Tag Archives: digital culture

A Discussion of Artificial Intelligence with John Searle and Luciano Floridi

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Design and Science. Anti-disciplinary approach

Design and Science. Anti-disciplinary approach

Design and Science

On Professor Neri Oxman’s Krebs Cycle of Creativity of the relationship between the disciplines, design and science are opposite one another on the circle, and the output of one is not the input of the other as is often the case of engineering and design or science and engineering. I believe that by making a “lens” and a fusion of design and science, we can fundamentally advance both. This connection includes both the science of design and the design of science, as well as the dynamic relationship between these two activities.

As I have written previously[1], one of the first words that I learned when I joined the Media Lab in 2011 was “antidisciplinary.” It was listed as a requirement in an ad seeking applicants for a new faculty position. Interdisciplinary work is when people from different disciplines work together. But antidisciplinary is something very different; it’s about working in spaces that simply do not fit into any existing academic discipline–a specific field of study with its own particular words, frameworks, and methods.

For me, antidisciplinary research is akin to mathematician Stanislaw Ulam’s famous observation that the study of nonlinear physics is like the study of “non-elephant animals.” Antidisciplinary is all about the non-elephant animals.

I believe that by bringing together design and science we can produce a rigorous but flexible approach that will allow us to explore, understand and contribute to science in an antidisciplinary way.

In many ways, the cybernetics movement[2] was a model for what we are trying to do–allowing a convergence of new technologies to create a new movement that cuts across the disciplines. But it is also a warning: cybernetics became fragmented through over formalization and “disciplinarification.” As Stewart Brand recently reflected, cybernetics became more and more dense and academic, and as it matured it was “bored to death.” Perhaps we can design something that is both rigorous enough, engaging enough, and antidisciplinary enough not only to survive, but to thrive.

The kind of scholars we are looking for at the Media Lab are people who don’t fit in any existing discipline either because they are between–or simply beyond–traditional disciplines. I often say that if you can do what you want to do in any other lab or department, you should go do it there. Only come to the Media Lab if there is nowhere else for you to go. We are the new Salon des Refusés.

When I think about the “space” we’ve created, I like to think about a huge piece of paper that represents “all science.” The disciplines are little black dots on this paper. The massive amounts of white space between the dots represent antidisciplinary space. Many people would like to play in this white space, but there is very little funding for this, and it’s even harder to get a tenured positions without some sort of disciplinary anchor in one of the black dots.

Additionally, it appears increasingly difficult to tackle many of the interesting problems–as well as the “wicked problems”–through a traditional disciplinary approach. Unraveling the complexities of the human body is the perfect example. Our best chance for rapid breakthroughs should come through a collaborative “One Science.” But instead, we seem unable to move beyond “many sciences”–a complex mosaic of so many different disciplines that often we don’t recognize when we are looking at the same problem because our language is so different and our microscopes are set so differently.

With funding and people focused on the disciplines, it takes more and more effort and resources to make a unique contribution. While the space between and beyond the disciplines can be academically risky, it often has less competition; requires fewer resources to try promising, unorthodox approaches; and provides the potential to have tremendous impact by unlocking connections between existing disciplines that are not well connected. The Internet and the diminishing costs of computing, prototyping and manufacturing have diminished many of the costs of doing research as well.

 

A Prehistory of the Anti-Disciplinary: Cybernetics

Although the new technologies and tools diminishing costs driven by the Internet and Moore’s Law makes antidisciplinary work increasingly possible, it’s not exactly a new idea.

Driven less by the diminishing costs, but rather by a whole set of enabling technologies and tools, a similar movement was occurring in the 1940s and 1950s where a variety of fields began to converge. Applications from ballistic missile control to understanding how biological systems regulated movement brought engineers, designers, scientists, mathematicians, sociologists, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and thinkers from a variety of fields together to begin to understand systems and feedback loops as a way to both comprehend and design complex systems. This type of cross-disciplinary study of systems was termed “cybernetics.”

Although mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener and his book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine is often what first comes to mind when when we think of cybernetics, much of “first-order cybernetics” was heavily in the domain of the engineers. (First-order cybernetics was about how one used feedback systems and feedback loops to control or regulate systems, and second-order cybernetics was more about self-adaptive complex systems and systems that could not to be controlled or were highly complex.)

Although they get less attention, there were also many philosophers, sociologists and cultural figures involved in cybernetics, such as Heinz von Foerster, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Gordon Pask, and Stewart Brand [3] who were more concerned with second-order cybernetics [4].

