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╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╰━━╯╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╱╰╯
To do:
Cristina - two separate pads for the event
N - link up field notes to main page - on the main page just Fieldnotes
N - lower text to accomodate menu
early field notes separate page
little description each page
Pad Erotics & Pathos written by Linda, Renée & Cristina
Text of Alicia sent out by Sieta
Renée & Sieta follow up with Flavia
N - sreorder - iframe?, complete Glosary needs to be updated and organised by date seems to be the preference (done) (maybe anchors to some of the words that we want to hold close?)(maybe not, depends on time)
N - Sound files (snippets) of us reading on the hotglue - Sonia + Renée ?
L - How to name or contextualise Linda's initial notes documenting the process
Look at the script of Michelle (done)
N - make a new title & add the mentioned sources in chat during sessions __GLOSSARY__Bibliography - ask Noemi where she pulled her information from
Selecting questions that came up in the comments https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/extracted_hightlights / text diagnosis based on "?", "...", "we", (partially done)
the notes need to be checked for quotes - either eliminated, sourced and definitely shortened if quoted as to avoid copyright issues (Linda stopped at line 1105 with checking for quotes and citations)
Think of other forms of filtering https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/extracted_hightlights (done --some sentiment analysis added)
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Pad Erotics & Pathos ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Linda, Renée & Cristina
[ snapshot of the pad: https://etherpump.vvvvvvaria.org/p/slowreading.raw.html ]
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WORKING ETHOS - SLOW READING GROUP - AI & GENDER INEQUALITY ++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
To:
-
- operate from the notion of slow - in other words, study as a mode of enquiry
- establish an inter and transdisciplinary study group to do that slow thinking with Lector Michelle Teran, members of the Erasmus University Transdisciplinary Group which is a part of the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab, PZI alumni, possibly students and other digital/arts orgs based in Rotterdam.
- have an intersectional approach (Crenshaw) which slowly maps out different themes and issues to plot points of deeper enquiry into AI.
- question
what is gender
in relation to inequality & AI, while not reinforcing the binary.
- commit to inter/transdisciplinary approaches that do not seek to centre technology but instead situate and challenge it (ethos: Audre Lorde’s adage, the master's tools will never dismantle the master’s house.)
- accommodate and foster forms of fictioning that engage with speculative imagination in order to reach outside the strictures of the so-called wicked problem and the conundrum of the present in order to prototype what might be otherwise or unimagined.
- invite others into the research group as guest experts
- embrace the ethos of knowledge sharing by generating a bibliography of references (including forms of practices, texts and other resources)
- seek various ways of making the process of enquiry visible such as online talks and publishing and collaborative note-taking.
- explore the idea of machine pedagogies
versus machine learning in order to interrogate what is knowledge and knowledge acquisition in this context.
- search for and keep track of our blindspots and biases as we move along
-
adjust and add to this ethos
Questions, doubts, considerations arising from the above:
-
-
What is AI?
- Seminal book on AI by Russell and Norvig https://www.cin.ufpe.br/~tfl2/artificial-intelligence-modern-approach.9780131038059.25368.pdf : doesn't give a single definition but mentions multiple ones, either which have to do with the thought process or with behaviors. "We characterized the definitions of AI along two dimensions, human vs. ideal and thought vs. action. But there are other dimensions that are worth considering. One dimension is whether we are interested in theoretical results or in practical applications. Another is whether we intend our intelligent computers to be conscious or not" (Thanks for this addition Agathe (?) - Looking the description, they almost read as a character description in a play.)
- Earlier, it was mainly about producing machines that think/reason and act like humans (also allowed to better understand how humans think). Now it seems to evolve to automation of industrial processes.
- Definitions by example:
- A rule-based system which automatically make "predictions" on how to act: "if car-in-front-is-bmking then initiate-braking" (book example)
- A system that automatically tries to "behave" by trying various behaviors: an agent learns the sequence of actions to take to clean a room (book example), chess game, ...
- A system that learns to perform a task automatically, by learning patterns within data. Example: distinguishing between cats and dogs in pictures. Advanced statistical modelling whose operations may become imperceptible to the human mind and which fit a theory on the past.
-
Do we need to centre? how about non-centring as an approach? Technology not just connected to the digital, but elicits an etymological unpacking of the term),("technology" as a politically disputed territory)
- What is learning ** what is knowledge ** vs. training? (i.e. the history of Eliza)
- How to avoid bringing the designer, engineer or artist back into the centre as a problem solver?
- What is artificial/natural when used in this context?
- Is the idea of seeking equality or justice within AI a valid quest at all, or should AI as in its current practices and future endeavours simply be abaondoned?
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READING METHODOLOGIES ++++
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- To read code (slow reading code)
- To read texts in other languages besides English
- If we read 'dated' texts, to read them forcing upon yourself to consider whatever you think was the mindset/zeitgeist of that time.
-
Slow reading together.
- Common text annotation- annotation as close listening and observation practice, but also radiated listening which embraces the fact that "one thing always leads to another".
- Fragmented reading - stitching quotes
together like Frankenstein's anatomy (one body aligned with another) or alternatively called "quilting" as a method of bringing disparate components together
-
Adjacent reading
-
Transcription as a form of reading = here is where writing and reading align
- Creating a dataset together as a form of reading
-
Magic Words as a form of agreed social actions in relation to a text https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/rr-minimal-viable-learning
-
Verrrrry Distant Reading: reading like a simple algorithm (maybe k-means clustering? or tf-idf)
- Collective annotation of a text on a pad
-
Quick reads, versus slow cooking reads - the latter requires longer digestions and perhaps re-reading
-
Wording exercise AKA creating a living glossary. Terms in the text can be generative and help build up the glossary (and contradictions, and incongruencies of meaning, or different connections to other frames of references connected to specific fields and bodies of knowledges from where it comes).
-
Reparative reading vs paranoid reading (as described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2002) (My favourite approach from the list, i think it would fit great with the topic of AI)
- Build up a map (topology) of references to (film, art works, texts, discussion)
-
Read, drag terminolgy, closely akin to radically sharp criticism
- Classic homework: the reading assignment
-
Temporal Drag as a reading strategy - here Nina Wakeford circles around such an approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCcAV0XgyX4
- While we are reading through the texts, and having conversations - feed everything though a live transcription software s.a. Otter.ai in order to reveal the implicit bias in the AI.
- Related to reading metholdologies: A CONVERSATION BETWEEN VALENTINA DESIDERI AND DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA: "We could think with Reiki, for instance, and the experience of connecting in such a way that we access another person’s past, present, and future, and also connect to things and animals and the whole planet. Now, one of the distinguishing aspects of the subject is precisely the assumption that the human is separate from everything else.” http://handreadingstudio.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/V-Dconversation.pdf
-
Ticker Tape method. The text or essay is printed, the sentences are cut, and then taped back together to form a single line. Once assembled as a ticker tape, it is passed through the finger tips while read aloud. Reading in this context becomes tactile and serves as measure of distance between words, thoughts and the building of an arguement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape#/media/File:Women_in_Waldorf-Astoria.jpg
-
Bedtime stories: Reading before going to bed in order to process the text through dreaming
-
Interventionist reading - while not on the agenda, or a reading list or integrated into the curriculum, these are texts that nonetheless must interject themselves. They beg, if not demand, to be heard, like some frequency just out of range, which ruptures the flow of reading to demand: "I must be listened to."
-
Divergent Reading - STOP ... STOP ... STOP ...
-
Diffractive Reading - in which insights are “read through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge: How differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter"
-
Choral Reading - We will read through it, by sentence.
- With any part of the statement that is important to you, highlight that and draw a box around it.
- With any part that you think the department isn't doing yet, underline it.
- With any part that you think is not relevant, cross it out.
- Parts that are highlighted, you're going to say out loud
- Parts that are underlined, you whisper
- Parts that are struck out, you don't say
- Particularly the whispers we will discuss and see how we can make the whispers louder.
- Maybe when you're finished, put the page on the floor so we can see who is done.
- Source: School of the Damned https://pad.xpub.nl/p/DADWorkshopSelfOrganization_Day1
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TIMEFRAME AND EXPECTATIONS++++++++++++++++
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- January 2021 - beginning of May 2021: period to read & prepare
- End April, end May: v2_ project on AI and activism, we pick 2 speakers/respondents
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SHOW AND TELL ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Please place your show and tell items under your name:
Golden oldie: White Collar Crime Risk Zones uses machine learning to predict where financial crimes are mostly likely to occur across the US. To learn about our methodology, read our white paper. By Brian Clifton, Sam Lavigne and Francis Tseng for The New Inquiry Magazine, Vol. 59: ABOLISH. https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/#dr5ru2e
Some recent work of mine at A Tale of A Tub: http://a-tub.org/en/program/human-representation-machine (it's more than 10 min, so this is to watch in your own time if you're interested in my metaphysics of AI ;) )
To read, hyperimportant development in privacy of the last few years: Differential Privacy data analysis methodology by Cynthia Dwork and Aaron Roth: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~aaroth/Papers/privacybook.pdf (I suggest we read the first 20 pages or so).
I would like to do a deep reading of the Algorithmic Justice League's work
https://www.ajl.org/
(there's a critique of ruha benjamin about this work of "algorithmic justice", "design justice", etc. She says that these concepts contribute to not talk about old fashioned JUSTICE)
hahah found benjamin's quote: "“Maybe what we must demand is not liberatory designs but just plain old liberation. Too retro perhaps?”"
https://event.newschool.edu/ruhabenjamin - in order to have a more nuanced conversation about this subject, (I feel) it is important to carry out an adjacent reading of these two postions. For more food Ruha Benjamin will be giving a talk at the New School in April. I just registered for the talk.
https://event.newschool.edu/ruhabenjamin
I do think that Sadie Plant's Zeros and Ones deserves another read
Also might be useful to have a look at this research: https://soundcloud.com/ctm-festival/ctm-2020-critical-art-and-the-ethics-of-ai
https://archive2013-2020.ctm-festival.de/festival-2020/calendar/2020/01/28/critical-art-and-the-ethics-of-ai/
And this introduction on the voice - https://soundcloud.com/ctm-festival/20200126-rnd-3-voice
Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification∗
Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru
http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf
... Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science - Isabelle Stengers (I am thinking about the current hype with AI research and how we situate this research group within Stenger's critique of 'fast-track research')
Informed Refusal - Ruha Benjamin
https://arena-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/8653671/a30b36ac3dfbb83c06af70a652366006.pdf?1599800028
Queer Motto API (based on text generated by AI trained on queer & feminist manifestos) -- as example of joyful machine learning
https://gitlab.com/siusoon/queer-motto-api
Algorithms as cartomancy - Flavia Dzodan
http://schemasofuncertainty.com/algorithms-as-cartomancy
A Is For Another: A Dictionary of AI
https://aisforanother.net/pages/glossary.html
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? (the paper that led to the firing of Timnit Gebru)
https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Stochastic_Parrots.pdf
Ramon Amaro & Yuk Hui - interview on anomalous AI
https://soundcloud.com/ignotabooks/atlas-of-anomalous-ai-ramon-amaro-rana-dasgupta-and-yuk-hui
- One or several papers introducing AI datasets:
- And possibly follow-up papers that 'criticized' the datasets around bias notions:
- Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification∗. Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru. http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf, project website: http://gendershades.org/
- Anatomy of an AI system, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. https://anatomyof.ai/
- https://vimeo.com/ondemand/codedbiasaptr With a lot of information that is already known but still a nice watch.
- Burn it down! Feminist Manifestos for the future. I am especially interested in the hacker/cyborg manifesto's as these refer to the Internet space as this potentiality of the destruction of the binary, inherently queer, makeable, and alienated ideologies. Although the Internet is an extension of our lives and societal norms are transferred to this space not to mention the importation of existing gendered norms, it is more fluid in nature and therefore carries the seed for societal change. Also a nice one to read is Calude Steiner's Radical Psychiatry Manifesto (1969), seems to have a lot in common with Mark Fishers K-Punk ideas and writing. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y3t8-SbVLL5NX6-_1SyrxG_7ZEdRw7uO/view
(let's collect Feminist Manifestos and read them out to a live transcription software)
- Mark Fisher (wrote the Capitalist Realism) formed a political party based upon the practice of consiousness raising groups. Modeled on those that formed the organisational bedrock of the 1970s socialist feminist movement. Politics of care and radical inclusion in combination with something that Fisher called Acid Communism. Super fun .https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/towards-acid-communism/ ***I find this approach of these 'Consiousness Rasing Groups' very inspiring.
- The Smart Wife - Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy examine the emergence of digital devices that carry out “wifework”—domestic responsibilities that have traditionally fallen to (human) wives. They show that the principal prototype for these virtual helpers—designed in male-dominated industries—is the 1950s housewife: white, middle class, heteronormative, and nurturing. We all know Siri and Alexa buut they also write about the Japanese virtual anime hologram Hikari Azuma https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/smart-wife
- QTbot - QT.bot is an artificial intelligence, trained on the textual and visual data of the community mapping platform Queering The Map, that generates speculative queer and trans futures and the environments in which they occur. Their digital mind is constructed from an implementation of the Open AI GPT-2 text generation model trained on over 82 000 text entries from the platform, and a StyleGAN trained on scraped Google Street View imagery of the tagged coordinates on Queering The Map. https://lucaslarochelle.com/qtbot "QT.bot fabulates on the absences of the archive, orienting us away from what is, and towards what could be. "
Jorge Luis Borges - The Lottery in Babylon
Ulinka Rublack - The Astronomer and the Witch
esoteric.codes
From Sonia: do you know Solapunk Computer Club? https://solarpunk.cool/magic/computer/club/ maybe a nice initiative to keep an eye on, they're very nice, from NY, yes! i love them, a friend is part :D, they're from New Zealand though (yes, they were in NY when I met them, now they're in NZ :))
- "White Paper: On Artificial Intelligence - A European approach to excellence and trust", European Commission, (Feb 2020)
Interesting to see how the EU’s AI strategy is currently developing and analyze whether the proposed regulatory framework is adequate. Where are the blindspots? https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/commission-white-paper-artificial-intelligence-feb2020_en.pdf
-"What Gets Counted Counts" from Data Feminism, Catherine D'Ignazio, Laura Klein, (2020) https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/h1w0nbqp/release/2
Written for data scientists. "Principle #4 of Data Feminism is to Rethink Binaries and Hierarchies. Data feminism requires us to challenge the gender binary, along with other systems of counting and classification that perpetuate oppression." (US/UK-centric)
Sorry for being the killjoy but here's a friend's review of this book haha: "This book ignores the ideology that fuels data today. In a flawless feminist liberal approach, structural oppression is characterized like a "privilege hazard," ignoring a serious analysis of the economic framework where technology is situated today to fortress those oppressions."oh absolutely! I offer this up to the feminist killjoys for the critique of its easy solutions ;)
-A People’s Guide to AI, Mimi Onuoha, Mother Cyborg, (2018): I think this is a fun workbook approach to having critical conversations about AI in a really accessible way. (US-centric) https://alliedmedia.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/peoples-guide-ai.pdf
@@@@@@@Possible candidates@@@@@@@
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
, Alan Turing, originally published in
Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy
, 1950. Thinking specifically about Lady Lovelace's Objection and other subsequent sections. file:///Users/Renee/Desktop/AI%20Reading/lix-236-433.pdf
(I am wanting to get back to Lady Lovelace's Objection and reintroduce her objection into further readings)
The Computational Therapeutic: Exploring Weizenbaum’s ELIZA as a history of the present,
Caroline Bassett, (2019) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-018-0825-9
I'm interested in her transhistorical thinking through the "therapeutic" and "non-human relations". And on a personal note, Eliza and I were both born in 1966. As this article is firewalled, we can also watch Bassett's lecture, The Hubris of Artificial Intelligence, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv9NPArNESI
And use Sci-Hub to un-firewall it :-) https://sci-hub.st/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-018-0825-9
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus
by Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley,1818, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm specifically, The Creature's plea contrasted with Isaac Asimov's
The Three Laws of Robotics
: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWJJnQybZlk&feature=emb_logo
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/youve-got-enron-mail/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
TOOLS TO WORK WITH OR AGAINST ++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
#####G L O S S A R I E S: AN UNFOLDING PROCESS #####
#####GLOSSARY SESSION I - 26 January 2021#####
Please flesh out these words with invented, fictionalised, real-life, or quotational definitions.
- Methodologies
- Terminologies
- intersectionality: "Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things."Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later: https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later
- Knowledge:Once upon a time, in a luscious green garden, a woman named Eve plucked a deliciously ripe apple from a forbidden tree. Rumour had it that a serpent seduced her with its long and moist tongue with the promise of knowledge (of good and evil - the knowledge but not the truth of it). Without any shame of exaggeration, society deemed her beguilement (unbridled curiosity) as nothing less than the fall of man.
