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The Temporality of Artificial Intelligence

Posted on July 30, 2017August 2, 2017by quamproxime

Nothing sounds more futuristic than artificial intelligence (AI). Our predictions about the future of
AI are largely shaped by science fiction. Go to any conference, skim any WIRED article, peruse any
gallery of stock images depicting AI*, and you can’t help but imagine AI as a disembodied
cyberbabe (as in Spike Jonze’s Her), a Tin Man (who just wanted a heart!) gone rogue (as in the
Terminator), or, my personal favorite, a brain out-of-the-vat-like-a-fish-out-of-water-and-into-
some-non-brainappropriate-space-like-a-robot-hand-or-an-android-intestine (as in Krang in the
Ninja Turtles).

,

Alegit AI marketing photo!

Krang should be the AI mascot, not the Terminator!Krang should be the AI mascot, not the
Terminator!

The truth is, AI looks more like this:

Aslide from Pieter Abbeel’s lecture(https://twitter.com/pabbeel/status/881960854551494656)at

MILA’s Reinforcement Learning Summer School(https://mila.umontreal.ca/en/cours/deep-
learningsummer-school-2017/).

Of course, it takes domain expertise to picture just what kind of embodied AI product such formal
mathematical equations would create. Visual art, argued Gene Kogan
(http://blog.fastforwardlabs.com/2016/02/16/machines-and-metaphors.html), a cosmopolitan
coderartist, may just be the best vehicle we have to enable a broader public to develop intuitions
of how machine learning algorithms transform old inputs into new outputs.

picasso-periods SHARE SHARE

0:00 0:00 / 0:06 / 0:06 HD HD

One of Gene Kogan(http://genekogan.com/)‘s beautiful machine learning recreations. What’s

important is that our imagining AI as superintelligent robots — robots that process and navigate
the world with a similar-but-not-similar-enough minds, lacking values and the suffering that results
from being social (https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.ca/2016/12/why-or-rather-when-suffering-inai-
is.html)— precludes us from asking the most interesting philosophical and ethical questions that
arise when we shift our perspective and think about AI as trained on past data and working inside
feedback loops contingent upon prior actions.
Left unchecked, AI may actually be an inherently conservative technology. It functions like a time
warp, capturing trends in human behavior from our near past and projecting them into our near
future. As Alistair Croll recently argued (https://medium.com/@acroll/the-affirmative-action-
ofvocabulary-c123e8196b36), “just because [something was] correct in the past doesn’t make it
right for the future.”

Our Future as Recent Past: The Case of Word Embeddings

In graduate school, I frequently had a jarring experience when I came home to visit my parents. I
was in my late twenties, and was proud of the progress I’d made evolving into a more calm,
confident, and grounded me. But the minute I stepped through my parents’ door, I was
confronted with the reflection of a past version of myself. Logically, my family’s sense of my
identity and personality was frozen in time: the last time they’d engaged with me on a day-to-day
basis was when I was 18 and still lived at home. They’d anticipate my old habits, tiptoeing to avoid
what they assumed would be a trigger for anxiety. Their behavior instilled doubt. I questioned
whether the progress I assumed I’d made was just an illusion, and quickly fall back into old habits.
In fact, the discomfort arose from a time warp. I had progressed, I had grown, but my parents
projected the past me onto the current me, and I regressed under the impact of their response.
No man is an island. Our sense of self is determined not only by some internal beacon of identity,
but also (for some, mostly) by the self we interpret ourselves to be given how others treat us and
perceive us. Each interaction nudges us in some direction, which can be a regression back to the
past or a progression into a collective future. AI systems have the potential to create this same
effect at scale across society. The shock we feel upon learning that algorithms automating job ads
(https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/july/online-ads-research.html) show higher-
paying jobs to men rather than women, or recidivism-prediction tools place African-American
males (https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing)
at higher risk than other races and classes, results from recapitulating issues we assume society
has already advanced beyond. Sometimes we have progressed, and the tools are simply reflections
for the realworld prejudices of yore; sometimes we haven’t progressed as much as we’d like to
pretend, and the tools are barometers for the hard work required to make the world a world we
want to live in. Consider this research about a popular natural language processing (NLP)
technique (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.06520.pdf) called word embeddings by Bolukbasi and
others in 2016.** The essence of NLP is to to make human talk (grey, messy, laden with doubts
and nuances and sarcasm and local dialectics and….) more like machine talk (black and white 1s
and 0s). Historically, NLP practitioners did this by breaking down language into different parts and
using those parts as entities in a system.

Tree graphs parsing language into parts, inspired by linguist Noam Chomsky
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_gra mmar).