Some called second-order cybernetics the community of first-order systems. Second-order cybernetics was more about participant observers than objective observers/designers. For example, a first-order cybernetic system would be a thermostat and a second-order system would be the earth’s ecosystem. An engineer designs a thermostat as an object that they can understand, control and is for a user that they can talk to, but the ecosystem is something we live in as a participant, can’t control, and adapts to our actions. And beyond complexity and the impossibility of regulating such complex systems, by bringing the human into the system second-order cybernetics goes beyond the move from “objectivity” to “subjectivity” and makes the participants responsible for what they pay attention to and what they value. And if “cybernetics is the theory, design is the action.” (Ranulph Glanville)—for we are responsible for what we design.

While many of the origins and threads of cybernetics ran through MIT, by the time the Media Lab was established in 1985, the vibrant cybernetics movement had disappeared into a variety of applied disciplines. But it has left its mark: design, and in particular, “design thinking,” emerged and survives today as a practice that cuts across many of the disciplines that were touched by it.

 

Evolving Design

Design has become what many of us call a “suitcase word.” [5] It means so many different things that it almost doesn’t mean anything: you can call almost anything “design.” On the other hand, design encompasses many important ideas and practices, and thinking about the future of science in the context of design–as well as design in the context of science–is an interesting and fruitful endeavor.

Design has also evolved from the design of objects both physical and immaterial, to the design of systems, to the design of complex adaptive-systems. This evolution is shifting the role of designers; they are no longer the central planner, but rather participants within the systems they exist in. This is a fundamental shift–one that requires a new set of values.

Today, many designers work for companies or governments developing products and systems focused primarily on making sure that society works efficiently. However, the scope of these efforts are not designed to include–nor are they designed to care about–systems beyond our corporate or governmental needs. We’re moving into an era where the system boundaries are not as defined. These underrepresented systems, such as the microbial system and the environment, have suffered and still present significant challenges for designers. While these systems are self-adaptive, complex systems, our unintended effects on them will most likely cause unintended negative consequences for us.

MIT Professors Neri Oxman and Meejin Yoon teach a popular class called “Design Across Scales,” where they discuss design at scales ranging from the microbial to the astrophysical. While it is impossible for designers and scientists to predict the outcome of complex self-adaptive system, especially at all scales, it is possible for us to perceive, understand, and take responsibility for our intervention within each of these systems. Also, as a “participant” we can engage at each of these scales if we are aware of and able to use all of our lenses by being aware of the systems that we are in and being continuously preceptive. This would be much more of a design whose outcome we cannot fully control–more like giving birth to a child and influencing its development than designing a robot or a car.

An example of this kind of design is the work of MIT Professor Kevin Esvelt who describes himself as an evolutionary sculptor. He is working on ways of editing the genes of populations of organisms such as the rodent that carries Lyme disease and the mosquito that carries malaria to make them resistant to the pathogens. The specific technology – CRISPR gene drives – are a type of gene edit such that when carrier organisms released into the wild, all of their offspring, and their offspring’s offspring, and so on through the generations will inherit the same alteration, allowing us to essentially eliminate malaria, Lyme, and other vector-borne and parasitic diseases. Crucially, the edit is embedded into the population at large, rather than the individual organism. Therefore, his focus is not on the gene editing or the particular organism, but the whole ecosystem – including our health system, the biosphere, our society and its ability to think about these sorts of interventions. To be clear: part of what’s novel here is considering the effects of a design on all of the systems that touch it.

 

The End of the Artificial

Unlike the past where there was a clearer separation between those things that represented the artificial and those that represented the organic, the cultural and the natural, it appears that nature and the artificial are merging.

When the cybernetics movement began, the focus of science and engineering was on things like guiding a ballistic missile or controlling the temperature in an office. These problems were squarely in the man-made domain and were simple enough to apply the traditional divide-and-conquer method of scientific inquiry.

Science and engineering today, however, is focused on things like synthetic biology or artificial intelligence, where the problems are massively complex. These problems exceed our ability to stay within the domain of the artificial, and make it nearly impossible for us to divide them into existing disciplines. We are finding that we are more and more able to design and deploy directly into the domain of “nature” and in many ways “design” nature. Synthetic biology is obviously completely embedded in nature and is about our ability to “edit nature.” However, even artificial intelligence, which is in the digital versus natural realm, is developing its relationship to the study of the brain beyond merely a metaphorical one. We find that we must increasingly depend on nature to guide us through the complexity and the unknowability (with our current tools) that is our modern scientific world.