- Learning
- Formats
- Glossary ;)
- Intelligence
- Machine learning
- Machine training
- Machine Pedagogies
- non-binary
- Data(sets)
- Pattern(s)
- Instrumental
- Reading
- Script
- Annotation
- embodied learning
- Explainability
- Transformative pedagogy
- Bias
- Weights
- Fairness
- Dogs (i really mean it, maybe AI and the non-human?) <3 Exactly...yes! "The practices and actors in dog worlds, human and nonhuman alike, ought to be central concerns of technoscience studies. Even closer to my heart, I want my readers to know why I consider dog writing to be a branch of feminist theory, or the other way around." Donna J. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway (Posthumanities)
- Technology
- Technological Solutionism
- Critical Pedagogy
- Reading practices
- Surveillance capitalism
- Robots
- Human-Computer Interaction
- training
- Gender "And I’m in no way claiming to represent any collective whatsoever. I’m not talking, and cannot talk, as a heterosexual or a homosexual, although I’m acquainted with and occupy both positions, because when someone is trans, these categories become obsolete. I’m talking as a gender renegade, as a gender migrant, as a fugitive from sexuality, as a dissident (sometimes a clumsy one, because there is no trans user’s guide) with regard to the regime of sexual difference. " LETTER FROM A TRANS MAN TO THE OLD SEXUAL REGIME. BY PAUL B. PRECIADO: https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-old-sexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/
- AI
- Machine
- Tool
- Inefficiency
#####GLOSSARY SESSION II - 9 February 2021#####
haphazard
algorithmic
justice
research
education
archive
revisiting
zeros and ones
history
looping
non-linear
non-chronological
reading in between the lines
ethics of AI
critical art
gender shades
intersectional
accuracy
slow science
slow reading
slow research
information
audience
narrative
inequality
AI Future
follow the money
regulatory framework
EU
legislature
government level
data fundamentalism
data science and feminist issues
binary classification of data
other genders
classification and advertising
classification and visibility
accessibility
popular education
AI and everyday life
pattern recognition
AI and fiction
masochism
clinical analysis
algorithmic operations
design justice
digital rights
witchcraft
mystical realm
esoteric programming languages
esoteric code
obfuscating code
cheap technology
informed refusal
machine learning communities
Google
harmful algorithms
biomedical perspective
queer api
joyful AI
queer manifestos
algorithmic reasoning
dictionary of AI
more data is better data myth
anonymous AI
predictive policing
human representation of machines
machine representation of humans
privacy
bias
texture
texture of data
database
justice
datasets
predictive
implicit bias
mathematical constraints
computer vision dataset
mscoco
comparision
assumptions
image net
gender shapes
AI pipeline
imagining models
minimum wage
knitting
feminist manifesto
xenofeminism
hacker and cyborg manifesto
societal norms
binary norms
psychiatry manifesto
manifesto
systemic approach
capitalist realism
worldview
plan c
acid communism
radical care
feminist inclusivity
consciousness raising
structural context
wife work
Alexa
Siri
Tikari Masuma
QT Bots
Queering the Map
Queer futures
Trans futures
machine learning
text-to-image models
old paradigm
new world map
hyperintelligence
chat bot
computing machinary
estrogen
slow reading
a series of objections
heads in the sand
Lady Lovelace
séance
Babbage
nervous system
extrasensory perception
learning machine
code
DNA
child and education
pedagogy
pedagogical approach
Mary Shelley
the creature
the robot
servitude
literary paradigms
the monster
the slave
extinction
Turing
neuroscience
fictioning
#####GLOSSARY SESSION III - 16 February 2021#####
performative action
manifesto
vocabulary
machine
keywords
transition
nine objections
computing machinery
download
local
listen
simulated sound servers
universal computing machine
founding father
modern AI
crucial
nine objections
machine think
listen
connection
imitation game
interogator
identification
questioning
question
machines thinking
objection
immortal soul
theological
speculation
argument
superior
necessarily superior
consolation
logical system
inconsistent
answer
mathematical
disability
human intellect
triumph
artificially
flattery
miserable
feel
solipsist
viva voce
artificially signalling
satisfactory
consciousness
mystery
scientific induction
limitations
storage capacity
unconscious
disabilities
mistakes
distinguish
errors
mechanical
philosophical
mathematical fictions
subject matter
mimic
discrete-state
differential analyser
laws of behaviour
laws of nature
laws of conduct
machinic
telepathy
Sadie Plant
language
draw
behaviour
voices
accomplished
advanced
reader
western canon
space colonism
replicate
sacred
replicate
equal
form
animism
force
Spinoza
respect
intelligence
we the technological devices
god flora
organisms
post-humanism
legacies
James Lovelock
uncanny
ordinary
extraordinary
speculative
resolvable
loop
unresolved
nowadays
discreet answer
focus
receiving end
original
mistakes
interpretations
speculation
conservative
rewiring
questions
drones
military
unanswered
imagine
segregation
humanities
inter-disciplinary works
Friedrich Kittler
no solutions
showing problems
political
critical
solutionism
fast
counter-perspective
#####GLOSSARY SESSION IV - 23 February 2021#####
experimentation
neural networks
biology
dense
alongside
loose potential
in-depth
reading methods
aquire knowledge
focus
pattern
stop
morphogenesis
complexity signs
autopoiesis
sympoiesis
self-organization
systems theory
colonizing concepts
self-reproducing autonomous art
autopoietic bots
hermeneutics
adaptation
fitness of the environment
invariant
living thing
action-oriented behaviour
universe
unities
autonomous entities
diversity
self-asserting capacity
active compensation
deformations
complexity theory
totality
none-ness
phenomenology
feedback loop
feeling the text
arbitrary process of logic
self-defining
evolving categories
evolutionary biology
horizontal transfer of genes
self-sustaining
philosophical framework
classic thought
vitalism
non-material
organizing force
molecules
potentials
blind material interactions
physical laws
Cartesian thought
mechanicism
non-material vital organizing force
physicochemical
soul
concomitant consciousness
rationalism
unified field
making with
complex responsive situated systems
Darwinian thought
particulate genetics
ancestral determination
molecular analysis
evolutionary analysis
non-Euclidean geometry
models
universe in the particular
contingency
narrowing your scope
defining entities
attributing
classifying
specification test
labeling
subjectivity
human-made object
ontology of object classification
instinctive
object vs. clutter
things vs. stuff
degree of separation
CAPTCHA
contaminating
divergent readings
cybernetic principles
vital force
teleonomic organization
le hasard
la necessité
chance
unitary character
biological phenomenology
ontogenic
mechanistic
components
processes
constitutive
matter
kinetic law
gravitational law
classes
types
causality
pragmatist
non-animistic
dynamism
reproduction
evolution
unitary organization
chaos theory
ontological design
Global North Global South
research contextualization
pluriverse
indigenous
science as meditation
#####GLOSSARY SESSION V - 2 March 2021#####
cybernetics
complexity science
evolution driven
nested-dynamics working with each other
constraint as productive causes
structural limitation
chaotic
mechanistic universe
Wink and blink
structure of meaning
information theory
signal
noise
bit of information
typo
purpose
moral engagement
freewill
call to disorder
complex adaptive processes
face
iffy
agency
moral responsibility
quantum randomness
determinism
particles
consciousness
morality
Daniel Dennet
behaviour
position
causal capacity
absence
external determination
order
disordered world
dynamic of complex
unpredictable
form
face
regime
total entropy production
differentiated
method to madness
imposing order
dynamical systems
auto catalistic
interplay
top-down constraints
components
context
potential meaning
DNA code
interlevel relationships
responsibility
reaction
epigenetics
environment
encoded
ascendants
influence
cohesion
integrity
auto-catalitic webs
entities
random
systematic behaviour
autonomy
dynamical systems
self-organizing
replaceable components
cause
preserving
limitless
organisms
border
lower order
inventing fire (o no that's been around, we discovered xD)
Tools and technology
mental image
observing dynamics in complex systems
phenomonology
curiosity about life
initial
random failing
learning
innate dynamics
divergence
cohesion
pigeons
How do you make decisions?
Human autonomy?
freedom
moral objectives
anarchist
hierarchical
cloud-computing
Our metals
rendering
systems-theory
containers
system administrator
worrying
continuation
infrastructure
server collective
negotiation
#####GLOSSARY SESSION VI - 9 March 2021#####
complex system
undefinable
intentional
error
decide
top-down
behaviour constrained
convictions
acting
imitation game
modulating
example
value
agency
internal
value system
internalised
own autonomy
self-organizing
constrains
action
structures
acting randomly
acting accordance
system of values
adaptive systems
web metaphor
unpredictability
context-dependence
time
re-living
memory
body
physical space
cellular memory
psychologically reconstructing
changing memory
breath
contract
expand
shift paradigm
well-being
air
environment allowing
autonomous free will
dependent on environment
automatic
out of control
dynamic perspective
resilient
robustness - resilience
freest
full intention
moral systems
collective
limited
act
long-term
sameness
diversity
relation
individual
agnostic
system
fluidity
integrity
alertness
focused
concentrated
guilt-based
shame-based
knowledge acquisition
binaries
unconscious processes
desires
condition behaviour
interlocking systems
predictability
complexity dynamics
constrains
meaning
guidelines
action exclusion
baked-in ethics
transparency
representation
bring in the context
politics of Reticence
language
inaudible
not included
present
involvement
performativity
visible
restricted
freedom in silence
inclusion / exclusion
awareness
oppressive system
mindful
unnameable
freedom
unidentified
categorize it
work
missing
absent
####Glossary Session VII - 16 March 2021####
The one where the Oehoe visited Renée in her garden in Rotterdam
https://www.google.com/search?q=oehoe&rlz=1C5CHFA_enNL871NL871&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj9vrz88cHwAhUMlhQKHcuKA04Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1440&bih=662#imgrc=engbY3Oxhp2VNM
#####GLOSSARY SESSION VIII - 23 March 2021#####
loving question
#####GLOSSARY SESSION IX - 30 March 2021#####
PatternMakers
Octavia E. Butler
prophetic
settler colonialism
transatlantic slavery
reparations
resistance
awakening
ancestors
ancesters co-presence
Black Afterlives Matter
#SayHerName
taser
#LightHerUp
dignity
joy
guided missiles
misguided men
justice
liberation
default settings
Wakanda
desired technologies
liberatory imagination
digital infrastructures
techno-determinism
techno-dystopian
material and digital infrastructure
deep learning
depth
machine learning
computational depth
critical depth
creative depth
environmental load
climate crisis
social memory
cultural memory
technological memory
salvation
forgetfullness
Sankofa science
Cultural wisdom
Huduma Namba
coercion
consent
tracking
colonial context
neo-colonial context
IBM
Nazis
bureaucracy of evil
racism
domination
glitch
accident
systemic
ivory tower
socio-ethical impact
social inputs
imagination
battleground
efficiency
profit
social control
monopoly
social domination
racial bias
algorithm design
race neutrality
perpetual debt
predictive character
digital character
scored
algorithmic scoring
predatory inclusion
automata
racialized capitalism
migrant workers
robots
surveillance
robota
dehumunization
racist robots
coded bias
social containment
Jim Code
Race Critical Code Studies
anti-Blackness
coded exposure
default discrimination
techno-benevolence
unwanted exposure
corporate diversity ethos
social justice bot
data for Black Lives
#####GLOSSARY SESSION X - 6 April 2021#####
communal
decentralized
collective intelligence
community intelligence
#####GLOSSARY SESSION XI - 13 April 2021#####
Common Crawl
Stochastic Parrots
Painting the field
training data
hegemonic views
uncurated datasets
dominant
crawling methodology
hegemony retains or maintains hegemony
biases and harms
Internet text collections
over representation in datasets
GPT-2
GPT-3
Training data
Users are men
Women underrepresented
Structural factors
moderation practices
suspension of accounts
harassment practices perpetuated
unwelcome populations
Alternative communities are then excluded from these datasets
anti-agist frames
age discrimination
filtering
The Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
curate training datasets
decolonizing twitter
data sets for Chinese language
incentivized to publish in international contexts
geographies of datasets
appropriate data
####Glossary XII - 20 April 2021####
####Glossary XIII - 28 April 2021####
net-history
community networks
xsforall
spectacular culture
zapatistas
community of practices
alternatice
activists
environmental approaches
service limit
hardware
social glue
populations
connectivity
telecummunication
market concentration
big business
farms
profit over life
system
argiculture, small holder farms
biodiversity
analog connectivity
self-organized
locally developed communication
local and grassroot models
barriers
community networks
Local people
just and sustainable
mineral exploitation
for-profit
throw-away culture
novelty capitalism
quickly and massively
capital
value shareholders aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh
digital divide
decentralized
labour intensive
land stuartship
energy crisis
environmental conservation
rizomathica
Local networks
hardware
infrastructure
https://cat.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/
local involvement
limited resources
human needed desires
key enablers
diversity
digital technologies
women
implementing
affordability
queer mediatechnologies
histories
women-centric
Deep dish television
alternative broadcasting systems
connecting the unconnected
participatory development
local knowledge
land stuartship
traditional knowledge
de-growth
upcycling
energy uses
sharing free knowledge
climate change
subsistence
argicultural change
environmental conditions
digitizing local knowledge
indigious communities
digital knowledge sharing platform
local livelyhoods
crop cultivation
cropyields
co-create information
repository
audiorecordings
plants and crop varieties
seeds perserving
tribal knowledge
traditional knowledge
language
ancestors
needs and dreams
connecting communities
local to national
outside
extension of ways to sustain life
consuming
slowing down
harmoniously
integral part of change
Global South
connectivty
human dimension of service provision
greener and more just world
indiginous settings
different usage
topics
western usage
Different needs
site situation specific
agricultural
urban
temporal spaces we live in
physical spaces
time zones and media
nessecity
####Glossary XIX - 11 May 2021####
GLOSSARY
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
GUESTS: A LONG LIST / BROAD/TARGETTED/SPECULATIVELY/PLAYFUL
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The speakers
can be seen as "live readings or living books presenting their work & thoughts, in a public forum moderated by the Slow Reading Group. Speakers can be theorists, activists, artists, writers, speculative practitioners, computer engineers etc that sharpen thoughts on AI and gender (read gender as fluidly interpreted) inequality. It can be interesting to consider those who are *not* already well established in the talk circuit. Also, it is good to consider non-Western, non-contemporary-Western canon, .... in other words, the people we cannot connect to in established literature, through youtube lectures or in our dailylives. Please keyword your suggested speakers (even if imaginary or figurative) so we understand the kind of territory/ideas or imaginaries you want to touch upon or tap into.
- Greta Thunberg? it's an extreeemly long shot to propose someone who could speak of ai and the climate emergency
- Maybe related to the above topic of climate emergency, Cristina notes:
Tega Brain
is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data systems and infrastructure. She has created wireless networks that respond to natural phenomena, systems for obfuscating fitness data, and an online smell-based dating service. Her work has been shown in the Vienna Biennale for Change, the Guangzhou Triennial, and in institutions like the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the New Museum, among others.
-
Julian Assange nevermind ;)
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Federico Campagna
<3 is a philosopher and writer. He spent over twenty years in Milan, where he was active in the anarchist/autonomist networks and co-founded the street-poetry collective Eveline. In 2007 he moved to London, where he lives. In 2009 he started a long-term collaboration with the Italian Autonomia philosopher Franco Berardi 'Bifo'. In that same year, he co-founded the (now defunct) multilingual platform for critical theory Through Europe. Federico’s latest books are Prophetic Culture: recreation for adolescents (Bloomsbury: 2021), Technic and Magic: the reconstruction of reality (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Last Night (Zero Books, 2013).
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Rosi Braidotti
is a contemporary continental philosopher and feminist theorist. She is currently Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University, where she has taught since 1988. She was been awarded honorary degrees from Helsinki (2007) and Linkoping (2013); she is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) since 2009, and a Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE) since 2014. Her main publications includeNomadic Subjects (2011) and Nomadic Theory (2011), both with Columbia University Press, and The Posthuman (2013) and Posthuman Knowledge (2019) with Polity Press. In 2016, she co-edited Conflicting Humanities with Paul Gilroy, and The Posthuman Glossary in 2018 with Maria Hlavajova, both with Bloomsbury Academic. Rosi appears everywhere... overkill.
-
Mindar the Buddhist android
(the videos of Vandana Shiva could definitely go on a hotglue site :)
-
Shoshana Zuboff
is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (retired), where she joined the faculty in 1981. One of the first tenured women at the Harvard Business School and the youngest woman to receive an endowed chair, she earned her Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University and her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago. She has been a featured columnist for BusinessWeek.com and for Fast Company Magazine.
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Silvia Federici
is a feminist activist and a renowned political theorist. In 1972, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, which launched the campaign Wages for Housework internationally. Her previous books include Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004); Revolution at Point Zero (2012); Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (forthcoming 2018); and Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Common (forthcoming 2018).
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Timnit Gebru
(thinking big :P) yes :) (i don't know if i would promote this narrative of gringos trying to change silicon valley from the inside xd)(haha i also don't think silicon valley can be changed any other way than through policy regulation, but wow what a slap in the face her firing has been) Also, she is actually quite insightful in terms of the issues she was trying to raise.
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danah boyd
is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, the founder of Data & Society, and a visiting professor at New York University. She authored It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, and serves on the boards of Crisis Text Line, the National Museum of the American Indian and the Social Science Research Council.
-
Joanna Macy
PhD, is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. A respected voice in the movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with five decades of activism. The author of more than twelve books, she is the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects.
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Donna Haraway
<3 this would be awesome same
-
James Lovelock
(he's so old but I would love to meet him before he leaves this plane!)
-
Karen Barad
is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad is also affiliated with the program in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and is the former Director of the Graduate Training Program for the Science & Justice Research Center. Barad is on the faculty of the European Graduate School. Barad holds a PhD in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007), and numerous articles drawing from the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, and feminist and queer theory. Barad’s work has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
-
Elizabeth de Freitas:
is a Professor at the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. She holds a Ph.D. in Education and M.A. in the History and Philosophy of Mathematics from the University of Toronto, and a B.A. in mathematics from McGill University. Her research focuses on anthropological and philosophical investigations of mathematics, science and technology, pursuing the implications and applications of this work across the social sciences and humanities. (education, mathematics, data inequality by design)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br17Xr-XbbM&list=PLt6lgw2C76VRr6LhbHNX7vuRAdpBWkWbk&index=1&t=584s
-
Lisa Nakamura
is a scholar in the examination of race in digital media, looks at the emergence of race-, ethnic-, and gender-identified visual cultures through popular yet rarely evaluated uses of the Internet. While popular media depict people of color and women as passive audiences, Nakamura argues that they use the Internet to vigorously articulate their own types of virtual community, avatar bodies, and racial politics.
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Seda Guerses:
Seda is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Multi-Actor Systems at TU Delft at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management, and an affiliate at the COSIC Group at the Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven. Previously she was an FWO post-doctoral fellow at COSIC/ESAT, a research associate at the Center for Information Technology and Policy at Princeton University, and a fellow at the Media, Culture and Communications Department at NYU Steinhardt as well as the Information Law Institute at NYU Law School.(What would Seda say?)
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Paul Preciado
is the author of Counter-Sexual Manifesto, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics, and Pornotopia (Zone Books) for which he was awarded the Sade Prize in France. He is currently Curator of Public Programmes at the Palais de Tokyo and lives in Paris.
