project in collaboration with Rijkswaterstaat, will be presented at the Dutch Design Week!

Sijme Geurts

* Officially nominated to exhibit my master graduation project at the Dutch Design Week!! http://t.co/G7gRR4F

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Below you see a picture of my harddisk. This picture will give you the agenda for some new IT developments in the coming years, at least if it’s up to me. Here goes. The picture shows all files and folders in a visual representation. I have had this application for many years now and I use it to determine what big files are eating up space on my harddisk. My harddisk was almost full. You can immediately see why. There’s three big things happening on my harddisk that occupy most of the space: photo’s, music, and video. 1) Photos. The purple block at the top, this is a folder called iPhoto, and in it are all our photo’s and small video’s taken with our camera. Holidays, children, and so on. 2) Music. The second is the green block on the lower right. It is the iTunes library: our CD collection. Since december I have been importing all our music into iTunes, and this is not even everything of it (I had to delete part of it after I had moved it to my iPod - which causes it’s own problems). The complete music collection is on the iPod, and I do have a backup of it on the external disk, so I could actually delete this iTunes library. But I still use it to listen to music directly from the computer. So I’ve kept it. 2) Video. Our good friends Paulien and Geert made many hours of video from our wedding. First these tapes have been lying at their house for 3 years, even surviving a move to their new house. At one point I remembered the tapes and took them home and imported all the tapes into the computer. But I never got to make the nice video edit of our wedding. And since I do not know much about video-compression, I have now a lot of very very large un-edited video files. Video-editing, especially with big files, is very cumbersome. You have to wait a long time for all files to load into your program, and the programs are often very complex. iMovie is pretty ok, but then there’s the compression issue. Big video files you can transform into small video files, but if you don’t do it the right way you end up with no sound, or bad quality image, or the thing won’t play on your laptop, or on anybody else’s computer, and so on. Digital video editing is pretty complex. Our students learn about it at bachelor college level.

So here’s my agenda for the coming five years. But first let me tell you what we should not be working on. The thing I am not proposing is bigger harddrives. One possibility is that we keep on designing bigger harddisks. Not 1 terabyte, but 10 terabyte, or 100 terabyte. This is the strategy that our politicians deploy with regard to traffic jams: if our roads are full, make more roads. We know what the effect is on traffic: more roads, more traffic. And the same goes for digital traffic. So bigger harddrives will lead to new kinds of files (HD video? 3D video?) and this will fill up your harddrive again. What I also do not propose is to upload all your files to the web. That is a ‘cloud-castle’ solution, in both senses, since The Cloud ultimately is stored on harddrives somewhere, and probably having things online means it is copied at least a number of times for each file which only makes the problem worse (think of energy consumption of having to accomodate all that server space in a reliable way). On the short run, it might solve ‘your’ problem, but on the long run, it will eat up our planet, and that’s everybody’s problem, even if it is not directly visible in your own backyard.

Instead I think a sustainable approach for the future is when we innovate in the following way:

* Create applications that really address the problem of what to do with photo’s. My problem is that I take many many many photo’s, and the task of ‘cleaning up’ my iPhoto library has simply become to big a task to handle. It will probably cost me about 3 weeks fulltime to decide which photo’s to keep and which to throw away. We could do a lot in terms of interaction design of 1) the camera (deciding to keep the photo already when you have just taken it), 2) importing (which photo’s to import, which not to import) and 3) in terms of managing your photo’s, e.g. by creating photo-albums etc… Some people have the mental power to actually make 3 albums each year, many people do nothing, like me. And the database grows and grows. If we want to do that, we have to make programs that specifically support the maintainance of your photo library, not the endless growth of it. Since people are lazy, and have a hard time keeping track of what’s ‘in the big box of junk’, the program needs to support people actively. One BIG move forward would already be a SAFE and VERY EASY way to say “get rid of all my duplicates”. There is not my knowledge no simple big button on my iPhoto application that does that in a way that I trust.

*  Same issue as above, but with music.

