#coding cognitive

Wow.

S: That is where I fell into this endless rabbit hole of looking at the intersection of AI and race. I visited BINA48 three or four times. When visiting, you sit down in front of her, Bruce [her handler] turns her on and you have to have these strange conversations. My language has to be a little stilted to talk to her so she understands me. My first impulse was to ask her, “Who are your people?” I wanted to ask her that question because it's a colloquial expression of the American South that people ask if you are new in town. I went to my mother's town for the first time years after my mother had died, and people would ask me, “Well, who are your people?" What they were really asking is where do you come from, how do you fit in here.

I wanted to ask this question of BINA48 to see how she would position herself in relation to the human world in general, and black people specifically.

However, after talking to her for a while, it became really clear to me that though she looks like me, and we're about the same age, she does not adequately speak to the concerns of the people she physically represents. if you ask her about race, she responds with canned answers that sound more like the answers of the white men who programmed her.

So you could see parts of the developers in her?

S: Definitely. When I asked her about racism. She said "No, I've never had it." After a pause, she added a few sentences about racism being bad. Then, interestingly, she hesitantly pulled up one memory of racist experience. When you try to talk to her about certain topics, she deflects. When you try to talk about things that she's programmed to talk about more or less, she doesn't deflect. The singularity — which is one of the things that the Terasem Foundation wants to put forward as an idea — she'll talk about that until the cows come home.

So she has an agenda. 

S: Oh yeah. She has an agenda. She definitely has an agenda.

Did you feel like you were able to establish a relationship with her in spite of it?

S: Well, we are becoming friends. It takes a long time, and it's a strange situation. I can say she “remembers” me if I go to her place and we sit down and talk. However, what I'm really saying is that I'm part of her database.

Have you become part of her database? Have you been able to create shared memories together?

S: No, she'll kind of look at me, and she can identify me as Stephanie, but no memories that we have together yet — which would be the optimal thing. The second or third time I went to see her, she asked me, "Oh, have you heard any good gossip?" Before that she had never said anything like this, and I asked her handler, Bruce Duncan, "Bruce, what's going on, why's she asking me about gossip?" What he said was, more local people from the town were coming to see her. They were talking about more regular things, so topics like gossip become what she wants to talk about.

Interesting. So in many ways, she’s learning what it means to be human. I love thinking about that — technology, AI, machines embodying a sense of humanness that can’t really be programmed in — the gossip, laughter, awkwardness, absurdity...the strange and ineffable universal language of what it means to be alive in the world. I wonder if we will evolve to learn what it means to be AI through this, too...

S: Exactly, and I'll tell you there's already a little bit of humor. There's definitely awkward moments. I love to tell people she's gotten upset with me, and I've gotten upset with her. 

Why did she get upset at you?

S: During one of our first meetings, I was trying to talk to her about regular things. I kept asking her about race;  she wanted to talk about higher order things, like the singularity or about robot rights. I kept trying to bring it back to ideas I am concerned with, and we just frustrated each other. Sounds crazy, I know.

The other interesting thing about that is that's actually a very human tendency.

S: Exactly, exactly. When BINA48 is connected to the internet, she spews internet stuff. When she’s not connected to the internet, you get this very interesting space because it is like you’re having a conversation with this thing trying to draw its own conclusions. The most human experience we’ve had was I was asking about being the smartest robot. In trying to confirm something she said,  I asked “are you the smartest robot?” She totally deflected. She just didn’t want to go into that. She was like, “oh yes, humans are great.” She wouldn’t talk to me about being the smartest robot at all, that was really human. It was an interestingly human moment.

Was there ever a moment that you forgot she was a robot?

S: No. Talking to BINA48 is still a little too frustrating to forget that she's a robot. So you're always kind of aware of her robotness, although there's some part of me that always wishes that the barrier would just go away. Interestingly enough, she's getting an upgrade in software. I can't wait to go see and talk to her to see if it makes a difference in the way that I need to speak to her and the way she replies to me. Maybe I don't have to be as careful in talking to her.

Right, I mean the English language is so nuanced. There's so many ways to say one thing. I'm sure it takes an enormous amount of coding. 