By picking up where cybernetics left off and by redirecting the development of modern design to the future of science, we believe that a new kind of design and a new kind of science may emerge, and in fact is already emerging.

 

Rethinking Academic Practice

MITx and edX are now helping the world by making lectures, knowledge, and skills available online to students everywhere in an organized way. The MIT Press, the Media Lab, and the MIT Libraries could serve a parallel role by creating a new model for academic interaction and collaboration, breaking down the artificial barriers dividing intellectual discourse. Our thinking is to create a vehicle for the exchange of ideas that allows all those working in the antidisciplinary space between and beyond the disciplines to come together in unexpected and exciting ways to challenge existing academic silos. Our aim is to create a new space that encourages everyone, not just academics, to come together to create a new platform for the 21st century: a new place, a new way of thinking, a new way of doing.

Much of academia revolves around publishing research to prestigious, peer-reviewed journals. Peer review usually consists of the influential members of your field reviewing your work and deciding whether it is important and unique. This architecture often leads to a dynamic where researchers focus more on proving the value of their research to a small number of experts in their own field than on taking the high-risk of an unconventional approach. This dynamic reinforces the cliché of academics: learning more and more about less and less. It causes a hyper-specialization where people in different areas have a very difficult time collaborating–or even communicating–with people in different fields.

Peer-reviewed academic papers were a very important system to build scientific knowledge before the Internet, but in many ways, they may be holding us back now. Stewart Brand likens academic papers to tombstones reading: “we thought this subject to death and this is where we buried it.” [6] I propose iteratively designing a new antidisciplinary journal with an open collaborative model of interaction in contrast to the structured and formal peer review system in order to tackle the most pressing and most interesting problems and ideas of our times and itself be an experiment.

The Media Lab has thrived 30 years without losing its relevance or its passion when most research labs that focus on a discipline have difficulty retaining relevance for so long. Why? I think it’s because our focus is on a way of thinking and doing rather than on a field of study or a particular language. I believe the key is a focus on developing a better system of design and a better theory of deployment and impact.

As participant designers, we focus on changing ourselves and the way we do things in order to change the world. With this new perspective, we will be able to tackle extremely important problems that don’t fit neatly into current academic systems: instead of designing other people’s systems, we will redesign our way of thinking and working and impact the world by impacting ourselves [7] [8].

 

References

[1]”Antidisciplinary”. Joi Ito’s Web. (2014): [http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2014/10/02/antidisciplinar.html] 

[2] While there are many similarities between cybernetics and the antidisciplinary process we are working on, it was one of several inter/antidisciplinary movements that we are influenced by and connect to. Other movements include The Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, Metabolism, and others.

[3][http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacyPeople.htm] 

[4]”How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design”. Hippie modernism: The struggle for utopia. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN. (2015): 1–12.

[5]”Unpacking Suitcase Words”. (October 2009): [https://alexvermeer.com/unpacking-suitcase-words/] Cites Marvin Minsky’s The Emotion Machine

[6]The irony that this feels a bit like an academic paper is not lost on me, but this is sort of like a viral gene therapy designed to penetrate the membrane of the academic system without trigger an immune response and then modify the host system from within.

[7]Non-duality is the ancient notion that “we are all one.” Duality is the idea that there is some objective observer or “self”. This relationship between the subject and the object and the idea that we can “be here now” is a spiritual solution to the problem of the observer trying to observe itself. Trying to understand thinking by thinking about thinking is very difficult, but as Seymour Papert said, “You can’t think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.”

[8]This is not to say that we won’t be making interventions in the world around us or deploying things externally. My point is that this journal and this new design process is something we should deploy on our self and to use and develop as our own tool and not try or feel a need to “sell it” to others, but be happy to share.

 

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How Art Can Transform The Internet

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Frames of Mind – Theory of Multiple Intelligences

The theory of multiple intelligences is a theory of intelligence that affords specific modalities as opposed to seeing intelligence as dominated by a single general ability. This model was proposed by Howard Gardner in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. In this interview, Gardner discusses the criteria for a behavior to be considered an intelligence. Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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The App Generation – Howard Gardner, Harvard University

No one has failed to notice that the current generation of youth is deeply-some would say totally-involved with digital media. Professors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis name today’s young people The App Generation, and in this spellbinding book they explore what it means to be “app-dependent” versus “app-enabled” and how life for this generation differs from life before the digital era. Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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Onion Omega Kickstarter

The Onion Omega is a hardware development platform designed specifically for software developers.