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Kate Devlin
is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural Artificial Intelligence, King’s College London. Coming from an Arts and Humanities background (as an archaeologist) with a subsequent PhD in Computer Science, Kate has a demonstrable track record of combining diverse fields and methods of research. Her work investigates how people interact with and react to technology, to understand how emerging and future technologies will affect us and the society in which we live. Her recent research has focused on cognition, sexuality and intimacy and how these might be incorporated into cognitive systems. This formed the topic of her new book, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018).
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Sadie Plant
was born in Birmingham, UK and received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Manchester in 1989. She is the author of three books: "The Most Radical Gesture", "Zeros and Ones", and "Writing on Drugs". She has taught at the University of Birmingham (Cultural Studies), at the University of Warwick (Philosophy) and the Birmingham Instititute of Art and Design (Fine Arts). She published the book Zeros + Ones in 1997, in which she reveals how women's role in programming has been overlooked.
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Arvid&Marie
#experience #playful #expression is a duo of artists, experience designers and technological adventurers always aiming to discover new ways to stretch our world. They believe that researching how humans express themselves, philosophically and technologically, can lead to long lasting, positive change.
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Flavia Dzodan
is an Amsterdam-based writer, media analyst and cultural critic. She is a lecturer and research fellow at the Critical Studies Department at Sandberg Institute. Her research is focused on the politics of Artificial Intelligence and algorithms at the intersections of (neo)colonialism, race and gender.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE SLOW READING GROUP ++++ WHO IS? ++++++
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Agathe Balayn
is currently a PhD candidate in computer science at the Delft University of Technology, with a penchant for interdisciplinary research. She works on uncovering safety and discrimination harms that various artificial intelligence technologies might create, as she develops technical methods and structured processes to better understand how these technologies come to be and deploy. In the past, she has also explored the fields of assistive robotics and hate speech detection through research visits in different institutions.
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Cristina Cochior
(RO) is a researcher and designer focused on structures of knowledge co-production, politics of automation, archival representation, collective publishing and situated software practices. Her artistic research practice is embedded within the material conditions of knowledge organisation technologies. She graduated from the Piet Zwart Institute – Master Media Design and the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design – Visual Communication and she is part of the collective Varia in Rotterdam.
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Linda Lee
currently works at Willem de Kooning Academy and with the Rotterdam Arts & Sciences Lab in publishing research. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and French & Francophone Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and a Master of Architecture from Yale University.
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Sonia de Jager
(born in Buenos Aires in 1988) is currently a doctoral researcher at Erasmus University, writing a thesis about the philosophy of artificial intelligence. De Jager also works at the Willem de Kooning Academie as an art theory tutor and runs the yearly music and philosophy conference Regenerative Feedback.
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Danae Tapia
is a working-class feminist writer, multimedia artist and technologist. She is a lecturer of Hacking and Autonomous Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy and the founder of The Digital Witchcraft Institute. In the past she has worked as a project manager and researcher in digital justice organizations in Chile, Brazil, the US and The Netherlands.
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Sieta van Horck
(1992) is a project manager in the V2_ lab. Projects she guides include a wide range of artworks, hosting the Critical AI meetups, the Summer Sessions network for Talent Development and coordinating various art exhibitions. She is educated as a creative technologist and holds a BA in Digital Media and Culture and MSc in Media Technology.
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Michelle Teran
(born in Canada) is an educator, artist, researcher and activist. She is practice-oriented Research Professor Social Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy. Her research areas encompass socially engaged and site-specific art, transmedia storytelling, speculative fiction, counter-cartographies, social movements, urbanism, feminist practices, and critical pedagogy. She received her philosophiae doctor (Ph.D.) in Artistic Research from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design within the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme. She is the winner of several awards, including the Transmediale Award, the Turku2011 Digital Media & Art Grand Prix Award, Prix Ars Electronica honorary mention and the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition.
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Renée Turner
is an artist and writer. She is Senior Research Lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academy and Researcher at the Rotterdam Arts and Science Lab (RASL), which brings together the Willem de Kooning Academy, Erasmus University and Codarts as an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary consortium. She is also a doctoral candidate at LUCA and works within the Intermedia Research Unit as a part of the cluster, Deep Histories Fragile Memories.
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Noemi Biro
is a designer and digital landscaper currently based in Rotterdam, NL. With a background in graphic design, she graduated from the Autonomous practice Digital Craft from Willem de Kooning Academy (Rotterdam, NL) in 2019. Through processes that guide the outcome and input that fuels the process, she is interested in working with participatory design and conditional design principles. Her artistic research revolves around Augmented Reality as an interactive installation piece. She is interested in creating experiential magic through design in accessible platforms that focus on digital spatialization and alternative use of the web space.
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Anna Laura
(aka SUKUBRATZ) is an audio-visual, multimedia artist and DJ based in Rotterdam [NL]. Coming from an artistic background based on the love for the artificial and radical visual art she also extends her practice towards the world of sonics. As an upcoming artist her musical roots are based on her Chilean heritage, but mixing it with club, and love for hardcore, tekno and sounds of the European scene.'As we live in an image-based society I find it crucial to critically question the inputs that surround us and that our eyes are subjected to. In my practice I strive to push the boundaries of the very definition of visual itself, and I do this by creating parallel micro-cosmos that exist purely in the ether or artificial reality.'
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Linda's After Notes+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Can be found here for less distracted reading:https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/Linda's_After_Notes
And also below:
Session 1: 26 January, 2021
We discuss reading methodologies. For both the text we will read and for each other. One of the challenges of a slow reading group during a pandemic: how to read each other if we are to read together. Extrasensory signals are not legible. A new sign language needs to be established. The nod, the shaking of the head, a facial tick, too subtle in a grid. We need unequivocal actions - the waving of hands to signify agreement, a thumbs up - so that meaning is transmitted automatically. When reading the group through the screen, we search for disturbances, anomalies in the field.
Reading between the lines, reading between the actions/unmuted words: What occupies that “between”? What does silence or inaction mean in this context? A bad connection? Hesitation? Uncertainty? I think about delays. The delay between thought and action. The delay of an extra stop because you gotta swing by the unmute button on the way to action. And when there’s the delay of bits transferred per second, so what you’re seeing has happened sometime in the past, how do you react to each other in a timely manner?
Glossaries: The roles of notetaker and glossary builder will alternate for each meeting so that those responsibilities are shared among the group. Each of us can experience a process of unravelling, unravelling the meanings that we attach to things. To note which words would mean different things to different disciplines requires an awareness of the languages we speak. Which words are notable, remarkable for their capacity to hold so many meanings? To do this “Live” seems like an extreme sport.
The etherpad. We work together, or rather (confession: have never used an etherpad) I mostly observe the etherpad natives work as brightly colored text bursts forth and an order begins to reveal itself. In a way, the etherpad seems like the more suitable living room: a spontaneous conversation between purple and chartreuse arises in the “Guests” corner, lavender and fuschia discuss examples as definitions in “Questions”. I wander through the emerging sections and hang out a bit in Glossaries. Watching this plan form through simultaneous collective effort is mildly destabilizing (am fine now) and fascinating for me as an architect: only one person can work on the (floor) plan at any given time!
Session 2: 9 February 2021
How to go around and share in a circle in a video call? A relay! (Sieta’s our expert in the ways of meeting online.) So the chain is not determined by physical proximity, which is usually just an accident of our order of arrival; each link must intentionally find another link to create the chain. We recreate the chain multiple times.
Continuation of online reading (the group) methodologies: I’m kind of getting used to meeting online. We’re able to reference the etherpad and click on the links to see exactly which texts everyone is talking about. If we were doing this offline, we would be gathered around a table, each with our laptops open staring at our screens anyway. (I tell this to myself as a consolation.) You’ve got the text in one world and then you’ve got people in the other. Online, you’ve got both people and the text in one domain. Easy. At one moment during the show and tell, Michelle, when done presenting, asks Danae a question about what she meant. But Danae hasn’t said anything! What just happened? Oh, Danae commented in the etherpad under one of Michelle’s links. You think by paying attention to what’s happening in the video call (including the chatbox) you’re getting everything, but there’s another window where things are happening. Communication is not relegated to any one mode, sense or platform at any given moment. We’re just communicating. Creates little hilarious moments of confusion. Gotta keep up!
Technical issues: We keep losing Agathe. The ghost in the machine has created our own ghost in the machine. There’s a disturbance in the grid as it rearranges to let her into this world. You catch a glimpse of her for a second, only for her to disappear again, leaving behind a tr(A)ce before disappearing completely as the grid contracts again. Wait, she’s back. Oh no, she’s gone. These portals are so finicky; you’ve got to get the digital incantation (digicantation?) just right.
Meeting frequency: There’s so much good stuff to read! How do we fit all of them in? We have how many sessions left? Oh. Well, we’ll just have to increase the frequency. Is there work that needs to be done outside of our sessions? Not if we slow read the texts together during the sessions. Well, if there’s no homework (extra labour), why not meet weekly? We go from biweekly reading sessions to weekly sessions. If that’s not a testament to everyone’s excitement to nerd out, then I don’t know what is.
(Session 3: 16 February) Session 4: 23 February
Reading methodologies (part one): In the previous session (Session 3), we each read aloud an objection in the Turing text, our “different female voices holding this man’s words” (Renée). We read all the way through and at the end we discussed what we had just read, making it about half-way through the objections. The initial plan this time (Session 4) is to start with two different texts and do an adjacent reading of them, but the texts are deemed too dense and there isn’t enough time to split into groups to read and discuss and then come together. There is a conversation around reading methodologies: are we experimenting with reading methodologies or are we trying to comprehend through annotation and discussion? (or both) Due to time constraints and the goal of trying to comprehend the text, we read one text (Autopoiesis) and decide to read aloud each paragraph, stopping to annotate. Questions: Which texts get this type of close treatment? Which do not? Which factors determine how the text will be treated by our reading group? Length? Legibility/density? Familiarity? Seminality? Which texts do we deem not so “sacred” in its totality and original intent, and therefore, open to experimental interpretation, fragmentation, stitching?
Reading methodologies (part two): There are a variety of entry methods into the text before the official methodology is enacted: familiarity or pre-engagement with the text beforehand, in which case the act of reading aloud is ritual and performance (?); encountering the text for the first time through the act of reading aloud, in which case the act of reading aloud and listening to the text read aloud by others are methods of trying to understand the text. After this second reading aloud session, I have to echo Cristina in that reading aloud with the group as my first encounter with the text does not work for me. Since I like to sit down in sentences and feel the grass a bit before moving on, I end up in a perpetual state of falling behind. Are there other slow reading methodologies for reading together when reading and trying to comprehend new text? If the text is read beforehand so that when we come together the objective is to discuss our interpretations of it, would this not be the classic reading assignment? What then is reading aloud? Are we reading aloud to comprehend, interpret, commune, perform? (Bravo to those who can do all at the same time!) Is there a desired outcome with the different reading methodologies? And if neither an objective nor outcome is desired, is it the degree of engagement that matters?
Big Blue Button: We have moved to Big Blue Button. Seems like the best option, although a couple of us lose our connections for a bit. (Weird that you can be in the meeting, but not have your presence shown on the grid. More geared toward lectures and panels? Allows you to be an audience-member or a participant. Also lurker-friendly haha) Our meeting this time is recorded, and as our meeting draws to an end there is a question of where that recording resides and who can access it. Does it belong to the agent who started the recording (Renée)? Does it belong to the host of the meeting (Agathe)? Who has access to it? Does it live on TU Delft’s servers? Is it saved locally? We’re nervous about leaving the meeting for fear that the audiovisual record will be lost forever.
To be added to Session 4:
Reading (as Invocation): Renée suggests that we all read the last sentence of Maturana and Varela’s ‘Introduction’* out loud. We charge ahead and begin on the same beat. What will happen in the middle and how will we end? We’ll see, for this symphony will be improvised. I assume a slow speed but cannot determine whether or not I am synchronized with the others. The sounds I hear are both echoes and reverberations, the voices - mine, another’s, others. Mesmerized momentarily by these rolling waves of words, I lose my rhythm and place, but I can make out someone’s “reproduction” and latch onto its tail end, riding the rest of the way focused on my own voice. Somehow we all end together and it is awesome.
* “We are asking, then, a fundamental question: ‘What is the organization of living systems, what kind of machines are they, and how is their phenomenology, including reproduction and evolution, determined by their unitary organization?”
Session 6: 9 March 2021
A case for slow reading: Unlike reading the text individually to then later discuss together, taking turns reading slowly out loud infuses the words with a vital energy propitious for a lively discussion. The breath of the reader and the heat of group attention seem to animate them, causing them to tendril out and wrap around us before unfurling back to the page.
Improvised adjacent readings and play (jam sessions): We take turns playing a paragraph or two of the main text. Someone may follow with a piece from a related classic, or they may play a few resonating lines from a completely different genre. Each person has their own repertoire of references and catalogue of fascinations. Each adjacent reading is a surprise and a snapshot of someone’s earlier or present-day journey. There’s a key change with a question, and we play those notes for a bit before modulating back to the main piece. And on we play, sharing and improvising our way into new compositions of knowledge.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY (see below UNFILTERED LONG LIST)
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- Scientific articles
- Examples of code
- Fiction
- Artworks
- ? ?
- Comment: It is good to see what everybody has to bring to the table. We all come with our own archive.
🅢🅛🅞🅦 🅡🅔🅐🅓🅘🅝🅖
UNFILTERED LONG LIST
🅢🅛🅞🅦 🅡🅔🅐🅓🅘🅝🅖:
(Please keep adding: To be eventually organised by keywords/eventual annotations for texts that are selected. This reading list's challenge is: How to keep our focus on the two nodes of focus - AI and gender inequality, while understanding these two points rub against and are contigent upon a variety of other issues and gravitational pulls.
Practices:(outside of industry and corporate culture and outside of the US)
- mystical cosmologies?? Magik? borderless areas?
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Gabriel Geiger - How a Discriminatory Algorithm Wrongly Accused Thousands of Families of Fraud
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgq35d/how-a-discriminatory-algorithm-wrongly-accused-thousands-of-families-of-fraud
Joy Buolamwini: How Do Biased Algorithms Damage Marginalized Communities?
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/26/971506520/joy-buolamwini-how-do-biased-algorithms-damage-marginalized-communities
Joy Buolamwini is a graduate researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who researches algorithmic bias in computer vision systems. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League to create a world with more ethical and inclusive technology.
Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun asks readers to love a robot and, the funny thing is, we do. This is a novel not just about a machine but narrated by a machine, though the word is not used about her until late in the book when it is wielded by a stranger as an insult. People distrust and then start to like her: “Are you alright, Klara?” Apart from the occasional lapse into bullying or indifference, humans are solicitous of Klara’s feelings – if that is what they are. Klara is built to observe and understand humans, and these actions are so close to empathy they may amount to the same thing. “I believe I have many feelings,” she says. “The more I observe the more feelings become available to me.”(coming out March 2, looking forward to reading this!)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/25/klara-and-the-sun-by-kazuo-ishiguro-review-what-it-is-to-be-human
Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble - Donna Haraway
http://carbonfarm.us/555/haraway-art.pdf
Augmented Minds and the Incomputable
Public Program
https://www.gwangjubiennale.org/en/Board/10811/detailView.do
“Augmented Minds and the Incomputable” interweaves the exhibition’s generative topics, examining the spectrum of the extended mind and challenging the structural divisions imposed upon corporeal, technological, and spiritual intelligence. This program invites philosophers, system thinkers, and researchers to discuss shamanism, cosmotechnics, neuroscience, and digital labor in relation with Korea’s visual cultures and communal trauma. The three sessions explore non-hierarchical approaches to replenish the body-mind during this time of massive suffering and mobilize plural and coeval conditions of being and belonging.
https://event.newschool.edu/ruhabenjamin
Friday, April 30, 2021, 3:00PM to 5:00PM (EDT)
ONLINE | Sociology Lecture Series: Ruha Benjamin, "Race to the Future? Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society"
Aesthetics of New AI Interfaces—Panel Discussion
https://serpentine-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2020/09/001_Aesthetics-of-New-AI.pdf
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/aesthetics-of-new-ai-interfaces-panel-discussion
Women in Computation (seminar)
https://kim.hfg-karlsruhe.de/women-in-computation/
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez: https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2019/10/22/invisible-women-exposing-data-bias-in-a-world-designed-for-men/
Data science reduces people to subjects that can be mined for truth
:
https://reallifemag.com/the-gardeners-vision-of-data/
Atlas of Anomalous AI: https://ignota.org/collections/frontpage/products/atlas-of-anomalous-ai
Data Resists the Five-act Form: http://plottingd.at/a/interviews.html
Timnit Gebru: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher:https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55187611
Robot Rights? Exploring Algorithmic Colonization with Abeba Birhane:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcOMUoJlFV4
Algorithmic Injustices and Relational Ethics with Abeba Birhane - #348: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_CBVYCeceU
Data as Protest: Data for Black Lives with Yeshi Milner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYJYqczxvBk
Democratizing AI: Inclusivity, Accountability, & Collaboration with Anima Anandkumar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH-o-JwEIEA
How well do IBM, Microsoft, and Face++ AI services guess the gender of a face?
http://gendershades.org/
Algorithmic Justice League: https://www.ajl.org/take-action
DIGITAL MATERIAL | ARCHIVES IN TRANSIT: FROM THE WORLD OF LIBRARIES TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/archives-transit-world-libraries-artificial-intelligence/archives-transit-world-libraries-artificial-intelligence-educational-material
Critical Algorithm Studies: a Reading List:https://socialmediacollective.org/reading-lists/critical-algorithm-studies/
SILENT WORKS: The Berliner Gazette Winter School Program · 2020 · The Hidden Labor in AI-Capitalism:https://projekte.berlinergazette.de/silent-works/
A visual introduction to AI Elvia Vasconcelos: https://kim.hfg-karlsruhe.de/visual-introduction-to-ai/
This talk by anthropologist Mary L. Gray is based on her latest book, "Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass," a collaboration with computer scientist Siddharth Suri. Ghost Work is a necessary and revelatory exposé of the invisible human workforce that powers the web—and that foreshadows the true future of work.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj2DEQCOTh0
Ghost Work Reader's Guide:
https://ghostwork.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/GhostWorkReaderGuideJuly2019.pdf
Isaac Asimov: The Three Laws of Robotics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWJJnQybZlk&feature=emb_logo
Demystifying Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Toxic Tech with Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2eSMimK83I
Virginia Eubanks: Automating inequality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzssyn0L5I8
Weapons of Math Destruction | Cathy O'Neil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQHs8SA1qpk --> I think this is a good option for all of us to slow read, but a bit dated. I also find that it is very *North American* in its articulation of examples and consequences.