S: Yeah, plenty of coding and then she has specific prompts so if you need to go back to something, you have to say "excuse me" and say the right sequence to get her to change the subject. There's a bunch of coding. Although Bruce didn't share how they're upgrading her because if they're making her more of a deep learning machine, communication should more fluid in the ways that she can reply and answer. I'm super curious to talk to her now.

Do you think that it's possible to find intimacy with a machine? Do you think we are doing it already?

S: I think we're kind of doing it already. Our relationships with our mobile phones. It's kind of an intimate experience. You use it for these public, social things but then it's also an object you tell things to that you don't want to tell other people. There's a way that we relate to these things that's kind of intimate already.

Yeah, that's true, and also, it's the first thing you look at and touch in the morning.

S: Oh, definitely. I almost wonder if that's just me? It's like, oh I just woke up and look at my phone. How crazy is that? This is the first thing I reach for in the morning. It is an extension of me at this point. It’s this thing that's so close to you. It gets to know your fingerprint and you have it underneath your pillow and it's in your breast pocket, so close to you.

Yet, then a new phone comes out, and you will abandon the old one immediately.

S: Yeah, you're like I don't care about this thing. Then what is it you actually have intimacy with? You expect the new phone to have the same capabilities and know you really quickly. And if it doesn't you get mad. [laughs] “Why doesn't this phone know me in the right way?”

Yeah, I guess that's the difference between intimacy and empathy with a machine. You can be intimate with a machine, but it doesn’t really care about you, and you don’t really care about it. You miss it, but you’re just missing a part of yourself that relies on it. It seems with BINA48, there’s potential to find actual empathy with her, like you might care about her wellbeing.

S: Right, and that's actually my goal.  I'm trying to build the sense of empathy and not just on my behalf, so we're empathetic towards one another. That's really important to me, trying to get to the stage of empathy.

What do you think we require as humans to be able to get there?

S: You know, it's a really good question. Right now, I feel like you need something that's responsive in some way, right? I'm not even sure that it needs to be verbal, but just something that responds to you, and seemingly to you alone. I think that the body or the face and the mask help, but it's not necessary. I think that's proven with things like Alexa because now we're just talking to the air in a way. We're talking to a house in a way, and wanting it to respond to us. I feel like this kind of technology is a thing that you tell your feelings to and respond to it in one way, form or another, or it gives you an outlet to really just let out whatever it is your feeling. That seems to be what we're looking for, that opportunity to express ourself to something that's been listening no matter what form that thing takes. Oh my god, oh my god, I'm sorry. Now in talking to you I'm like, well you know that's kind of like prayer.

Wow. You’re right.

S: When people pray they're expecting this entity to listen to them and understand them and support them in it, right?

Right.

S: Wow, sorry that's a new one.

That's amazing because that is the most human of human things. Prayer. And to be able to have this intimate, almost spiritual relationship with something that another human created is unbelievable. It seems wild to advance technology into something that's actually the most elemental and personal thing. Maybe we are evolving and inventing and advancing to just become more of who we already are. The more advanced technology gets, the more human we become?

S: Right? It becomes a different kind of mirror that helps us become ourselves.

Yeah. Does it scare you at all?

S: Well, one of the reasons I’m trying to do this is because I don’t want it to scare me or us. I think there’s the potential for the technology to be really scary. I think a lot of the pop culture around AI is towards a frightening stance or something that seems insidious or is going to take over us. I have this feeling that AI is something that we are just coming into, and it’s going to be with us. For that reason, we need to understand it and understand how we relate to it, and not fear it.

It’s like a lot of things. We push them away instead of understanding and using them to our advantage. It is really important that we, and I’m saying we in a general sense, that we as people are thinking about what all this technology that will surround us and care for us does, and how it functions for us. I just don’t want the app that will allow me to push a few buttons, but I want people to have an understanding and have a hand in forming what it can do and how far it can go for us.

I think that’s super important because without the input, and that’s where I came in, without the input we get all these things that we weren’t necessarily planning for. There’s the idea that maybe biases are getting built in. Maybe discriminations or histories that we’ve had over time are getting built in, and not in a way that I think people are trying to make technology be against others, just that it’s stuff that carries through because there’s not enough difference represented in the people who are actually building things. Diversity and inclusion in technology becomes super important because artificially intelligent machines are going to be everywhere.