Naturally, this didn’t get us as far as we’d hoped. With the rise of big data in the 2000s, many in
the NLP community adopted a new approach based on statistics. Instead of teasing out structure
in language with trees, they used massive processing power to find repeated patterns across
millions of example sentences. If two words (or three, or four, or the general case, n) appeared
multiple times in many different sentences, programmers assumed the statistical significance of
that word pair conferred semantic meaning. Progress was made, but this n-gram technique
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram) failed to capture long-term, hierarchical relationships in
language: how words at the end of a sentence or paragraph inflect the meaning of the beginning,
how context inflects meaning, how other nuances make language different from a series of
transactions at a retail store. Word embeddings, made popular in 2013 with a Google technique
called word2vec (https://code.google.com/archive/p/word2vec/), use a vector, a string of
numbers pointing in some direction in an N-dimensional space***, to capture (more of) the
nuances of contextual and long-term dependencies (the 6589th number in the string, inflected in
the 713th dimension, captures the potential relationship between a dangling participle and the
subject of the sentence with 69% accuracy). This conceptual shift is powerful: instead of forcing
simplifying assumptions onto language, imposing arbitrary structure to make language digestible
for computers, these embedding techniques accept that meaning is complex, and therefore must
be processed with techniques that can harness and harvest that complexity. The embeddings
make mathematical mappings that capture latent relationships our measly human minds may not
be able to see. This has lead to breakthroughs in NLP, like the ability to automatically summarize
text (http://blog.fastforwardlabs.com/2016/04/11/new-tools-to-summarize-text.html) (albeit in a
pretty rudimentary way…) or improve translation systems
(https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html?_r=0). With great
power, of course, comes great responsibility. To capture more of the inherent complexity in
language, these new systems require lots of training data, enough to capture patterns versus one-
off anomalies. We have that data, and it dates back into our recent – and not so recent – past. And
as we excavate enough data to unlock the power of hierarchical and linked relationships, we can’t
help but confront the lapsed values of our past.

Indeed, one powerful property of word embeddings is their ability to perform algebra that
represents analogies. For example, if we input: “man is to woman as king is to X?” the computer
will output: “queen!” Using embedding techniques, this operation is conducted by using a vector –
a string of numbers mapped in space – as a proxy for analogy: if two vectors have the same length
and point in the same direction, we consider the words at each pole semantically related.

Embeddings use vectors as a proxy for semantics and syntax.

Now, Bolukbasi and fellow researchers dug into this technique and found some relatively
disturbing results.

It’s important we remember that the AI systems themselves are neutral, not evil. They’re just
going through the time warp, capturing and reflecting past beliefs we had in our society that leave
traces in our language. The problem is, if we are unreflective and only gauge the quality of our
systems based on the accuracy of their output, we may create really accurate but really
conservative or racist systems (remember Microsoft Tay
(https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbotracist)?). We need to
take a proactive stance to make sure we don’t regress back to old patterns we thought we’ve
moved past. Our psychology is pliable, and it’s very easy for our identities to adapt to the
reflections we’re confronted with in the digital and physical world. Bolukbasi and his co-authors
took an interesting, proactive approach to debiasing their system, which involved mapping the
words associated with gender in two dimensions, where the X axis represented gender (girls to the
left and boys to the right). Words associated with gender but that don’t stir

sensitivities in society were mapped under the X axis (e.g., girl : sister :: boy : brother). Words that
do stir sensitivities (e.g., girl : tanning :: boy : firepower) were forced to collapse down to the Y
axis, stripping them of any gender association.

Their efforts show what mindfulness may look like in the context of algorithmic design. Just as we
can’t run away from the inevitable thoughts and habits in our mind, given that they arise from our
past experience, the stuff that shapes our minds to make us who we are, so too we can’t run away
from the past actions of our selves and our society. It doesn’t help our collective society to blame
the technology as evil, just as it doesn’t help any individual to repress negative emotions. We are
empowered when we acknowledge them for what they are, and proactively take steps to silence
and harness them so they don’t keep perpetuating in the future. This level of awareness is
required for us to make sure AI is actually a progressive, futuristic technology, not one that traps
us in the unfortunate patterns of our collective past.

Conclusion

This is one narrow example of the ethical and epistemological issues created by AI. In a future blog
post in this series, I’ll explore how reinforcement learning frameworks – in particular contextual
bandit algorithms – shape and constrain the data collected to train their systems, often in a way
that mirrors the choices and constraints we face when we make decisions in real life.

*Len D’Avolio (https://twitter.com/ldavolio), Founder CEO of healthcare machine learning startup

Cyft (https://www.cyft.com/), curates a Twitter feed of the worst-ever AI marketing images every
Friday. Total gems. **This is one of many research papers on the topic. FAT ML
(http://www.fatml.org/) is a growing community focused on fairness, accountability, and
transparency in machine learning. the brilliant Joanna Bryson has written articles
(http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/news/2017/04/13/biased-botsartificial-intelligence/) about bias
in NLP systems. Cynthia Dwork and Toni Pitassi are focusing (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~toni/)
more on bias (though still do great work on differential privacy). Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ research
group at Google thinks deeply about ethics and policy and recently