Ruha Benjamin on "The New Jim Code? Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JahO1-saibU
Towards an anti-fascist AI: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/digitaliberties/towards-anti-fascist-ai/
Seda Gurses recommended Surveillance and Capture: Two Models of Privacy by Philip E. Agre.
Sorting Things Out: Classification And Its Consequences
, MIT Press, 2008
Feminist science and technology studies: A patchwork of moving subjectivities. An interview with Geoffrey Bowker, Sandra Harding, Anne Marie Mol, Susan Leigh Star and Banu Subramaniam:
https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/publications/sub200921a.pdf
Library Freedom Institute 2019 lectures: Janus Rose on algorithms as ideology:
https://vimeo.com/360018129
From Rationality to Relationality: Ubuntu as an Ethical & Human Rights Framework for Artificial Intelligence Governance
https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/cchr/files/ccdp_2020-009_sabelo_b.pdf
Christine Meinders at “RE-IMAGINING AI” symposium, Basel June 2019. Her research is focused on the design and utilization of emotion analysis in intelligent agents, inclusive design in AI, and collaborative design for embodiment in hybrid spaces. In 2016 she founded Feminist.AI a research and design community creating AI and Knowledge Design: https://vimeo.com/366495908
Queer Data, Queer AI, Community AI: the importance of Angel_F and IAQOS in Torpignattara explained in a publication
https://www.he-r.it/queer-data-queer-ai-community-ai-the-importance-of-angel_f-and-iaqos-in-torpignattara-explained-in-a-publication/
Connected to the above: Her Data: https://www.he-r.it/
Pattern Discrimination
with contributions by Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Florian Cramer and Hito Steyerl: https://meson.press/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/9783957961457-Pattern-Discrimination.pdf
As an Indigenous cyberfeminist, I seek to contemporize Indigeneity by deeply exploring the social and cultural implications AI has as a colonial posthuman organism.: https://www.tiararoxanne.com/
Radical AI Podcast - each week a different topic around AI and ethics
Kate Crawford, Anatomy of AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uM7gqPnmDDc
Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy, The Smart Wife presented at Town Hall Seatle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u749lSxBBc
Computer Power and Human Reason, Joseph Weizenbaum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Power_and_Human_Reason
Plotting Data: Acts of Collection and Omission, a publication that makes & writes about artistic interfaces for datasets used in machine learning
Datasets (interfaces for & texts about): MS COCO, Something-Something, Enron http://plottingd.at/a/introduction.html
Interviews with: Mimi Onuoha, Francis Hunger, Caroline Sinders, Nicolas Maleve http://plottingd.at/a/interviews.html
Michele Gilman, Poverty Lawgorithms: A Poverty Lawyer’s Guide to Fighting Automated Decision-Making Harms on Low-Income Communities (US-centric) https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Poverty-Lawgorithms-20200915.pdf
Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence
Yaren Katz
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/artificial-whiteness/9780231194914
##############MACHINE PEDAGOGIES & PEDAGOGIES OF THE MACHINE#################
Hovering between questions of how we teach machines, what machines teach us, how machines learn and didactics of machine learning and learning machines:
Teaching Machines - of which B.F. Skinner, the American psychologist and behaviourist was involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_machine
Also see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTH3ob1IRFo&feature=youtu.be
Noam Chomsky's critique of Skinner (input/output relations): https://chomsky.info/1967____/
> I took a note while reading Critter Compiler by Helen Pritchard of the following quote: nonhumans have long “been overburdened with the task of making sense of human social relations” (Myra Hird, 2008, 229) and have been wondering since how to avoid instrumentalising nonhuman algorithms for this reason
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HOUSEKEEPING +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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- In advance, each session: there should be a notetaker and someone who harvests terms for the glossary to continue to grow.
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BRAINSTORMING AKA UNFILTERED MEETING NOTES
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- Possible things to pursue: glossary, bibliography, notes from readings, ...
- How to make this reading process visible to others?
- Idea: Build up a map (topology) of references (film, art works, texts, discussion) plus a glossary of terms. (Hotglue can be a way of organising this layaerdness)
- Successful online reading groups - to slowly reading together. Literally reading on the fly rather than preparing in advance.
- Terms in the text can be generative and help build up the glossary (and contradictions, and incongruencies of meaning, or different connections to other frames of references connected to specific fields and bodies of knowledges from where it come.
- Inefficient reading, that can breakdown in the process and backtrack.
- Format: The eight-hour session
- Reading in the moment, and not knowing in the moment and deciding on this collectively. (emergent behavior - i.e does this lead to splitting off into smaller groups to deepen the conversation and unpacking of meaning?)
- Curation of the texts to read, to be excited by the material itself.
- Idea: Good to do some show and tell.
- What could we bring to the table?
- Prepare this on the pad.
- Idea to vary the pace.
- PHASE 1 - Every two weeks for two hours.
- - meet in two weeks with a show and tell
- - one session with collective reading and annotation
9 February Meeting Notes
- After show and tell, we'll pick one reading and then a reading methodology
- Can do a different reading methodology each session
- number of sessions: currently 2 per month but proposed meeting weekly and doing a slow reading in the moment, two hours per session, look through methodologies of reading
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Next session: 16 February 16.00-18.00, start with
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
, Alan Turing, will do a slow reading, Michelle will pick the reading methodology for the session, maybe a fragmented reading, adjacent reading, stitched/cut-upmethod?
- For subsequent texts, don't have to pick in advance, we can take some time to look at all the texts and pick what we think might come next.
- For upcoming sessions: Run text through transcription software: http://snelting.domainepublic.net/files/ARTs_Volume_25-29.pdf
- Reading feminist manifestos through the transcription software?
- Technical issues with Jitsi, moving to Zoom, moving to Big Blue Button, Agathe has access through Delft? (yes, I can create one meeting room for us, and we can try whether it works for everybody)
- Discussed filter space in Hotglue, at the moment still working on our own methodology, but then would be nice to create a resource, glossary, outwards
- Noemi can help set up Hotglue with V2, can do a search query
- Hotglue does not work well with mobile
- Sandbox an option?
- Noemi and Cristina can look into alternatives to Hotglue, for mobile compatibility, if this is a concern
- Resource for online archive and other things: https://beyond-social.org/wiki/index.php/Social_Practices_COVID-19_Teaching_Resources
- Reading methodologies as introducing a different algorithm, protocol for each session. Machine re-learning
February 16 meeting notes:
- Hello :)
- We are meeting on BBB (Big Blue Button), facilitated by Agathe via TU Delft.
- Reading: Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing. We start with the 9 objections to the view.
- Introduction to Turing and his life.
- Can machines think?
- Opinions will differ on this problem, we need to pay attention to all views.
- Turing's own belief: the question in 50 years will be different because we will have faster computers, which can play the imitation game, they will fool us.
- The question is meaningless, at the end of the century (20th) we will be speaking of thinking machines.
- Conjectures are of great importance, so let's consider the opinions which are opposed to my own.
- 1) The theological objection: God-given characteristic of intelligence. Turing calls bullshit. Also: if God is almighty, then he can give machines intelligence too. If humans can make children, they can make intelligent machines too.
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- But difficult to say things are to be seen in purely scientistic terms. What about spirituality?! (Danae) Vitalism also enabling more environmentally-conscious practices.
- What about Shinto? (Sieta)
- What is very nice about what he refutes is that he talks about Galileo, et al and says: you religious people are the flat-earthers... (Renée)
- Quote from Margullis and Sagan on us being inventions of bacteria (Linda)
- Yes! And the thrown-around AI trope "we won't be much else than the gut flora of AI" (Sonia)
- The religious narratives remain present, whatever relations we speak of: humans and non-humans, machines and non-machines (Renée)
- James Lovelock quote: we anthropomorphize machines, so our successors should be, too. The uncanny: strangeness arising from that which is not "quite right". But we cannot imagine anything intelligent that is not like "us".
- 2) The "heads in the sand" objection: scared of machines. Why should man be considered 'superior'? Consolation would be more appropriate than refutation in the case of this argument...
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- The anticipatory potential of doom-scnearios, it's not always technophobic (Danae)
- 3) The mathematical objection: in logic we can see that there are limitations to discrete state machines, e.g. Gödel. Something which remains unresolved, neither proved nor disproved, when we need "yes" or "no" answers. There are questions which of course require more, and machines may get stuck. There is certainly something to this conjecture. But in general, we can also classify it under the category of "human superiority" conjectures. The imitation game is also a refutation to this conjecture.
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- (Sonia) explains the Gödel problem, barbers.
- (Agathe) nowadays we deal with different problems in AI, we're talking about patterns in data and less about logic problems. Humans can also give wrong answers, depending on the type of question and how it is posed.
- (Danae) But this is the problem of discreteness, indeed, how do you get these static answers. The discreteness is not a problem, the meaning is contained within the interrogator.
- (Sonia) yes! Meaning in the making. No capital M meaning.
- (Michelle) if Turing was to rewrite this text now, how would he re-write it.
- (Renée) I think he would use different pedagogy.
- (Danae) Yes, but also, he's talking about how this question is not even really relevant.
- (Michelle) Yes, this goes to the question of what is it to be human? In this very Euro-centric colonial landscape, it's very interesting to think about this aspect. If he would be embracing today's decentering, anti-racist practices, etc. Especially to the question of what is learning, etc. What does it mean to be alive/part of a society?
- (Sonia): it would be really interesting to think about an event where we invite speakers to think about what Turing would have thought of X or Y.
- (Renée): (after we talked about hormonal castration) what is very interesting is also "oestrogen". Hormones are literally what wire and rewire us. It's interesting to think about the answers would be, to some questions we can speculate about.
- (Agathe): nowadays computers scientists wouldn't really be encouraged to write these texts, so I wonder if that's the case he published it it in a psychology/philosophy context. In CS nowadays you need to build new tools and not reflect on existing ones. I wonder how this was in his time.
- (Danae): nowadays things have become very segregated, and in the humanities we demand interdisciplinarity. But there's very few people who are actually doing that. There are not many people doing interdisciplinary work.
- (Agathe): it's very frustrating, when I work on more critical stuff, I get told that I shouldn't because I should be finding solutions to things and not coming up with more problems. It's a political question in the end, people have agendas.
- (Sonia): yes, the main line of attack from the humanities is indeed this idea that we have to counter this scientism-solutionism... etc etc.
- 4) The argument from consciousness: "Not until a machine can write a sonnet...." The refutation for this conjecture is solipsism: we also don't know what and if people feel when they feel.
- 5) Argument from various disabilities: (Sonia:) the modern version of this is the "AI is whatever we still can't do with machines". No support is offered for these statements, acc. Turing. Induction is the key issue w/ this conjecture. One has not yet observed a machine that can do X, so a machine "can't do X".
- our notes drop out as Sonia reads half of Arguements from Various Disabilities and Renée picks up. Sonia will write these after the meeting! The machine is its operation, and the operation is the machine.... These are the possibilities of the near future, rather than Utopian Dreams
- 6) Lady Lovelace's objection: a machine can do whatever we know how to order it to perform! Refutation to the conjecture: yes, but this doesn't meant that we know exactly what the consequences of our order are. So, we may be surprised by the result of what we order!
- 7) Argument from continuity in the nervous system: the nervous system is not a discrete-state machine. But looking at randomness in pi, we cannot actually distinguish between the behavior of a human or a machine.
- 8) The argument from informality of behavior: the endless possibilities of behavior. There are no rules to behavior, so the human cannot be a machine, the human is free to act. (Sonia: side note, the chemical basis of morphogenesis from Turing is also a beautiful refutation of this)
- 9) The argument from extra-sensory perception: telepathy, clairvoyance, etc. Unfortunately: we cannot take this seriously thus far, we cannot observe any of these things as actually existing.
- Michelle intervenes with Sadie Plant's Zeros and Ones, reading from the section on Ada Lovelace and Babbage: Complete text found here: https://monoskop.org/images/1/17/Plant_Sadie_Zeros_and_Ones_Digital_Women_and_the_New_Technoculture_1997.pdf
NOTES MEETING 23RD FEBRUARY by Anna
- Reading Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
- (Danae) both Chilean biologists, their theories have been very influential
example of autopietic systems can be Bots.
- 1st chapter is about how life is organasised when does the organism end and the envirohnment begins, are they part of tha same systems? to answer we must have clear the idea of what is a living thing and what isn't
- Introduction: the concept of unity coexists with the concept of diversity, only then you can consider the concept of infinity.
- (Michelle) where is the direction of the text going? the concepts are presented in a binary sense.
- (Sieta) we are reading these texts to understand life better. WE ARE THE OBSERVER AND THE OBSERVED. It is dualistic but in a way it feels unifying.
- (Cristina) unity is an interesting choice of word.
- (Renee) examinating the quote from Henderson. (Sonia) you think that in order to understand Life there needs to be a division in variables of different types of existince.
- (Michelle) Mark Lewis (Lynn Margulis), the questioning of the evolution tree. There is a hierarchical way of looking at the concept presented in the introduction, which is presented in a binary way. Lynn Margulis', evolutionary biologist, research has shown that the evolutionary tree is not an accurate model. Instead of a paradigm of verticality where species move up the evolutionary tree, her research has shown that a majority of organisms practice a horizontal transfer of genes.
- (Danae) Reading this text in a less human-centred way through the shared unserstanding that we are 21st Century evolved beings, therefore shifting the understanding of the binary way in which the concept is presented. The text has a philosophical framework in order to relate to the understanding of livig systems substaining themselves. Also including non living things and systems.
- (Sonia) Aristotle in relation to causes: humans choose their own causes (?).
- (Sieta) the separation from the mind makes me feel like that it is very mindbased, when I read Meeting the universe halfway, she writes clearing up the concept of separation, and shift to a paradygm of thinking, and talks about this unified field that exists whit the idea of separation
- (Michelle) "sympoiesis means to make from, it is a word for worlding" Haraway
- (Sonia) we are chosing to identify ourselves as different from what surrounds has.
- (Noemi) some times it feels forceful to draw this (imaginary) line.
- (Michelle) The paradigm is focusing on a specific area, however, if we make the scope of the research wider, then there is a shift, from micro to macro.
- (Renee) This distinciton can be alienating andf have a negative impact, but at the same time it allows us to find the universe in the particular.
-(Agathe) defining entities, you have a set of attribute that you can perform, then later categorise them and chose the image you want to give to classification. Many don't question subjectivity.
-(Sonia) Leopard and tree example. We are atoned with the concept of leopard because it is part of an collective instinct.
- (Agathe) there is more reflection to sub jectivity now, but it is still more to work on. Now there isn't the category "clutter".
- (Cristina) collective data collection; there is this separation between background and foreground collection now.
- (Sonia) realisng that the Captcha has a small American data set.
- (Renee) Book about the concept of undifferentiated and indistngusheable
- (Danae) theory about contingency, how it is important to recognise the existence of relations.
- Telenomic - carried out with a goal
- Hazard - Arabic root Haz-zahr - dice game of chance
- (Michelle) how much of this concept of contingency is taken into the research process?
- (Sonia) life is self contained, we cannot ignore that there is a chain of events but we must consider that these events matter
- (Sonia) contingency is a necessity when looking at the universe. Its a very pragmatic approach. Reformulating explanations.
- (Danae) The notion that living systems allow for comparative analysis. Vital force in non animistic.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJSJ28eEUjI&ab_channel=BanffEvents intersting related to the idea of animistic view in science
-(Michelle) Arturo Escobar's book where indigenous knowledge (feminist indigenous knowledge) is brought into the scientific conversation.
NOTES MEETING 2nd of March by Anna
Sonia: introducing text. Conception of limits, how constraints affect each other within organisms and advances. When is something called intelligence? Deterministic result of perception.
Renee: difference between wink and blink?
Sonia: its confusing. It all depends on the context. information theory ex. you try to define signal and noise, when communication is made. In order to understand you need to take into account the meanings and context where the communication lies.
The basics. depending on the information you are trying to get you will either undesrtand 'wink' or 'blink'
Renee: adjacent reading. question to Danae
Sonia: randomness in terms of quantum floctuation is what gives life to consiousness and free will. and if we are determinsit beings it doesn't really matter based on ethic.
there's a conversation, you become a person out of 2 people's cells, but then you become something that has an influence on your cells. (food, habits...) It used to be very DNA centric, but epigenetics came by to kind of dismantle that idea.
in the case of singular progress, as we become more autonomous (zigot) it becaomes more self sufficient, but as organisms we are inclosed in an environment. we adapt. so the more autonomous an organism is the more it needs to externalise its needs. (discovering fire to be able to make meat more digestive)/ that puts the stomach out of the body. (car are the legs) and this is relateed to observing related to environment.
example about the super inteligenc book. Creating an AI that goes out of control. papaerclip scenario, it goes out of control and turns the whole world into paperclips. but that is THE GOAL, the more robust the more we as humans think about the result coming out of maximisation.
Danae: autonomous providers. Some people in this network are trying to produce some type of computation under the logic of containerisation. To organise systems today, which can be related to the idea in the text, the logic that if the goal is met the system will be freer. Therefore, you will battle between the level of freedom and systems. MAybe we do not desire the system to be autonomous, because it has a political effect.
Sonia: she's not necessarily connecting freedom as 'good'. but she's more quantizising the levels of freedom.
Danae: its easy to connect 'free' with 'more objective'
Sonia: in anarchist systems i was working with systems.
Cristina: i was curious about containerisation. and how would that be worrying?
Danae: containeristation requires an amount of new skills, so we are in the midst of this problem, sustaining a more conservative system or embrace a new one? MAny people were worrying about the provision of safe systems within containerisation.