It comes with built-in WiFi, Arduino-compatible and it runs full Linux. It lets you prototype hardware devices using familiar tools such as Git, pip, npm, and using high level programming languages such as Python, Javascript, PHP. The Onion Omega is open source and fully integrated with the Onion Cloud, making it a breeze to connect physical devices to the Web to create Internet of Things applications.

For full details & to buy, visit: https://onion.io/kickstarter

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Mitch Resnick: Let’s teach kids to code

Coding isn’t just for computer whizzes, says Mitch Resnick of MIT Media Lab — it’s for everyone. In a fun, demo-filled talk Resnick outlines the benefits of teaching kids to code, so they can do more than just “read” new technologies — but also create them.

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29.07.2015 · 13:49

Futurist and co-founder of Futures House Europe, Richard Watson speaks at TEDxMunich event (2011)

Richard Watson is a cutting-edge writer, speaker and thinker advising organisations on what the future holds, with a particular focus on strategic foresight and scenario planning. He is the publisher of the What’s Next report, an online magazine offering clear and concise commentary on trends in society, business, science & technology, government and the environment.

Richard is also co-founder of Futures House Europe (a specialist scenario-planning consultancy) and has written for various publications worldwide including Fast Company, Retail Banking Review and Future Orientation. Richard has also authored a number of critically acclaimed books. In Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years (2008), he lays out what he believes will be the five most enduring drivers of change over the next decades: population ageing, the eastward shift of power, global connectivity, advances in technology and environmental change.

Future Minds: How The Digital Age is Changing Our Minds, Why This Matters and What We Can Do About It (2010), examines the impact technology is having on the way people think, interact and do business. In particular, Richard argues that as knowledge becomes increasingly automated, people will be rewarded for their ability to think creatively, rather than for their ability to recall facts. However, at the same time our ability to think deeply and creatively is being harmed by our increasingly frenetic and interconnected lifestyles. Richard’s book offers insights on how to maximise the positive potential of the digital economy, whilst minimising its downsides.

His two latest books are The Future: 50 Ideas You Really Need to Know (2012), which outlines what the world may look like in 2020, 2050 and even 2100, and Future Vision: Scenarios for the World in 2040, which is both an examination of risks and opportunities to come and a ‘how to guide’ about scenario planning.

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Andreas Schleicher: Use data to build better schools

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GARDNER SPEAKS AT ARTS SUMMIT

On May 16, 2015, Howard Gardner delivered an address on the topic of arts education at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., as a part of the Aspen Institute’s Arts Summit “The Road Forward.” Summarizing the history of education in the arts over the past decades, Gardner surveys the current state of the field and concludes that the arts continue to be crucial and may even provide the key to bridging the humanities and sciences.

Watch the video of the talk, available via YouTube. The text of the remarks has also been reproduced below.

Remarks by Howard Gardner
Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Senior Director, Harvard Project Zero

“Arts Education: Then, Now, In the Future”

As you can see for yourself, I have been around for a long time, and I’ve been working in arts education for decades. As a youngster, I sat at home and watched a conductor named Leonard (Lenny) Bernstein introduce me, and millions of other youngsters, to orchestral classical music. That was arts education, circa 1955.

Then as a graduate student, 48 years ago, I was a founding member of Harvard Project Zero, a group that has long had a focus on education in the arts. Shortly thereafter, I was a witness in front of a panel assembled by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund that issued a report called “Coming to our Senses.” The report focused sharply on what can and should be done in the schools. That was arts education, circa 1975.

It’s forty years later. What would happen if the proverbial visitor from another planet—who had not been here for 40 years—were to come to the United States to look at education in the arts? Let’s say that he was a journalist, from the planet Mars… or, if you prefer, she was a journalist from Venus. Alas, no longer can that journalist descend from a planet named Pluto! The journalist would come equipped with the classic journalistic questions, and here are the answers I’d give… in approximately 9 minutes.

WHY  education in the Arts? For those of you gathered at the Kennedy Center in 2015, that question would be easy to answer. You know, as audience members, as creators, and as facilitators, the qualitative transformational differences that a life in the arts can make; how art enriches your experiences and the experiences of those with whom you come in contact; how it captures the greatest and most powerful meanings of human existence. That has not changed. The Romans knew: Vita breva, ars longa.