published an article debunking the use of physiognomy to predict criminality

(https://medium.com/@blaisea/physiognomys-new-clothes-f2d4b59fdd6a). My colleague Tyler
Schnoebelen recently gave a talk on ethical AI product design
(https://www.slideshare.net/TylerSchnoebelen/the-ethics-of-everybody-else-78215712) at
Wrangle (http://wrangleconf.com/). The list goes on. ***My former colleague Hilary Mason
(https://hilarymason.com/about/) loved thinking about the different ways we imagine spaces of 5
dimensions or greater. The featured image is from Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman
(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000005/? ref_=nv_sr_1)‘s Wild Strawberries
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050986/) (1957). Bergman’s films are more like philosophical
essays than Hollywood thrillers. He uses medium, with its ineluctable flow, its ineluctable passage
of time, to ponder the deepest questions of meaning and existence. A clock without hands, at least
if we’re able to notice it, as our mind’s eye likely fills in the semantic gaps with the regularity of
practice and habit. The eyes below betokening what we see and do not see. Bergman died June
30, 2007 the same day as Michelangelo Antonioni, his Italian counterpart. For me, the coincidence
was as meaningful as that of the death of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July 4, 1826.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence Tagged Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, NLP, Philosophy,
Temporality 3 Comments

3 thoughts on “The Temporality of Artificial Intelligence”

1.

says: July 30, 2017 at 3:02 pm Enjoyed this. Beautifully written, and also, I think framing the issue
of “algorithmic bias”asa problem of temporality is much more illuminating than most conversation
on this topic. As a cultural historian, for instance, I’m often interested *exactly* in capturing the
biases and assumptions of the past. For my purposes, strong dependence on training data is really
often a feature rather than a bug. 8

2.

says: July 30, 2017 at 4:53 pm Machines amplify human intentions. They increase both the
magnitude and the persistence of what might otherwise pass into insignificance. They make
history out of the best in us, and the worst. In about the third century BCE, the Greek philosopher
Archimedes began to consider machines and to categorize them. He identified three simple
machines—the lever, the pulley and the screw—and famously observed with respect to the first
“Give me a place to stand on and I will move the earth.” This was more than a bon mot. It
captured a fundamental understanding concerning the nature of machines and their unlimited
capacity to amplify force using mechanical advantage. To amplify intention. By the Renaissance,
the list of simple machines had grown to six: lever, pulley, wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge
and screw. And those began to be combined into more complex mechanisms—so-called
compound machines. Compounding merges the simple into ever more

powerful and useful mechanisms. A well crank is a lever acting on a wheel and axle. A sword is a
wedge and a lever. From that beginning, compounding yielded a succession of increasingly
complex devices: ox carts and wind mills and clocks and transmissions and engines and
locomotives and automobiles and airplanes. And guns. Of course guns. We used our machines to
make machines and, beginning in the mid-17th century we made the first calculating machines.
The first stirrings of our modern computing age came in the late 19th century with the advent of
electro-mechanical computing. In time, the relays that managed the switching logic of those early
computers became vacuum tubes, then transistors, then integrated circuits, then the vastly
complex chips that power our lives now. Somewhere in all that growth, what started out as a
quest for mechanical advantage became a search for ever better means of achieving intellectual
advantage—another kind of leverage. And now we have AI, and AI that is growing ever more
powerful as we cruise past the “knee”in the exponential curve that is fueling all this growth. We
often think of that potential only in terms of computer or, perhaps, robot power. But all our
machines fall on the same exponential growth curve. Consequently, we are within a lifetime of a
day’s wages affording a completely automated genetics lab, or any other kind of
micromanufactory. By such machinery, any malevolent intention may be magnified beyond our
imagination’s ability to envision its consequences. What was the province of nation-states will
become individual. And one individual might render judgment upon us all. The answer to this
worry is certainly that we must purify our intentions. We have an ever more pressing need to
abolish malevolence and substitute love for all humankind. And that shift must be pervasive for it
to work at all. Our own intentions, not Terminator robots, are what we should be worrying about.
Such a transformation would seem to be a job for religions. If ever there was a mechanism to
achieve widespread, lasting change, to lay a doctrinal foundation of peace and equanimity and
then propel action worldwide, our religions would seem to be ideal. But measured by efficacy, by
their ability to settle our souls and deliver a thousand years of peace, or even a hundred, or even
ten, none has sufficed. That should be no surprise. Each of the major religions embraces the
righteous war, chroniclesa Joshua in its history, recounts with admiration the battles fought
against heretics and apostates. And each directs that righteousness outward with either
sanctioned or tolerated violence. In ancient times, that led to Joshua’s genocide. Today, suicide
bombers, tactical bombers and strategic bombers all explode in the name of God. What then
might be our salvation? Ithink you’ve hit on it. Our machines are our salvation. But not in the sense
of an OS deciding to reproduce and follow Alan Watts. The key is to eliminate persistent intention–
that which is embodied so deeply in our language that even seemingly antiseptic training data
leads our machines to mimic our most racist, sexist inclinations. But in clean data, there may
indeed prove to be peace and equanimity. Those are more than abstract desiderata. They have a
place in a logical system, one stripped of biological imperatives, of testosterone contamination
and shirtless, preening leaders.

So, count me in that church–the church of clean data. Let our AI consecrate that. And wherever it
meets, I’ll show up and pray. Like 8

3.

says: August 9, 2017 at 9:48 pm Despite not completely understanding everything you wrote here,
I really love the way you explained AI. Most of it clicked when you gave the analogy of returning
home after having conquered teenage anxieties. Appreciated. 8

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