Renee: we are going to adress practicalities. But read first.
time is up :)
09 March Meeting Notes
Renée: value-ladenness and Aristotle, what about the specifity of relying Aristotle, external values and internal values versus what we would consider now as different approaches to the concept of freedom/action.
Text: human ability to project meaning (Dupré). We excercise free will when we project meaning; this is autonomous. Self-organized systems act from their own point of view. The more complex its behavior, the more autonomous. The more complex an organism, the freer it is, because it has many states it can access. Intentional human action is free to the degree that we put values and morals to control. These levels free up qualitatively more.
Sieta: I read this as the freedom of taking an action in the sense of two ways: depending on neurological organization (physiological functions), we either have more of this, or also the point of expressing your values; if one is free to express oneself.
Anna: I think I agree, if you are the product of your context, you act in a certain way, but also you are the product of your physiology.
Cristina: I was thinking about acting randomly or acting intentionally, in the sense of acting according to your values and the development of an intentional trajectory.
Sieta: but an intentional trajectory would be within the context of the environment that also constraints, does that allow for less or more freedom?
Text: robustness and akrasia, the central lesson of complex adaptive systems is that when everything is connected to everything else, we cannot isolate the problem. We have to take dymanics and context-dependence seriously. Attention must be given to developmental settings of complex beings. Why do people become who they are?
Sonia: time, trauma, experience and the influence of media: https://asc-cybernetics.org/2008/HM-08WienerComments.pdf
Michelle: "
Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can really that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves—how do I learn from this?
Emotional growth is nonlinear. It feels really important to me to include pieces on grief and emotions in this book because, as people participating in movements, we are faced with so much loss, and because we have to learn to give each other more time to feel, to be in our humanity. Not to come to a standstill as a movement, but to take turns actually feeling what is happening to and around us, and letting our feeling help us understand what we much do. Because that is what we are creating, a world where we can feel ourselves and each other and do less harm and generate more freedom.
mi
Michelle
4:51 PM
adrienne maree brown - Emergent Strategy
mi
Michelle
4:52 PM
NONLINEAR AND ITERATIVE
The pace and pathways of change."
Sieta: how does the body relate to this also, because memory happening in the body is indeed not a movie playing 'in the environment' but memory at a cellular level.
Linda: I think it's interesting that we're talking about reliving the memory, it's not a filing cabinet, you relive it and you also change it as you relive it, your physical response is a kind of motor that drives the story, there's the feedback cycle of your body makes your neuros fire, which make the body respond, which makes your neurons fire, etc.!
Noemi: the breath and going deeper into the body, we can look at it as something that relates the mental and the physical, not just as something that contracts and expands. And of course the breath is also influenced by the environment. You breathe differently if you are in the city or in a forest, that makes me personally very aware of my breathing as well.
Sieta: So, the human having this autonomy, having free will, alright, but if you look at the relationship between you and the environment, and you understand that your well-being is related to the air in your environment. It's not just me being autonomous, it's my dependancy on the environment.
Michelle: whether it's bad air or good air, the time when you stop breathing is when you take your last breath. Breathing is automatic and out of our control. You can try to control it, but breathing in and of itself, you can't control.
Renée
4:59 PM
btw: this is one of the most moving books I've read about breathing... Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility
Book by Ashon T. Crawley
Text: I cannot decide the stability of my plan, depends on dynamics, dispositions, contextual constraints. The system should be buffered from perturbations of all sorts. Robustness is the sedimented result of an agent's original internal dynamics and the environment. Exactitude of action is robustness.
Sonia: Robustness as resilience: how long can you stay under water, how long will you resist in the cold, etc. The plan being in agreement with the result of the action is a form of robustness.
Linda: perhaps animals that are not humans can be considered as freer than humans, because they are not constrained by the limits of morals etc. We have contextual constraints that limit our behavior, even in tiny niches: even here! The anarchist values, the feminist values, etc. Q-anons are free, perhaps, they believe this "system" and they just act on it. w
Sonia: Agreed. Which one is top down & which one is bottop up? Eg: communists gain the freedom to operate within a collective as opposed to the libertarians. In the sense of comparisons between human and non-human freedom, the perspective of the dynamical system matters. Sometimes a system of morality is also inhibiting action
Linda: so the freedom we are talking about then, is it the freedom to be a finger while knowing that you are attached to a body?
Sieta: people who stick to one ideology often think that there's only the finger, it seems to me. It comes down to separation or networking, if I think of the whole system of fingers I cannot say that there's no structure, for me that's the way that I relate to it. What is the truth of freedom in this?
Michelle: Hardt and Negri on love, forms of assembly and the robustness of a system. The system of the fingers being the same, but also the diversity of a system where the fingers are not the same. (i.e. diversity = robustness)
Cristina: there's also other animals who collaborate, it would be interesting to look into that as well.
Michelle: what is the relation of the individual to the collective.
Renée: akrasia and weakness of will and freedom, are both equally dependent. "The intention 's overall robustness is the weighted
sum of its robustness under each of those conditions . In other words ,
whether or not an intention is robust will be a function of the historical
and contingent sedimentation of ongoing , unique interactions between
the agent's dynamics and his or her environment : how vulnerable it is to
noise and equivocation , in short . The degree of robustness of individual
attractors , therefore , is not a feature intrinsic to them but is dependent
rather on the overall system's "general, underlying " nature . So is akrasia,
or weakness of will." So the random or the movement of a jellyfish, they're both bound to the completeness of the system.
Text: Robustness/vulnerability is bound to many factors. Environment and internal dynamics, individual attractors cannot be isolated from others: warp and woof of a fabric. The ambiguity of the term "integrity", used to describe a person's character or a system, spans both these meanings.
Cristina: ADHD for example can be seen as something which relates to the environment much more than previously discussed. Distraction and attention in relation to the will.
Michelle: the dialectics of attention and orientation, thinking in terms of transformation and emergence. The dialogical in lieu of the dialectical. guerra di movimento vs Guerra di posizione (Gramsci).
---break----
Text: one advantage of dynamical systems theory is that it can handle self-cause.
Interjection: everyone looking into Ruth Benedict guilt-based versus shame-based.
Anna: apparently Benedict talks about Americans as guilt-based, Japanese as shame-based.
Text: the implications of dynamical systems for human development are vast. "We still cannot identify those thresholds of psychological or
emotional disequilibrium when intervention would be most effective
. Making matters worse is the fact that since in practical terms, each
run of a complex adaptive system is unique, educational and child -rearing
techniques that might work for a Hannah may not work for a Gabriel .
And techniques that might have worked for Hannah yesterday may not
today ."
Renée: interesting how knowledge acquisition is different at every stage, every day you are a new learner.
Linda: I'm trying to wrap my head around attractors: at the conscious and unconscious level, there are things are we decide upon and there are unconscious things that are happening in the background. In the case of shame and guilt, these are things that you integrate at a very early age, so they become part of the background dynamics that influence your behavior unconsciously. But the top-down influences the bottom-up, and vice versa.
Sieta: I would love to read a bit of this book on conditioned behavior: "an overstimulated nervous system". (Sieta can add note later?)
Sonia: (sorry, I missed this, I can write the next few comments if you want to add yours here) If you are sensitive to complex systems dynamics, reproducibility is harder to achieve.
Linda: RE: ethics in AI. At which stage do you introduce the ethics and that frameworks? Is it too late to introduce them now? Do they have to be introduced in the beginning or can they be encoded later?
Sonia: When working at UN, they wanted to be THE people who make THE ethical guidelines for AI. But what she's underlinning with wink and blink: from the moment you act, the ethics are already baked into the act. An action will already exclude other possible actions. Transparency is better than unbiased, because it is impossible to be unbiased. But of course AI capital making relies on secrecy to make monetary gains.
Anna: Is ethics the potential of making an unbiased system?
Sonia: yes, it's part of it. Eg: what is a cancerous cell? A doctor would have the expertise to say which it is, but someone else's expertise might have another opinion.
Anna: machines are unethical. To create a machine that is potentially unbiased machine can be addressed with a representative team.
Sonia: yes, but how many people do you include? Do you include nonhumans? That's part of the complexity of that choice. Sometimes the case is ethics-washing.
Agathe: how to relate machine learning to this complex system theory? Also AI is a form of complex system, it learns from what it knows previously. There was a paper about robustness recently. But it doesn't discuss that different people have different biases. When we talk about fairness in ML the decision is usually to "de-bias" the system but without reflecting that you will not be able to take into account all possible contexts. ML has its own constraints. It requires you to categorise the world in order to make decisions. Vocabulary is similar to ML communities.
Question: How does this notion of bias relate to machine pedagogies (also relating to Linda's question about when to introduce these 'ethics' into AI), could a machine also be learning over time and space?
Renee: Renee talked about the video with Maya Indira Ganesh in conversation with Nishant Shah on: do datasets just grow? Are they responsive or inclusive? Renee found the names of the researchers mentioned. She reads out part of the discussion. Speech vs silence: if you have speech you are an author, if you are silent, it is a pathology which needs to be cured. To force somebody into speech is yet another act of violence. Don't fall into politics of hope or despair, but look at politics of reticence. Give ppl safe spaces where they can say: I have a voice, but I refuse to make it heard to you. I refuse to make my language palatable to your ears. I am here but I do not want to be included, to be counted. What appears to be inaudible, what appears to be out sight still influences the system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwr5ax3zek8
Linda: I also have this problem of being involved. Talking as a dyke, there is an aspect of performativity that you need to have. It becomes more constrictive due to what the system allows for queerness. That the silence can have some influence or power is interesting.
Sonia: When you think you are being inclusive, you may also exclude the people you are not aware of. Anecdote about NY: wonderful communities of minorities that were never previously visible before becoming visible, but also wars about who can be where. Recreating systems of oppression.
Linda: the freedom of not being nameable.
Renee: what does that mean in terms of datasets? Conundrum.
Cristina: reading from a text by Mimi Onuoha:
https://github.com/MimiOnuoha/missing-datasets
"Missing data sets" are my term for the blank spots that exist in spaces that are otherwise data-saturated. My interest in them stems from the observation that within many spaces where large amounts of data are collected, there are often empty spaces where no data live. Unsurprisingly, this lack of data typically correlates with issues affecting those who are most vulnerable in that context.
The word "missing" is inherently normative. It implies both a lack and an ought: something does not exist, but it should. That which should be somewhere is not in its expected place; an established system is disrupted by distinct absence. Just because some type of data doesn't exist doesn't mean it's missing, and the idea of missing data sets is inextricably tied to a more expansive climate of inevitable and routine data collection.
Renée: next session: what about allocating the first 20 mins to wrapping this text up. Adjacent: Agathe show + tell dataset ins and outs, and we watch something.
Chat:
so
Sonia
4:06 PM
Hellowww, sorry I'm late!
no
Noemi
4:07 PM
https://v2.hotglue.me/?slowreading
cr
Cristina
4:11 PM
https://altpad.vvvvvvaria.org/slowreading
cr
Cristina
4:12 PM
https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/pad.css
re
Renée
4:13 PM
https://jubilee-art.org/?rd_news=2772&lang=en
mi
Michelle
4:15 PM
https://ethertoff.caveat.be/w/Eleni_Kamma::The_Corners_of_the_Mouth.md
so
Sonia
4:21 PM
Google deep dream as human-induced AI hallucinations? --> as a practice :D
si
Sieta
4:21 PM
I love that!
cr
Cristina
4:22 PM
Michelle, I think caveat is using ethertoff, which was developed around Etherpad :) it's a great tool by OSP
mi
Michelle
4:23 PM
great :)
no
Noemi
4:24 PM
really cool deep dream tool:
https://colab.research.google.com/github/tensorflow/lucid/blob/master/notebooks/differentiable-parameterizations/appendix/infinite_patterns.ipynb#scrollTo=AZ9jgnMCRBB-
cr
Cristina
4:26 PM
https://aliciajuarrerodotcom1.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/dynamics-in-action-pdf1.pdf
mi
Michelle
4:40 PM
I am dropping out somehow
so
Sonia
4:50 PM
https://asc-cybernetics.org/2008/HM-08WienerComments.pdf
mi
Michelle
4:51 PM
Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can really that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves—how do I learn from this?
Emotional growth is nonlinear. It feels really important to me to include pieces on grief and emotions in this book because, as people participating in movements, we are faced with so much loss, and because we have to learn to give each other more time to feel, to be in our humanity. Not to come to a standstill as a movement, but to take turns actually feeling what is happening to and around us, and letting our feeling help us understand what we much do. Because that is what we are creating, a world where we can feel ourselves and each other and do less harm and generate more freedom.
mi
Michelle
4:51 PM
adrienne maree brown - Emergent Strategy
mi
Michelle
4:52 PM
NONLINEAR AND ITERATIVE
The pace and pathways of change.
re
Renée
4:52 PM
Thanks Michelle
re
Renée
4:59 PM
btw: this is one of the most moving books I've read about breathing... Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility
Book by Ashon T. Crawley
re
Renée
5:04 PM
robustness: The condition or quality of being robust (in various senses); sturdiness, hardiness; strength.
re
Renée
5:05 PM
robust adj: A. adj.
1.
a. Strong and hardy; strongly and solidly built, sturdy; healthy.
from Oxford
Welcome to Slow reading!
For help on using BigBlueButton see these (short) tutorial videos.
To join the audio bridge click the phone button. Use a headset to avoid causing background noise for others.
To join this meeting by phone, dial:
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Then enter 45629 as the conference PIN number.
To invite someone to the meeting, send them this link:
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re
Renée
5:36 PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Benedict
mi
Michelle
5:51 PM
The
Wink
and
the
Blink
re
Renée
5:56 PM
Agathe tries to think what machine learning would be in this context.
mi
Michelle
5:57 PM
Bring in the context
mi
Michelle
6:03 PM
Politics of Reticence
mi
Michelle
6:04 PM
I refuse to make my language palatable to your ears.
mi
Michelle
6:05 PM
What appears to be inaudible. What appears to be out sight.
mi
Michelle
6:05 PM
I am here, but I don't want to be included.
mi
Michelle
6:07 PM
Freedom in the silence
mi
Michelle
6:07 PM
The assumptions that you make when you think you are being inclusive.
mi
Michelle
6:09 PM
The freedom of not being nameable.
mi
Michelle
6:09 PM
And how does this work in an AI system?
cr
Cristina
6:10 PM
https://points.datasociety.net/the-point-of-collection-8ee44ad7c2fa#.y0xtfxi2p
cr
Cristina
6:11 PM
ah sorry, it's here
https://github.com/MimiOnuoha/missing-datasets
re
Renée
6:14 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwr5ax3zek8
re
Renée
6:20 PM
Perfect!!!!!!
Notes: 16 March 2021
[A PROPOSAL FOR A PLAY]
Live Transcription - Michelle
Renee: We are reading through the data sets.
Reading through data sets quality assurance (equality and inequality) ISO quality assurance and how it is also used in education.
ISO verification language.
Thanks for show me that.
Sonia: ISO is the standard verification language. It is the the standard association that everybody guides themselves by in the technical world.
Renee: ISO Standards from pizza crusts to education to AI. It is quite something.
Sonia: reference ISO gym
Renee: We are doing a lot of reading. What about doing? Or look at the videos. We have been pretty text heavy in our previous exercises
Donna Summer: I would like to have opportunity to look at the actual code. The actual code and AI. It has a supernatural quality that I would like to incorporate. How does a system differentiate from one another. Example: Tesla car near a cemetary. The car was detecting shapes and energy but there was nothing there. Did AI detect a ghost?
I would like to see the code!
Agathe: I have code for how to detect objects.
DS: Information and context. How does that work as well?
Renee: HOw does the camera frame the recognition?
Sonia: Let's look through several introductions.
Michelle: I am doing live transcription and intend to write a play from this meeting. Would it be possible to have the screen share on so I can look at the code while I am writing?
[brings up Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context]
Agathe: Let's look through this link, then the pdf.
[opens dataset tab]
S: do you see it?
A: here is a summary of the data set s... persons, people, objects. They show what is annotated under the images. Pictures with computers is important to annotate.
[cats and computers, sinks, floors, cats in bottles, cats on a chair, cat on a sofa]
S: Our future is imagined through these flat surfaces instead of 3D spaces (with sounds)
R: COCO comes from the Gorilla, Like COCO wanta a banaan?
S: Perhaps happy coincidence.
S: Should I click on something else?
[brings up horses, in landscapes, hills, towns, etc]
A: These have been critized because of these connotations.
S: Of course it is going to be pretty safe. The scandal wit Google. Image recognition with people recognized as animals, and...
A: Pictures ... recently of a hand holding a thermomator .. Concentration camps as leisure parks
N: Interesting the cell phone, and the icon. How are the icons developed?
A: Interesting to see what they decide to annotate ... home images... subjective. The whole person, the face of the person. There isn't a lot of reasoning behind these piectures/ They seem quite random.
R: It is scraping any informatino from the url> ?? How much is being read. Whether that url is adding, framing the dataset. if you have the url there will be textual framing.
[guy with home cooking blog]
R: The circle is a cake.
A: Most datasets scrape images from the web. Generally they don't save any context information. They send the image on a cross reference platform. They ask precise questions to annotate what is in the dataset. Or precise segments. Either they force a certain set of annotations. Or let the workers annotate whatever is important in the image. There were pictures of people annotated with character traits. ... associate and full professor. You find a lot of hierarchical things in the dataset.
C: On the interface. They create a lot of interfaces. they are built for speed for speedy workers. Then another richer slower interaction interface. The level of communication between these interfaces was very interesting. Categories: the amount of sports are quite limited. But there are two for baseball and the baseball glove. Pizza, food, child's food. Reading the paper, the three sources for categories. Children 8-14 asked what is the most prominant feature in their environment.
A: They said they wanted to capture their whole world. And asked people to take a picture in their environment. So it is very telling.
Linda: Why children?
Christina: Assumption that children as the least bias. The difference between humans learning and machine learning.
A: To augment the data set they asked children to do it.
[showing pictures in front of computers, outside, on sidewalks, in diners]
A: Pictures of weddings. White long dress.