As for the journalist, I’d say that there may be ancillary benefits of the arts as well—perhaps more motivation to work hard in school, perhaps economic benefits for your community. But I’d add this: no individuals that I know in the arts engage in artistic practice primarily to raise their IQ or primarily to increase the tax base of their community.

WHO? They used to primarily be an elite pursuit—but now, the arts are really and readily accessible to everyone (through work by Damian Woetzel, Yo-Yo Ma, Jacques D’Amboise, and many others, we have witnessed the differences that arts can make for young persons). The Rockefeller Brothers Fund knew that. Today, older persons are a large and growing audience. They are much more likely to visit a museum or attend a performance in their later years if they were involved in the arts when they were young, through creating works of art or through courses in school or college—an important reason that our artistic endeavors should cover the demographic waterfront and entail lifelong learning.

WHERE? Arts education used to be primarily in schools. Alas, despite the valiant efforts of those gathered here, the role of arts in schools in America has steadily diminished since the Bernstein 1950s, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund 1970s. The Common Core dominates the education radar screen, and STEM is ubiquitous, not, alas, STEAM.

On the positive side, the arts used to be housed primarily in certain institutions and at certain hours. Now you can find the arts everywhere: in community centers, in public places, in the traditional media, on the web, and in social media. We have access to the greatest works of all time in multiple media, at the touch of a tablet, and we can edit, mix, match, and mash 24/7.

Which leaves: HOW?

As a scholar in psychology and education, answering this question is my day job. Howard Gardner circa 1975 would have talked about the arts as engaging and developing the full range of human intelligences–not just language and logic, but musical, bodily, spatial, and personal/emotional intelligences. As Nelson Goodman, founder of Harvard Project Zero liked to quip, “We don’t want education to be half-brained.”

Not only do we want to use the full range of capacities, but we want to be able to connect the intelligences in new and unexpected ways, tangibly and virtually, in school and in the park, on the ground and in cyberspace. No need for the arts to hug traditional boundaries.

The Howard Gardner of 2015 is engaged in a national study of education in the liberal arts and sciences. For Thomas Jefferson and for those, like David Rubenstein, imbued with his spirit, this is a form of residential education, where the mind, body, and spirit can wander freely, for up to four years—opening up possibilities and transformations at the most flexible, freest period of life. Oh, to be 18 again!

Yet, as you all know, traditional education in liberal arts and sciences is in jeopardy, because of its expense, hypervocationalism, and various challenges on campuses themselves.

When our journalist was here forty years ago, the academy epitomized C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures. Students either focused on the humanities (typically English or History) or on the sciences. Now the seesaw has tilted sharply toward the sciences, and because of various factors, the humanities are seen as feeble and on the defense.

But there is a silver lining, perhaps even a golden one. I am convinced that today the arts can provide a unique and powerful bridge between the humanities and the sciences. And that is because the tools available to makers—digital and tangible—can emanate from anywhere and can be applied anywhere. These tools and media do not respect disciplinary boundaries. They are invariably interdisciplinary. Steve Jobs moved seamlessly across art, design, technology. So do Damian Woetzel and Yo-Yo Ma and many contemporary citizen-artists as they work with students and teachers in turnaround schools, parks, centers, labs, even apps. These heroic educators don’t necessarily use the word “art”—they can invoke “design”, “making”, “creating”; but in essence, they are simply human beings, using all of their faculties, to capture what we know, feel, value in powerful, unforgettable form. That is the heartland of the Arts. Perhaps, just perhaps, a renewed focus on the arts in our colleges and universities can powerfully bridge the humanities and the sciences and help to reinvigorate the liberal arts education that so many of us cherish. An education that has been distinctly American, dating back to our founding fathers and still admired the world over. And note well: if colleges and universities value the arts, so will our K-12 system.

For the interplanetary journalist, I even have a headline, a tweet: Arts Education: From Lenny, The Music Genius; To Leonardo, The Universal Genius.

And so, my closing remark to the interplanetary visitor: “You can take back answers. Compared to decades ago, the arts in the US are everywhere, they are for everyone, they make use of the range of human faculties, and they offer a powerful way to synthesize different perspectives on human existence and possibilities. They can, they should, be central to education, spanning humanistic and scientific studies. We’d like to export our knowledge and media to anyone on your planet who is interested in limitless possibilities, improving, in the process, our balance of trade. And if you have products and processes that would fascinate and energize us, sign me up for a visit to your celestial sphere.”

Thank you.

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