* Create good and easy to use video editing programs for the lay-person. And make sure all frustration concerning video compression, with all the hassle with codecs, stays ‘under the hood’, that is, hidden from view. There’s two things that a user should be able to do very easily and that is: 1) creating a ‘crop’ from a video file (cutting a sample out of it and saving that under a new name, and discarding the left-overs) and 2) compressing the video to a format that plays on all standard video players and still has reasonable quality. (I propose that you can easily preview 3 kinds of compression, ranging from ‘low quality-small file’ to ‘high quality-big file’.

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I don’t know how, but suddenly I found myself in a Linked In Group discussion on “The Nature of Truth”. I felt I had to make a bold statement, since so much of what was written there was a bit .. , well, I mean to pose this question already gives me certain feelings. Why discuss that question, when so many people have been discussing it for the last 2000 years? (I could also have decided not to reply at all, which would have been better, but I am a weak social media user so I have to contribute)

This is what I wrote.

Jelle van Dijk • I guess I want to question the idea of trying to ground ones’ statements in the past, instead of grounding them in the future. Grounding in the past is saying things like: “I have done the empirical research and the results provide evidence for X, therefore, X is true.” We always present it as if such a statement is about the *now* (The evidence shows that *currently* it is the case that X. Or as Robert says “at the time of the statement”.) But of course in fact we have done our measurements last week, not *now*. Building a truth statement as ‘grounded in evidence’ is therefore always a form of grounding what you claim in the past. The same goes for statements grounded ‘in theory’ (based on other statements). The theory, or evidence, or whatever you want to use to ground your argument in, has to exist before you can use it to create the argument, right? Could it be any other way? One would think not. How else can we find truths but by ‘providing evidence’, and how else could we provide evidence if not the evidence was gathered first (making it a ‘thing in the past’?). And so we argue by quoting Plato, and not by quoting Qzorq (the famous 3000 century thinker).But think about designers. Designers create concepts, prototypes, proposals, interventions. These are statements of some sort. One may start to think about the ‘truth’ of a design concept. The ‘validation’ of a design concept, however, is a tricky business. The design may not simply ‘fit’ to the world it has to function in, it may also *change* the world. So what happens if we start to consider statements that may not only (or not at all) *reflect* our knowledge of the world, but at the same time *influence* this world? What to do with these strange ontological kinds? Sometimes all you can say is: THIS (the concept, the prototype, the thing, the piece of art), “is what I ended up with while doing my job as a designer *as truthfully as possible*”. Or: “This is what I had to make, in order to *stay true to my identity*” (while at the same time designers define their identity through their work!). For scientists, this may seem strange. For artists, it is their everyday reality. To me, the truth value of designs, at least, lies in what they *do*, in their transformational power, (i.e. in the future), not in what they reflect or represent, (i.e. in the past.)

Of course, most PROBABLY this kind of thinking is ‘old’ as well. Does anybody know which philosopher I am (naively and unconsciously) resonating with? I would be interested!

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Een tijdje geleden was-ie ineens erg in, Richard Sennett. Hij komt binnenkort spreken, kreeg ik door, via Roel, mijn vriend bij Premsela.

In Eindhoven stond hij op het lijstje van de leesclub. In Den Haag zong zijn naam rond langs IPO, HT en diverse lectoraten. In Denemarken, bij de Design Antropologen, vonden ze hem maar niks. (Dat maakte me dan weer achterdochtig, want ik had die antropologen hoog zitten.) Het boekje vond ik uiteindelijk niet goed leesbaar. Maar waarom precies, dat weet ik niet meer. Zouden zijn lezingen wel te pruimen zijn? Het thema vind ik nog steeds enorm boeiend: Craftmanship. Archaisch? Romantisch? Of de leidraad voor een nieuwe wereld? Ik ben benieuwd.

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https://sites.google.com/site/cc11embodied/

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Increasingly we will see designers and artists working with interactive technology as a natural base material for tinkering, exploring, crafting. Like their predessessors, who were skilled in crafting clay, or paint, or working wood, these young designers take a set of batteries, a bunch of interactive components (using, quite often, Arduino as a basic system) and they simply begin to design and make art. They also still draw on paper, make video’s, animations, work in textiles, use wood and iron: it is not as if they are computer programmers. This is simply a new kind of stuff to work with. For today’s students in design schools and art academies, working with interactive technology is just the normal thing to do. See for example this designer student’s projects: Liza Stark - and she’s just one of the many I stumbled upon.

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