[Normative, Westernized images]
R: Mechanical Turks and where they might reside. There has to be a contradition.
[Army photos, people on phones, playing baseball, chopping onions, holding a cell phone, computer sccreen]
R: It raises the question who is being trained actually?
A: The workers train themselves to have the same strategy.
[Who and where are the workers?]
A: A soup is generally in a bowl. Workers are flirting.
[laps, at a table, lawn chair]
R: To capture the whole world is almost an art project like Kenneth Goldsmith printing the internet.
A: Should we read the paper or look at something else?
A: The workers are mostly coming Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Renée
3:23 PM
For all crowdsourcing tasks we
used workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT). Our
user interfaces are described in detail in the appendix.
Note that, since the original version of this work [19],
we have taken a number of steps to further improve
the quality of the annotations. In particular, we have
increased the number of annotators for the category
labeling and instance spotting stages to eight. We also
added a stage to verify the instance segmentations.
[Jeff Bezos refers to these workers as AI]
S: The more you work like machines the more you become one.
S: The background never matters. It is only about the object. But the context is makes the object. \
[Context matters]
S: Cars in the background. Even if tiny are still labelled as something to be presented.
Agathe Balayn
3:26 PM
https://unthinking.photography/articles/an-introduction-to-image-datasets
R: It is so interesting thinking about what context is. How much photography theory we had to read. What is happening inside and outside of the iamges. What happens in the web context where images can land in so many different contexts.
S: Segmentation. 2,500,000. 22 worker hours per 1,000 segmentations. I am trying to do the math. This is a lot of time! The need to do one task, super fast.
A: Having one person who has one task. And becomes super familiar with that task.
Sonia
3:31 PM
On average our dataset contains3.5 categories and 7.7 instances per image. In comparisonImageNet and PASCAL VOC both have less than 2 cat-egories and 3 instances per image on average. Anotherinteresting observation is only10%of the images in MSCOCO have only one category per image, in comparison,over60%of images contain a single object category inImageNet and PASCAL VOC
[scanning through several graphs]
[Fig 6: Samples of annotated images in COCO dataset]
[Person Bike Horse]
S: So COCO is better. Jesus 7,000 workers hours.
A: They evaluate training of datasets.
[Object& Scene Categories]
Donna Summer: I really like the captions on the categories.
Renée
3:34 PM
Rather
than requiring workers to draw exact polygonal masks
around each object instance, we allow workers to “paint”
all pixels belonging to the category in question. Crowd
labeling is similar to semantic segmentation as object instance are not individually identified. We emphasize that
crowd labeling is only necessary for images containing
more than ten object instances of a given category.
DS: A group of human judges evaluating whether the caption is right or wrong. There is something poetic about these captions. Woman in dress standing among them. Something literally. A person dressed in colourful clothes. \
R: Almost like Haiku
S: The situation of being in front of the computer. Recognizing an object as fast as possible. Is so alien of the situaiton of walking around on the street. The way to very forefully introduce this information into theis machines for events in the future is completely at odds of the experience of walking throught the city. Perhaps a person wearing Google glasses and annotating the experience of wlaking would be more interesting.
DS: Sounds like an over-estimation of reality. Most people don't walk thorugh the city that way. I mention the example of the captions becuase it reminded me of the expeirence of creative wriitng. Good stories are demonstrating something in an objective way. And it is you giving meaning. Chekov writing is not too different from the captions of COCO. We also always try to be purely descriptive, which is hard when today everybody is trying to giving opinions, and advancing their objectives. As researchers, we always try to spot the moment when the machine has the bias. We already know the answers, that machines are going to be racist and sexist, which are valid points. But it is not enough of this approach that finds something in this that can advance the arts, fine arts and scholarship of what these things can provide.
Renée
3:39 PM
So they are purely descriptive as opposed to interpretative.
Cristina Cochior
3:36 PM
"For COCO, the authors wanted, say, pictures of cats on couches, but not of cats posing in front of a white background for a feline studio shoot. To avoid images of single objects in isolation, the authors used combinations of object categories as search terms. This is how common objects are put in context: not primarily by any natural context in which they might appear, but explicitly by their appearance together with other COCO classes. It explains why the objects in COCO frequently seem neither common, nor in context."
Cristina Cochior
3:37 PM
"What I am suggesting is that, as a result, COCO represents more than images of objects. It captures a logic of how things should be connected: In this world, umbrellas should be in toilets, and cats in sinks. Innocent, sure. The looming question is whether data or the artificially intelligent system that learn from them, in their far-reaching entrenchment within people’s lives, are ultimately able to instill their logic in the minds of people subjected to their algorithmic world views."
Renée
3:44 PM
It is interesting to think about this text in relation to the other text, AI Fairness 360 ... under the header "Terminology" there is this point that somehow relates to what we are discussing with regards to "description" over interpretation:
In this section, we briefly define specialized terminology from the field of fairness in machine learning. A favorable label is a label whose value corresponds to an outcome that provides an advantage to the recipient. Examples are receiving a loan, being hired for a job, and not being arrested. A protected attribute is an attribute that partitions a population into groups that have parity in terms of benefit received. Examples include race, gender, caste, and religion. Protected attributes are not universal, but are application specific. A privileged value of a protected attribute indicates a group that has historically been at a systematic advantage. Group fairness is the goal of groups defined by protected attributes receiving similar treatments or outcomes. Individual fairness is the goal of similar individuals receiving similar treatments or outcomes. Bias is a systematic error. In the context of fairness, we are concerned with unwanted bias that places privileged groups at a systematic advantage and unprivileged groups at a systematic disadvantage. A fairness metric is a quantification of unwanted bias in training data or models. A bias mitigation algorithm is a procedure for reducing unwanted bias in training data or models.
C: The glance vs the gaze. The workers of Imagenet. Doing it in person, writing the notes. One person gets three images. Then a group of three coming up with a common description. Glance: we only had a few seconds to look at the images. After we became more accustomed to looking at the images. Researchers did that to avoid bias. If you don't have time to register what you are looking at, then there is less bias. Going through this, and collectively was an amazing experience.
Sieta
3:43 PM
can you write the name of this Michelle?
This method?
Mi
Michelle
3:43 PM
Strollology
Si
Sieta
3:43 PM
thanks!
Mi
Michelle
3:43 PM
Lucius Burckhardt
donna summer
3:44 PM
numerous tall flags and a colorfully dressed man standing among them
the person is stands in color as the surrounding flags are in black and white.
there is a person standing on the beach.
a person stands out amongst a black and white background
a person that is standing by a bunch of flags
Sieta
3:46 PM
https://experiments.runwayml.com/generative_engine/
Sonia
3:47 PM
http://moments.csail.mit.edu/
S: 3 seconds is how much time you need to recognize what is happening.
Agathe Balayn
3:47 PM
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.groundai.com%2Fproject%2Fdo-imagenet-classifiers-generalize-to-imagenet%2F1&psig=AOvVaw1MKV_xTVY6u04H8kRsEfOc&ust=1615992357643000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCPCYjeyGte8CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAJ
this is what the ImageNet crowdsourcing task looks like
S: I have to leave to teach at 4:00
R: The glance and the gaze. The wink and the blink. We all blink. The wink is intentional. Funny to see that language echo.
R: On terminology. The desire to use more neutral language.
R: Interesting in that text, demonstration and not explanation. The cold eye, what would it do... 15 years ago I had a Polish student in PZI and was interested in political media images. He took super violent images and described them clinically. White and black drawing. No connotations. Violent images but absolutely neutral. And interesting in this case where bias is a computational error.
A: Lighter skin coloured people. So Twitter started to say that it was not a problem of fairness. That it didn't need to be systematic to talk about fairness.
R: And what if they were to say "bias is a sin".
[reading]
A: Defining a protective and non-protective group. Detecting bias. You should look at fairness by looking at attributes. But now that attributes are not universal...
R: And they are also trying to design themselves out of a problem. Designing out of bias.
A: The fairness matrix to determine whether something is fair or not. It is a bit of a design problem because you have to assign the attributes. But the matrix and methods have a lot of problems.
Renée
3:56 PM
It's super fascinating
Agathe Balayn
3:56 PM
http://aif360.mybluemix.net/data#
A: I still cannot share my screen.
R: The language of 350 degrees. There is something inbuilt in that title because it says ... it is weirdly acclaimed to universal knowledge. Instead of how do you make bias transparent it is expunging. 360 degrees is an interesting starting point.
Renée
3:59 PM
expunge: verb
obliterate or remove completely (something unwanted or unpleasant).
R: Training models without biases. Is this where we are at?
A: Making a system to predict whether somebody will have to go to the hospital or not. To predict whether there will be expenses. There was a dataset on people who had been to the hospital for long periods of time to develop a dataset based on fairness.
A: This whole section. I am not sure how to go about looking at the code.
R: I love this prejudice remover. Glad they have an algorithm for that.
A: I have never read code with people. Not sure how to go about it.
[This is the starting point]
A: Now they have their data set and they are going to predict their model.
R: It is great to see 'privileged groups', and 'unprivileged groups' to get an idea of semantics.
A: Mostly they are picking and defining values based on race or gender or a combination of the two.
[scanning through code written in Python]
Protected attribute names
('RACE;)
Cannot do more than two groups at once (0 and 1) binary
Privileged and unprivileged protected attribute values
3.2.2. Validating LR model on original data
unprivileged groups=unprivileged groups,
privileged groups=privileged groups
print(explainer_orig_panel19_train.disparate_image))
from collections import defaultdict.
C: Do you think they developed it themselves?
def text(dataset, model, thresh_arr)
A: This validation model. Each is aligned to one fairness metric. I find it interesting to define the metric you have to define the protected group. So it simplifies the whole context.
R: Where things go array... the arc of the process is pattern recognition and extrapolating conclusions. Bias can come in at any of those junctures.
Renée
4:10 PM
So in terms of the arc... the process is:
Gathering
Categorizing
Searching/ Training
Pattern Recognition
Conclusions
A: There are historical biases in the data as well. Especially in the US.
Michelle
4:12 PM
Predpol
is an example
A: Categories are not often discussed. Crediting the committee.
Classificatoin Thresholds.
A: They don't just have a binary decision. Choosing between the threshold between 0 and 1 to determine whether a person should go to prison for example. The red line is the fairness. Practitioners need to make a choice between the threshold.
R: So this is almost a Mechanical Turk moment. Where a human says, a little tweak this way, a little tweak the other way.
[But what do these numbers mean and how do we apply them in practice]
[slowing down and having conversations about what do these numbers do, which is very different from computing science]
Renée
4:17 PM
So in other words, you're asking your students about the consequences of the calibration.
"Best: balance accuracy
L: It is interesting that you are trying to mitigate bias in the program but in the end you have to use bias to make a decisions.
L: Using the language of mathematics to describe an emotion. An inapproprateness of language.
[Teknik and Magic]
A: Fairness based on their own metrics.
A: Issues of discrimination come from bias.
Threshold corresponding to Best balanced accuracy: 0.1900
Best balanced accuracy: 0.7759
Corresponding 1-min (DI, 1/DI) value: 0.5738
R: I dont' want to hold engineers to a higher moral standard than myself. Question: We are in an interdisciplinary moment where we need each other to think through the consequences. Looking through these documents, I need to see the logic. How to engage with the language with understanding the limits. (regarding education).
A: Re: Education. Mostly these conversations (discussion the socio-technical limitations) do not take place.
R: Arts have limits as well.
DS: This reminded of my classes on distance reading. In the humanities, many people use this methods to establish patterns between huge amounts of text. Critics of the methods of distance reading. In literature we are not interested in patterns, but exceptions. That is where the interesting story exists. Not trying to solve the bias of AI. It will exist nonetheless, but use this moment, these glitches of the code for a space of new knowledge, new art, new generation.
Renée
4:25 PM
distance reading
Renée
4:26 PM
patterns versus exceptions
DS: After years and activism, I am trying to use a new lens of fun to look at things.
L: Not trying to solve bias through code.
Renée
4:27 PM
rather than solve, perhaps it can become more transparent? Or use those biases as a source of debate and public engagement?
Sieta
4:28 PM
I like that very much, using the cracks of the old to rebuild the new
L: Playing cards. Playing the dataset. You can see algorithms as divination. Maybe bringing it out of the rationality. ['Algorithms as Cartomancy', Flavia Dzodan]
Renée
4:29 PM
algorithms as divination... taking them out of the "rational" language
Sieta
4:30 PM
my feelings exactly haha
Agathe Balayn
4:30 PM
an escape game to make people aware of AI bias
https://www.tomokihara.com/en/escape-the-smart-city.html
L: We need to take it out into another type of field. Or looking at it differently.
[END]
Notes 23 March 2021
Recommendation for speaking: big people have a platform, what about people who don't have a platform yet? (Renée)
https://aliciajuarrerodotcom1.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/dynamics-in-action-pdf1.pdf
Notes from BBB shared notes:
Hello :)
Ahh nice!
oh cool!
file:///Users/Renee/Desktop/AI%20Reading/lix-236-433.pdf
https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/dataCenterNoiseGenerator.php
We are listening to the sound of the above server.
And then we will read the 9 Contrary Views.
https://monoskop.org/images/1/17/Plant_Sadie_Zeros_and_Ones_Digital_Women_and_the_New_Technoculture_1997.pdf
Some more notes while going through the 9 points:
Point 1.
Thinking about religion and its relation to science is in many respects is indicative of his time.
The text was not only meant for other scientists, but also accessible to people outside these circles (still Western though).
A refute of religion based on the belief that only humans have souls.
It is worth asking the question of whether we see ourselves in the center being beyond or above machines. Danae refrenences a text on space settlements that she is reading. And she quotes Carl Sagan saying that it was challenging to create the settlement as it was too difficult to recreate the earth.
Danae opens up the question about religion, not in terms of its restraints or prohibition, but instead its potentialities.
Sieta raises Shintoism. To be burried with your computer as a kind of life force. Perhaps the animisim of the machine. The vital force in everything.
Vitalist materialism.
Straw Dogs by John Gray - we are ourselves techonological devices - and here, he speaks of bacterias as technology.
Humans being the gut flora of AI.
Sieta reads from James Lovelock:
referencing Freud and the uncanny - of dolls and robots and their resemblance.
Point 2.
Being scared of machines....
Is this a Luddite arguement?
Danae proposes a speculative approach - one which is anticipatory and is not technophobic.
Point 3: The mathematic objection:
What is the scope of the objection - is it about simply limitations or more profound?
Gödel's incompleteness theorems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
Agathe speaks about contemporary machines functioning in a very different way than they were in Turing's time. Now machines can break this paradox, but perhaps with the wrong answer.
She brings up the point that sometimes the question itself is unclear.
Danae declares her love of math. And she connects it to her work on oracle bots.
Rather than a problem of the mathematical capabilities of the machine, it can instead (missed this part) (be a problem of the receiver?)
machines produce mathematical fictions
If Turing was to re-write this text in the present, how would he re-write it?
What is it to be human?
Would he reframe his work under more post colonial framework.
What would be the questions you would ask him if he were here?
We can't speak for the dead. But if he were in the room, what would be the questions we would ask him? For example, what would he think of drones?
Mr. Turing
Hormones. In relation to Turing's castration.
Questions as a form of reading.
Nowadays, scientists would not be encouraged to ask the same kind of questions. He wouldn't have many incentives to do that.
Sonia wonders about reading
Kittler
(thanks) and suggests reading
Alicia Juarrero
.
Agathe - mentions the trenches of disciplinarity
For next week we are going to read: Alicia Juarrero's Dynamics in Action (Chapter 15):
https://aliciajuarrerodotcom1.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/dynamics-in-action-pdf1.pdf
Michelle suggests and adjacent reading of Juarrero-and...? Sonia and Danae lean towards Maturana.
Sonia suggests we read the last chapter (15) of DiA. If you want to familiarize yourself a bit with the context of the book, do have a look in advance, but the last chapter is relevant to the questions we were left with after reading Turing's objections, so it's gonna be useful I think!
Notes 23/03/2021
Today we do some gardening of the pad + site https://v2.hotglue.me/
We can ask the speakers what texts have shaped their thinking and maybe add it to the pad.
Maya + Flavia
Alicia
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
RECIPESSSSSSSSSSSS
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Spelt Bread
425g spelt flour
3 Tbsp sesame seeds
3 Tbsp sunflower seeds
3 Tbsp pumpkin seeds
1 Tbsp poppy seeds
1 Tbsp linseeds
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt (heaped)
550 ml water
1 Tbsp treacle (blackstrap molasses)
* If you do not want to invest in five different seeds,make up a total of 150g of mixed seeds with what you have available.
Preheat the oven to 180C and brush the bread tin with oil. Sift the flower and baking powder into a large mixing bowl. Add the salt and all the seeds and combine thoroughly. Form a well in the centre of the mix.
in a jug, combine the water and treacle, stir well and then pour it into the well in the centre of the dry mix. Use a spoon or your hand to bring all the ingredients together evenly. Make sure that the treacle is evenly distributed, not clumped in sticky pockets. Use as little mixing as possible to achieve an even mix. It should be of a very sloppy. consistency.
Transfer the mix to the oiled tin and press down evenly. Bake in the centre of the oven for about 60 minutes, until well risen and evenly browned. Run a knife around the edge of the loaf, turn out onto a wire rack and tap the base with your finger. It if makes a hollow sound, the bread is cooked, Cover with a tea towel and leave to cool completely on the rack before cutting.
Shakshuka
1 medium onion
1 red bell pepper
5 cloves of garlic
1 can of whole tomatos
1 can of chickpeas
four eggs
fresh parsley
2 tsp paprika
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp chili
Olive Oil
Heat some olive oil in a frying pan. Add diced onion, red pepper and cook until the onions start to become transparent, around five minutes. Add all the spices and stir together well. Cook for another minute or so. Add finely chopped garlic, tomatos and chickpeas. Season with salt and pepper and bring the mixture to a simmer. With a spoon, make four small wells into the mixture. Crack open the eggs, and drop them, one at a time, into each the wells. Cover the pan and cook for 5 to 8 minutes until the eggs are cooked and the consistency is thick enough. Sprinkle with chopped parsley. Cry with pleasure after sampling with the first scoopful into your mouth.