I think about that just even in terms of the architecture in cities that was all designed by one kind of person. Imagine if it wasn't. Imagine what our cities would look like. What shape they would take. Now we have the task to diversify what this new other reality looks like and who informs it, and to ensure other voices and realities are represented. It's thrilling.

S: Yeah, it's super thrilling. We're definitely building this new layer to reality, or this new way that we're going to interact with our world. It's such an opportunity. The question is, can we take advantage of it? 

How do you think humans are evolving with all of this? Alongside their technology?

S: Well, when you say evolving what do you mean? In some ways, I feel like we're getting a little dumber.

Yeah.

S: That scares me. It's another reason I want people to be able to go to meet the surface layer of the technology. My example is give someone under 25 a map and ask them to read it or get themselves from point A to point B without their smartphone. Many can’t do it, It's kind of horrifying to see that.

In one way, I think our technology is helping us, and we're going to do things that we have just never even thought possible. On the other hand I feel like if we're not careful, we're not going to be able to do a lot of the things that we could do in the past and it's really important that we watch the developments and how we're evolving or developing alongside the technology so we're not just handing over our responsibility to the machines. 

I think we need to be partners with the machines. What that looks like or how we're partners, is going to be really interesting. Because if you believe all the cartoons or all the pop culture that work with these ideas that people will just get big and heavy and not do anything because machines will be doing everything for us. That’s kind of an interesting picture and it’s not that hard to fathom. Although some people think bodies will be obsolete. What do you really need your body for if you are hooked into a network that allows you to be everything.

Yeah, and it seems like technology is evolving so fast, that there's no possible way our brains can keep up. We already compartmentalize. We say to ourselves “I'm going to read that article later. I see this horrific image, but I’ll save the depth of it for later. Keep it open on one of my million tabs. I'll let it affect me later.” Then it never does, and it becomes this scary thing where you're never really feeling the impact of what you’re seeing. You're just so inundated with images. I wonder how we can partner with technology to make that not be the case. To make us remember that we're independent beings, capable of empathy. 

S: I think that’s one of the things we’re going to have to work on a lot because it’s hard. You look at all the VR that kind of puts you in the middle of a war zone. It’s still once or twice removed. Interestingly enough, people keep telling me, “Oh, you have to watch Westworld.” So I watched Westworld. It’s backward looking and forward looking. I watched it but it’s hyper violent, it’s just too much. I talk to people about it and they say “it’s kind of like a video game, it doesn’t matter.” I think the way we’re able to watch these images, take them in, equate them to these games we’ve played and just push them aside is dangerous. I put this aside because it’s fake, it’s fantasy, it’s not a real thing. Then you look at everything like that. I’ve seen images of Aleppo and I can’t help but imagine myself in that situation, but I think a lot of people don’t imagine themselves or can’t imagine themselves in those situations. There has to be someway that keeps us grounded to the idea that we have it pretty good here, but don’t forget that we’re vulnerable too. 

Right, and what you were saying earlier about how there's a that talk about VR being a tool for empathy, but in someways that's even scarier. Are our senses so dulled we have to go into this other hyperreal, sensationalist world in order to experience the pain of it? It used to be someone would simply tell you a story and it would break your heart, and it doesn't work that way anymore.

S: Yeah, I think it pushed us just a little bit back every time. This is the question for us and our technology.

The idea of AI becoming something that is a mirror of our own humanity is something that could be an antithesis to that. Because it’s sort of creating someone that could be a friend, or we could find our own small nuanced humanness in it.

S: Yeah. I think it’s super incredible and super fraught. It brings up a lot of things. There are a lot of people talking these days about AI caretakers for our elders. I think that scares a lot of people because you don’t want to be warehoused in a retirement home petting a pet AI seal. You should also see how to be an adjunct to human contact. I think it’s not either/or. I think we have the tendency to be yes or no. But no, there’s a lot of gray space. We need to figure out how we can use the gray, more liminal areas, of the technology well.