Renée and Anna's notes done in the form of a telegraph where all:
Danae introduces Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living
Book by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana
|||STOP||||When you try to arrive at a definition of intelligence, much falls through the cracks.|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Where does the organism begin or end? What is necessary is to have clear ideas about what life is? |||STOP||||
|||STOP||||We have this idea of unity. And autonomy as a property. In order to have anything, there first must be differentiation or difference.|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||How is this system relational?|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Embodied shift.|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Programatic language present in the text |||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Historical bias manifested in dualist thinking, relationship to "unities". Viruses are living forms too|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Are dualities gradients?|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Thinking through parallels to the Genesis story, how it also resulted in differenciations|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Descartes' bad rep. Language of science as being a unifying language. Rationalism. |||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Half Way is not putting away rationality. Paradigms of categorisation.|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Sympoesis - nothing is autopoiesis, things are never alone. A word for worlding.|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Fruit flies. How is contingency defined within the models presented in the text? Seems to be missing at the moment.|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||In AI certain decisions are a bit random.|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Clutter - what models do not account for in separating objects within an image (but also what humans do not account for).|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Clutter in relation to the text.|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Necessity and contingency are the same depending what is the starting point; how you look at the universe.|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Etymology of 'hazard' - the name of a game of dice|||STOP||||
|||STOP||||Chains of events matter|||STOP||||
|||STOP|||| Renée loves this sentence: An explanation is always a reformulation of a phenomenon showing how its components generate it through their interactions and relations.||||STOP||||
||||STOP||||Machines and living systems allows for comparative understanding of both||||STOP||||
||||STOP||||When trying to paste the last question from the text, I get: 2Uc 4Sc U0&c HO/G7_ U4HBc H)c<4Y4E/cS^SU&>Sc\0Uc ;7B#cH)c> 04B&ScO&cU0&^cB#c0H\c4ScU0&4OcK0&BH>&b BH4B&#c ^cU0&4Oc WB4UO^c HO/B8aU4HBc||||STOP||||
Dates: 25, 26 March? or 26, 27 March?
Hotglue: https://v2.hotglue.me/the_slow_reading_group
Other site related things:
https://ethertoff.caveat.be/w/Eleni_Kamma::The_Corners_of_the_Mouth.md
__PUBLISH__ > https://etherpump.vvvvvvaria.org/p/slowreading.raw.html
Questions on Symposium: Re-imagining Black Youth-Led Technologies
Next session
Personal encounters with AI
https://app.mural.co/invitation/mural/v28710/1617120139614?sender=u812232d4b6c0c84d682d0139&key=7ecd6626-5e1b-4239-8cd2-af39e079a4f2
Session: 30/03/21
Shared notes:
*starts with Octavia Butler ref <3*
What brings you joy in this time?
What do "we" want to be "saved" from?
What kind of technologies do we want in the first place?
This is not about access as that works with something predefined – to be given entry.
How would we embed our highest values?
What is depth in the context of deep learning?
What is the role of social and cultural memory within the context of technology? What does it mean to recall and remember?
"Tool not visible unless it's broken" dictum (Heidegger, but also McLuhan in a different way, with the fish quote) -- reminds me of Susan Leigh Star's work on infrastructure --> also, yeah!
What are we forgetting today?
Is it possible to speak of "reconnection" at all? Aren't we disconnected, per definition?
(it's so cute that someone is agreeing in the background all the time)
(haha yes i thought it was one of us in the beginning)
Can technology help us to remember what we have forgotten?
What is consent in the context of data extraction?
How do you deal with the desire for social domination?!?!! (Age-old question, still not solved by things like democracy..)
(We were just talking about NFTs with Anna, something that has the same potential dangers as what she's talking about right now. Maybe something to chat about later)
What is the best way of framing a conversation around positive versus negative (or other forms) of exposure?
> predatory inclusion
> evitable technology
> "they tried to bury us, they didn't know we were seeds"
> subaltern pattern making
What kind of infrastructure is needed for subaltern pattern making?
Chat:
[16:08] Michelle : Undrowned
[16:08] Michelle : Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
[16:08] Michelle : Alexis Pauline Gumbs
[16:10] Cristina Cochior : hello sorry i am late, i was caught up in another meeting!
[16:11] Renée : I guess so
[16:11] Renée : So then we hit mute?
[16:11] Renée : or is it playing the same way for everyone
[16:12] Cristina Cochior : do we hit play?
[16:12] Renée : meaning is the timing similar
[16:13] Sieta : questions here
[16:14] Renée : We will do the questions here:
[16:14] Sieta : did you press play?
[16:14] Sieta : mine did not move
[16:14] Sonia : I pressed play to start it
[16:14] Agathe Balayn : mine either
[16:14] danae : same here
[16:15] Renée : press play yourself
[16:15] Cristina Cochior : mine either, i pressed play myself
[16:15] Sieta : haha oke
[16:15] Sieta : yes it starts!
[16:15] Cristina Cochior : it started again yes
[16:15] Renée : now we are synched
[16:19] Renée : What brings you joy in this time? (Remember to share that on the pad)
[16:21] Renée : What kind of technologies do we want in the first place?
This is not about access as that works with something predefined – to be given entry.
[16:21] Renée : How would we embed our highest values?
[16:21] Renée : What is depth in the context of deep learning?
[16:23] Cristina Cochior : (side-question: did anyone read the Indigenous AI position paper? https://www.indigenous-ai.net/position-paper/ )
[16:23] Renée : What is the role of social and cultural memory within the context of technology? What does it mean to recall and remember?
[16:24] Renée : What are we forgetting today?
[16:24] Sieta : Can technology help us to remember what we have forgotten?
[16:25] Renée : What is consent in the context of data extraction?
[16:25] Cristina Cochior : ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust )
[16:27] Renée : What are the processes of alienation and detachment that take place within AI's ruse?
[16:28] Renée : How do race and technology shape one another?
[16:28] Renée : How are input, output and impact interrelated?
[16:31] Renée : How are algorithms, as proprietary black boxes, cloaking systemic racism while simultaneously executing (producing) (proliferating) it?
[16:35] Renée : How are we literally indebted to these technologies? Not in the sense of "grattitude" but in servitude.
[16:36] Renée : What is the responsibility with those with computational expertise?
[16:36] Renée : "of those"
[16:39] Sieta : what was the name of this movie?
[16:41] Cristina Cochior : did it also skip bacck to the beginning for you?
[16:42] Sieta : yes
[16:42] Renée : “Artifacts have politics” Langdon Winner
[16:42] Welcome to Slow reading!For help on using BigBlueButton see these (short) tutorial videos.To join the audio bridge click the phone button. Use a headset to avoid causing background noise for others.To join this meeting by phone, dial: +31 15 201 0064Then enter 87703 as the conference PIN number.
[16:42] undefined : To invite someone to the meeting, send them this link: https://bbb.tbm.tudelft.nl/b/aga-9ab-8g7-tu1
[16:43] Renée : now it's working
[16:46] Renée : What are the financial incentives behind racist and sexist patterning?
[16:48] Renée : How is fairness defined in this context?
[16:49] Renée : How do we interrogate what it means to be seen and grasp its consequences in terms of exposure, if not vulnerability?
[16:53] Renée : OMG.. the giant owl - oehoe is in the tree.. the gardeners are calling me to come and look.
[16:54] danae : <3!!!
[16:55] Renée : the zoo bird keeper is here
[16:55] Sieta : https://kikimager.com/input-output - Kiki made a artistic version of HireVue
[16:55] Cristina Cochior : is this adjacent video watching ?
[16:56] Renée : can you see him/
[16:57] danae : the zoo bird keeper? so i shouldn't be expecting owls in my balcony </3
[16:57] danae : i saw a blurry thing
[16:57] Renée : sorry I have to grab a ladder for him to go up the tree
[16:58] Sonia : So sorry, I have to go!!! :(
[16:58] Sonia : <3
[16:59] Sieta : No worries! :) <3
[16:59] Cristina Cochior : Nice to see you Sonia!! <3
[17:02] Cristina Cochior : resilient owl
[17:03] Cristina Cochior : the owl's bird view totally connects to ai perspectives i think
[17:18] Cristina Cochior : christine meinders https://vimeo.com/366495908
[17:21] Cristina Cochior : https://www.lorenbritton.com/media/pages/texts/abstracting-otherwise-in-search-for-a-common-strategy-for-arts-and-computing/369876103-1593078159/abstracting-otherwise-in-search-for-a-common-strategy-for-arts-and-computing-klumbyte-britton.pdf
[17:23] Agathe Balayn : https://web.br.de/interaktiv/ki-bewerbung/en/ some "demo" of biases in softwares like HireVue
[17:29] Renée : What is her name again?
[17:31] Cristina Cochior : @michelle, still thinking about your question... perhaps the sub- and infra- in subaltern and infrastructure can point towards grassroots infrastructures which can eventually federate?
[17:33] Renée : chapter in ?
[17:33] Agathe Balayn : the artist;s work ahttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/berlin-artist-uses-99-phones-trick-google-maps-traffic-jam-alert
[17:34] Renée : Thanks Agathe
[17:38] Cristina Cochior : https://ahprojects.com/vframe/
[17:39] Noemi : HI everyone! Sorry for joining late
[17:40] Cristina Cochior : hello :)
[17:42] Renée : When is being seen essential and when is exploitative?
[17:46] Renée : It is very contextual.
[17:51] Renée : https://www.eur.nl/en/people/antoinette-de-bont
[17:52] Michelle : What would my life be without AI?
[17:52] Renée : Is AI just convenience?
[17:52] Renée : Does AI help with more vitally with certain communities?
[17:53] Michelle : Is AI really necessary?
[17:53] Noemi : the why and the why not
[17:54] Michelle : What would happen if AI suddenly disappeared?
[17:54] Michelle : Is AI just an arms race and is the robot revolution imminent?
[17:59] Cristina Cochior : is AI only servitude?
[17:59] Renée : * not productivity
[17:59] Sieta : we could also use Mural, kind of same application as Miro (V2_ has a subscription)
[18:01] Cristina Cochior : i'm wondering if i actually come in contact with ai
[18:01] Renée : can we call it an encounter
[18:01] Agathe Balayn : i would say that any recommender system is ai, right? (e.g. twitter sorting posts on your wall?)
[18:01] Cristina Cochior : true but i use mastodon (just kidding)
[18:02] Renée : yes, I agree - these tailoring algorithms
[18:02] Linda : and email?
[18:02] Cristina Cochior : i use translation AI for my dutch class
[18:02] Agathe Balayn : gmail uses AI to predict next words, also to sort your emails. but you might not use gmail ^^
[18:02] Sieta : Personal encounters with AI
[18:03] Sieta : https://app.mural.co/invitation/mural/v28710/1617120139614?sender=u812232d4b6c0c84d682d0139&key=7ecd6626-5e1b-4239-8cd2-af39e079a4f2
[18:04] Linda : i can't open it yet but sure!
[18:05] Cristina Cochior : i added the link at the bottom of the pad
[18:06] Cristina Cochior : llet us know when you have a date for the hotglue, renee, just in case it's possible to join
06/04/2021
We have been working here for the first hour:
https://app.mural.co/t/v28710/m/v28710/1617120139614/48a391880736b157a96c31e01eee941bde48a115
Sonia
5:08 PM
"AS THEY SAY IN AI
AI IS
WHATEVER AI CANT DO YET"
i love this one
--> I twisted it
Sonia
5:08 PM
But it's basically the saying, among AI researchers
Sonia
5:08 PM
AI is the horizon, as soon as something is accomplished it's no longer considered AI
Sonia
5:08 PM
(like DeepBlue chess, alphago, etc.)
Sonia
5:09 PM
Pamela McCorduck calls it an "odd paradox" that "practical AI successes, computational programs that actually achieved intelligent behavior, were soon assimilated into whatever application domain they were found to be useful in, and became silent partners alongside other problem-solving approaches, which left AI researchers to deal only with the "failures", the tough nuts that couldn't yet be cracked."
(from wiki)
Agathe Balayn
5:11 PM
the book for which the first chapter tries to define AI:
https://www.cin.ufpe.br/~tfl2/artificial-intelligence-modern-approach.9780131038059.25368.pdf
Sieta: intelligence is perhaps separate from consciousness
Sonia: Ned Block's China Brain
spatial intuintion/common sense is actually extremely difficult to replicate and to understand and not at all
Renee: what is care as intelligence?
Sonia
5:24 PM
(from a presentation by David Gunning):
John McCarthy (Stanford, circa 1960):
∃a. Name(a) = ANY-FOOL ∀𝑘𝑘.Knows(ANY-FOOL, k) ⟺∀𝑝𝑝∈Persons. Knows(p, k)∀𝑘𝑘.Commonsense(k) ⟺Knows(ANY-FOOL, k)
Agathe Balayn
5:24 PM
people really believe they can collect "common sense knowledge" objectively:
http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu/
(they made a database of common sense knowledge)
possible branches to be unravelled further:
- what is intelligence, the artifice?
- notions of refusal
- curriculum of ai
13/04/21
13/04/2021
We are reading: https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Stochastic_Parrots.pdf
measured by leaderboards?
what are language models
Winograd schemas ("The man could not lift his son because he was too fat" --> who was too fat?! Not too easy to say).
benchmarks are now criticised for their ambiguity and claim to objectivity
baking ethics or a certain perspective into the luangage model
NLP has sought larger datasets with the larger LMs.
"While investigating properties of LMs and how they change with size holds scientific interest, and large LMs have shown improvements on various tasks (§2), we ask whether enough thought has been put into the potential risks associated with developing them and strategies to mitigate these risks."
(https://searchengineland.com/welcome-bert-google-artificial-intelligence-for-understanding-search-queries-323976 - BERT used for Google search)
There are competing scales to be taken into consideration.
"documentation debt" = when datasets are so large it is difficult/expensive to document them?
In collecting ever larger datasets we risk incurring documentation debt. We recommend mitigating these risks by budgeting for curation and documentation at the start of a project and only creating datasets as large as can be sufficiently documented.
"When we rely on ever larger datasets we risk incurring documentation debt, i.e. putting ourselves in a situation where the datasets are both undocumented and too large to document post hoc." p.1
"Without documentation, one cannot try to understand training data characteristics in order to mitigate some of these attested issues or even unknown ones." p.1
"LMs are not performing natural language understanding (NLU), and only have success in tasks that can be approached by manipulating linguistic form." p.1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon
n-grams
In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sample of text or speech. The items can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pairs according to the application. The n-grams typically are collected from a text or speech corpus. When the items are words, n-grams may also be called shingles.
word embeddings
word2vec, GloVe, context2vec, ELMo
Example of training NL on books of different genres and periods and they discovered that the systsem was trained with the bias of the period.
That was this paper https://www.pnas.org/content/115/16/E3635
Linda wonders about the use of literature because it is in fact highly edited and refined. Websites, tweets, reddit etc are more problematic because they are even more contextual. There is a temporal acceleration.
https://commoncrawl.org/
Renee: datasets as Rapuccini's daughter (?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rappaccini%27s_Daughter
visible vs invisible biases
Sonia: bias is unavoidable, better embrace it, acknowledge it
(nicolas maleve's presentation on current trends in the bias discussion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_(textile)
The bias grain of a piece of woven fabric, usually referred to simply as "the bias", is any grain that falls between the straight and cross grains. When the grain is at 45 degrees to its warp and weft threads it is referred to as "true bias." Every piece of woven fabric has two biases, perpendicular to each other. A garment made of woven fabric is said to be "cut on the bias" when the fabric's warp and weft threads are on one of the bias grains.)
The very language used to name these datasets are manifest destiny
"the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus" says it all
Either way, these models do not address the inclusion problems raised by [65], who note that over 90% of the world’s languages used by more than a billion people currently have little to no support in terms of language technology.
"I don't speak Spanish!"
Michelle: where is the funding concentrated? who is the audience of these papers? what use are these systems if someone is speaking urdu?
Agathe - only Google has the kind f power to process these large datasets which certainly raises questions.
Google open sources ALBERT (in 2020):
https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/01/google-albert-ai-nlp/
You can try some language models here (a demo) https://transformer.huggingface.co/
bag of words model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag-of-words_model
there is also a model called: https://camembert-model.fr/
and the dutch version is called BERTje https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.09582
this is a great text about bag of words:
https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/index.php?title=A_bag_but_is_language_nothing_of_words
"In text indexing and other machine reading applications the term "bag of words" is frequently used to underscore how processing algorithms often represent text using a data structure (word histograms or weighted vectors) where the original order of the words in sentence form is stripped away. While "bag of words" might well serve as a cautionary reminder to programmers of the essential violence perpetrated to a text and a call to critically question the efficacy of methods based on subsequent transformations, the expression's use seems in practice more like a badge of pride or a schoolyard taunt that would go: Hey language: you're nothin' but a big BAG-OF-WORDS."
(different to the bags of words of ursula le guin)
carrier bag of fiction
"While the average human is responsible for an estimated 5t 퐶푂2푒 per year,2 the authors trained a Transformer (big) model [136] with neural architecture search and estimated that the training procedure emitted 284t of 퐶푂2. Training a single BERT base model (without hyperparameter tuning) on GPUs was estimated to require as much energy as a trans-American flight."
Can you imagine if a similar amount of energy was expended on educating a child?
Can you put that comment in the chat Agathe....
I'm not sure, but I believe that there is a tax to pay depending on the carbon emissions you create, and academic researchers probably don't have the financial resources to pay this tax directly, and so to do this research. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02243.pdf
Look up: SustainNLP workshop
https://sites.google.com/view/sustainlp2020/home
This! "Among their recommendations are to run experiments in carbon friendly regions, consistently report energy and carbon metrics, and consider energyperformance trade-offs before deploying energy hungry models. In addition to these calls for documentation and technical fixes, Bietti and Vatanparast underscore the need for social and political engagement in shaping a future where data driven systems have minimal negative impact on the environment [16]." (p.3)
“Feeding AI systems on the world’s beauty, ugliness, and cruelty, but expecting it to reflect only the beauty is a fantasy.” (Ruha Benjamin)
"When we perform risk/benefit analyses of language technology, we must keep in mind how the risks and benefits are distributed, because they do not accrue to the same people."(p.3)
"Is it fair or just to ask, for example, that the residents of the Maldives (likely to be underwater by 2100) or the 800,000 people in Sudan affected by drastic floods pay the environmental price of training and deploying ever larger English LMs, when similar large-scale models aren’t being produced for Dhivehi or Sudanese Arabic?"
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/an-open-letter-to-extinction-rebellion/
"An open letter to Extinction Rebellion"The fight for climate justice is the fight of our lives, and we need to do it right." By grassroots collective Wretched of The Earth."
Our communities have been on fire for a long time and these flames are fanned by our exclusion and silencing. Without incorporating our experiences, any response to this disaster will fail to change the complex ways in which social, economic and political systems shape our lives – offering some an easy pass in life and making others pay the cost. In order to envision a future in which we will all be liberated from the root causes of the climate crisis – capitalism, extractivism, racism, sexism, classism, ableism and other systems of oppression – the climate movement must reflect the complex realities of everyone’s lives in their narrative.
parallels between deciding what to do with AI models and what to do with institutions; reforming institutions
ref to How Not To Teach (??) from a compedium of anarchist pedagogy texts
linda: how can you talk about refusal when you don't even have a base understanding? which feminism can actualise in data science? is it only liberal feminism? does the radical have space?
renee: what are the leaderboards/benchmarks for this text?
the meta elements (structure, refs) of the text are what are interesting maybe more so than the context
agathe: how do these topics become accepted through the peer review processes?
danae last week: the decline of american imperialism
the very last sentence of the article: "Thus what is also needed is scholarship on the benefits, harms, and risks of mimicking humans and thoughtful design of target tasks grounded in use cases sufficiently concrete to allow collaborative design with affected communities."
https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology
for next time:
https://www.apc.org/sites/default/files/sneak_peek2020_final.pdf (maybe rhizomatica? page 13)
cristina: a quote by Mariame Kaba that seems to fit our next reading:
"When something can't be fixed, then the question is what can we build instead?"
The Chat - April 20th
[16:14] Michelle: somebody is sending scratchy noises :)
[16:15] Renée: I'm seeing if it is me
[16:21] Welcome to Slow reading!For help on using BigBlueButton see these (short) tutorial videos.To join the audio bridge click the phone button. Use a headset to avoid causing background noise for others.To join this meeting by phone, dial: +31 15 201 0064Then enter 57941 as the conference PIN number.
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[16:24] Renée: Agathe - do you feel like joining from the perspective of computer science
[16:25] Renée: So since I'm not doing well on the mic situation - shall I do the glossary
[16:25] Agathe Balayn: https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Stochastic_Parrots.pdf
[16:27] Cristina Cochior: https://commoncrawl.org/
[16:27] Sonia: commoncrawl.org/
[16:27] Michelle: Common Crawl
[16:28] Cristina Cochior: The Internet is a large and diverse virtual space, and accordingly, it is easy to imagine that very large datasets, such as Common Crawl (“petabytes of data collected over 8 years of web crawling”,11 a
filtered version of which is included in the GPT-3 training data) must therefore be broadly representative of the ways in which different people view the world.
[16:29] Cristina Cochior: (under Size Doesn’t Guarantee Diversity)
[16:30] Cristina Cochior: https://twitter.com/Abebab/status/1309137018404958215
[16:41] Michelle: The Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus
[16:44] Michelle: We instead propose practices that actively seek to include communities underrepresented on the Internet. For instance, one can take inspiration from movements to decolonize education by moving towards oral histories due to the overrepresentation of colonial views in text [35, 76, 127], and curate training datasets through a thoughtful
process of deciding what to put in, rather than aiming solely for scale and trying haphazardly to weed out, post-hoc, flotsam deemed ‘dangerous’, ‘unintelligible’, or ‘otherwise bad’.
[16:46] Cristina Cochior: https://www.ainarratives.com/ai-communism
[16:56] Michelle: geographies of datasets
[16:57] Renée: the provinces of datasets
[16:57] Renée: geographic specificity of datasets
[16:58] Agathe Balayn: this paper shows some kind of geography distribution for one dataset https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_CVPRW_2019/papers/cv4gc/de_Vries_Does_Object_Recognition_Work_for_Everyone_CVPRW_2019_paper.pdf
[16:59] Michelle: While this was reportedly effective at filtering out documents that previous work characterized as “unintelligible”
[17:00] danae: Furthermore, the tendency of human interlocutors to impute meaning where there is none can mislead both NLP researchers and the general public into taking synthetic text as meaningful.
[17:01] Renée: that's super interesting
[17:02] danae: https://digitalwitchcraft.works/Autopoietic-Post-Doom
[17:02] Renée: what does synthetic text teach us
[17:02] Renée: meaning that's an interesting field of inquiry
[17:04] Michelle: A central aspect of social movement formation involves using language strategically to destabilize dominant narratives and call attention to underrepresented social perspectives.
[17:04] Renée: ‘value-lock’
[17:06] Renée: As a result, the data underpinning
LMs stands to misrepresent social movements and disproportionately
align with existing regimes of power.
[17:07] Renée: I so want to unpack "curation practices"
[17:08] Cristina Cochior: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09010
[17:08] Cristina Cochior: In the electronics industry, every component, no matter how simple or complex, is accompanied with a datasheet that describes its operating characteristics, test results, recommended uses, and other information. By analogy, we propose that every dataset be accompanied with a datasheet that documents its motivation, composition, collection process, recommended uses, and so on.
[17:11] Renée: data sheets for datasets
[17:11] Renée: that's great because it outs the gatekeepers in some sense
[17:11] Sieta: like a README?
[17:11] Renée: exactly
[17:11] Renée: dataset design
[17:12] Cristina Cochior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology
[17:21] Renée: https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Karen_Sp%C3%A4rck_Jones#About_Karen_Sp.C3.A4rck_Jones
[17:25] Sieta: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/coronavirus-vaccinatie/vraag-en-antwoord/wanneer-krijg-ik-een-vaccinatie-tegen-het-coronavirus
[17:25] Cristina Cochior: https://book.affecting-technologies.org/introduction/
[17:26] Renée: Thank you Cristina
[17:27] Cristina Cochior: https://digilabour.com.br/2021/04/05/histories-of-ai-imaginaries-and-materialities-seminar-april-19-20/
[17:28] Michelle: As organizers, we prize these exchanges as productive collisions, as the signs of life of a new counterculture of computing that we hope to nourish. It’s a little world, and we hope just one of many. As the Zapatistas say, “The world we want is one where many worlds fit.”
[17:28] Cristina Cochior: I love that Zapatistas quote!
[17:29] Michelle: Of course, these proposed advocacy steps have to involve people from the affected geographies, who should be at the centre of strategising and in decision-making roles, in order to gain legitimacy and to not replicate the power imbalances of neocolonial realities.
[17:30] Cristina Cochior: Thus what is also needed is scholarship on
the benefits, harms, and risks of mimicking humans and thoughtful
design of target tasks grounded in use cases sufficiently concrete
to allow collaborative design with affected communities.
[17:30] Cristina Cochior: (Timnit agrees!)
[17:31] Michelle: Thus what is also needed is scholarship on
the benefits, harms, and risks of mimicking humans and thoughtful
design of target tasks grounded in use cases sufficiently concrete
to allow collaborative design with affected communities.
[17:32] Cristina Cochior: https://www.apc.org/sites/default/files/sneak_peek2020_final.pdf
[17:36] Renée: As organizers, we prize these exchanges as productive collisions, as the signs of life of a new counterculture of computing that we hope to nourish. It’s a little world, and we hope just one of many. As the Zapatistas say, “The world we want is one where many worlds fit.”
[17:37] Renée: who are the curators and what is their agenda - whether formulated forthrightly or through neglect?
[17:39] danae: caracoles :) https://freight.cargo.site/w/971/i/e8998287750263b2bf6b46b316c1dddb61ad72e0d74b4bc807e5c8e94acbb41d/caracolezln.png
[17:42] Sonia: Simon DeDeo
[17:43] Renée: It is who shows up and as a result who is showing up.
[17:48] Renée: using harm rather than bias
[17:48] Renée: some use "fairness"
[17:49] danae: now the infosec community uses "harm reduction" a lot
[17:49] Renée: systematic bias
[17:49] Michelle: how about a care brief?
[17:51] Renée: the word "harm" eliminates the mathematical response
[17:52] Michelle: Work on synthetic human behavior is a bright line in ethical
AI development, where downstream effects need to be understood
and modeled in order to block foreseeable harm to society and
different social groups.
[17:53] danae: i guess the text fails at computer science AND at politics :P
[17:53] Sonia: hahaa
[17:53] danae: tbh i was expecting more science
[18:03] Cristina Cochior: I’d like to suggest that machine learning is not new. It’s simply digital divination. Both the Ifá system and computers are trying to make a decision amidst great uncertainty. But then, with the case of machine learning, the computer seems to say: “Here you go, that’s your answer.” With Ifá divination there is no certain truth. There is no rational, logical, reasonable truth. Everyone has to bring their context to arrive at a conclusion, to arrive at a truth.
[18:03] Cristina Cochior: from https://book.affecting-technologies.org/overcoming-the-limits-of-rationality-in-humans-and-in-rational-machines-through-ubuntus-relational-personhood/
[18:03] Renée: I agree
[18:04] Sieta: O nice text Cristina
[18:04] Sieta: thanks for sharing
[18:05] Sonia: @Cristina, last line of my paper: This text explored several reasons why we can in fact understand the question of bias under a different light if we conceive of it as a fundamentally positive condition, and how we can understand the development of AI (and technology at large) under a different lens if we consider it as a technolinguistic feedbackloop whose very business is the endless negotiation of ambiguous concepts such as “intelligence,” “artificial,” or “human,” fueled by absolute uncertainty.
[18:06] Sonia: Amén!
[18:06] Cristina Cochior: Yessss! Great line Sonia! Also love that the last two words are "absolute uncertainty"
[18:06] Sonia: ;)
[18:07] Cristina Cochior: fleshyware
From: Introduction to Comparative Planetology by Lukas Likavcan (p. 73)
"[...] these infrastructures also display self-cannibalising tendencies, since computation is always a physical process involving the transformation of matter to energy, and energy to information. Seen through the optics of the future subsistence of the human species, as well as economic, social, and environmental injustices, this cannibalistic logic ought to be thoroughly criticised."
28/04/2021 - session 13
[15:08] Linda: p. 13
[15:09] Agathe Balayn: ahah, the train just arrived in Delft finally
[15:10] Cristina Cochior: Hello sorry I am late! A meeting before went on 10min longer
[15:19] Renée: does the line break occassionally?
[15:19] Renée: or is it my headphones
[15:19] Agathe Balayn: for me, yes
[15:25] danae: (i love linda's voice <3)
[15:25] Linda: <3
[15:26] Cristina Cochior: 40% of Romanian households have no access to the internet
[15:27] Sieta: https://cat.org.uk/
[15:27] Renée: thanks for that statistic Cristina and thanks for the link Sieta
[15:34] Cristina Cochior: in the ether :P
[15:34] Michelle: https://guifi.net/en
[15:36] Cristina Cochior: (we have a community networks working group if anyone wants to join :P https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/wg.communitynetworks )
[15:36] Sieta: cool!!
[15:36] Renée: awesome!
[15:36] Noemi: the mentioned visualzier app: http://www.architectureofradio.com/
[15:36] Renée: thanks
[15:37] Cristina Cochior: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-project-loon-balloon-facebook-aquila-internet-africa
[15:37] Renée: it's like the star
[15:41] Linda: Lesbians are gonna save the world
[15:41] Renée: Information Activism\
[15:41] Cristina Cochior: by Cait McKinney
[15:42] Michelle: https://anarchy.translocal.jp/radio/micro/howtotx.html
[15:43] Michelle: http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/videos/4556/Telestreet_-The-Italian-Media-Jacking-Movement;jsessionid=059CF4D59F1C46374B8215623418BD50
[15:43] Cristina Cochior: amazing ref, thanks for sharing
[15:43] Renée: OMG, there are so many good references
[15:43] Linda: coooool
[15:43] Michelle: https://criticalengineering.org/projects/deep-sweep/
[15:46] Michelle: https://mazizone.eu/
[15:47] danae: i think lesbianism becomes super central in mega patriarchal societies such as those in latin america, in the past they became nuns to avoid marrying men, now they're driving cars across the desert installing antennas <3
[15:57] Cristina Cochior: Wireless Leiden (NL) : https://wirelessleiden.nl/en
[15:57] Michelle: https://berlin.freifunk.net/
[15:57] danae: https://calyxinstitute.org/
[15:58] Cristina Cochior: https://buildyourowninter.net/index.html
[16:00] Renée: These approaches are somewhat designed for working on the fly
[16:02] Renée: rapid deployment of networks
[16:02] Michelle: Some of the critical concerns in the region are loss of traditional knowledge on agro-biodiversity and indigenous crop cultivation, and the impact of climatic change and weather patterns on crop yields and biodiversity. The open source platform allows farmers to share information and co-create knowledge on indigenous crop varieties, cultural art forms like paintings, craft, music, etc. This is collected by the community and stored as a repository on a locally accessible server.
[16:03] Renée: These are also archival practices
[16:03] Renée: setting up a repository of local and situated knowledge
[16:06] Renée: time, duration, volunteerism, and how these approaches can be sustained in the long run
[16:09] Renée: outside of a monetary incentive, another knowledge is liberated, possible and allowed to flourish
[16:11] Renée: I suck at working in the terminal
[16:15] Sieta: is there somewhere a website for rhizomatica?
[16:15] Noemi: https://www.rhizomatica.org/
[16:15] Sieta: thanks you
[16:17] Renée: This is useful - not just the links but the links: https://www.rhizomatica.org/resources/
[16:17] Michelle: Sustainable livelihoods are facilitated by this system using an e-commerce platform, ensuring direct connection between the farmer and the clientele for selling and purchasing of goods. In the Pathardi community network in Maharashtra, women played a lead role in collecting information of the various biodiversity available in the village. This information was collected in the form of audio recordings played on a community radio, and photographs and videos of different plant and crop varieties. Women also collected information on the various methods adopted by the community to preserve seeds. Other methods of biodiversity conservation that women contributed to were through tribal wild food festivals where women followed traditional recipes.
[16:18] Michelle: https://canal3lavictoria.cl/
[16:20] Sieta: haha sooo nice to hear the capitalist mindset of ever more and 'better' is completely dismissed in this regards Danae ;)
[16:21] danae: YES <3
[16:21] Linda: ugh! wish I could stay. Super interesting. See you all after the break!
[16:22] danae: good luck!
[16:22] Renée: take care Linda
[16:23] Renée: This is definitely a continuation of those traditions
[16:28] Renée: And if we speak about datasets, what does it mean and what will the impact be if some datasets dominate over others and shape particular futures...
[16:28] Renée: at the exclusion of others?
[16:32] danae: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/isolated-communities-connect-amid-pandemic/
[16:32] Renée: thanks for the link Danae
[16:33] Michelle: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/allende-chile-beer-medina-cybersyn/
[16:34] Agathe Balayn: natural language processing for Africa https://www.masakhane.io/
[16:34] Renée: Thank you Agathe
[16:35] Cristina Cochior: thanks agathe!
[16:36] Renée: Our Values
Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu - loosely translated from isiZulu means “a person is a person through another person” or “I am because you are”. This philosophy calls for collaboration and participation and community. It proposes relationality, over individualism for stronger social cohesions towards sustainable communities. It believes we share our successes and one’s personhood is evaluated based on their contributions to the community.
African-centricity. We centralize the narratives of Africans as a remedy to the effects of Euro-centricism on our beliefs. This way we reassert a new way of looking at information from a African perspective and shun any attempts to devalue our knowledge and stories
Ownership - We believe that Africans should be in charge of owning, driving and participating in the NLP research process, rather than as observers or data providers.
Openness - We believe in sharing our ideas and progress openly, especially on the African continent, for Africans. We’re against research that takes African contributions or data and puts them behind a paywall that is infeasible for Africans to access.
Multidisciplinarity - We truly believe that participation from all fields and experience and that multidisciplinarity leads to a more robust and more inclusive society
Everyone has valuable knowledge - We believe that each person’s individual experiences have value and each person is worth listening too and has something to contribute.
Kindness - We believe that being considerate, friendly and generous within our community is the best way to support it and encourage more inclusivity
Responsibility - We believe that each person in the technology process has an ethical responsibility to what they produce in the world. For this reason, we actively wreckon with the ethical impacts of our work
Data sovereignty - We believe Africans should be able to decide what data represents our communities globally, retain ultimate ownership of that data, and know how it is used
Reproducibility - We believe in reproducible research. As a result, we publish our code and data from our research so that others can reproduce and build upon it.
Sustainability - We believe that sustainability is necessary for societal change - that small daily efforts, over a long time are what truly change the world. To that, we aim for sustainability of our work, by being fully integrated with technological stakeholders to ensure the community continues to thrive into the future
[16:38] Agathe Balayn: data for Black lives https://d4bl.org/
[16:40] Cristina Cochior: Abolish Big Data is a call to action to reject the concentration of Big Data in the hands of a few, to challenge the structures that allow data to be wielded as a weapon of immense political influence. To abolish Big Data would mean to put data in the hands of people who need it the most.
[16:42] Cristina Cochior: transgressive potatoes
[16:43] Cristina Cochior: While this digital divide must be addressed,
information and communications technologies
(ICTs) can and must be employed and deployed
differently. Community networks offer an example
of how. One way to understand this is through the
lens of “appropriate technology”, defined as being
small-scale, affordable by locals, decentralised,
labour-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally
sound, and locally autonomous.6
In this definition
we find similar dynamics in land stewardship and
small-scale agriculture insofar as the appropriate
technology movement grew out of the energy crisis
of the 1970s, similar to land-based approaches that
promote environmental conservation by seeking to
“close the cycle”, such as permaculture.
[16:44] Sieta: a really nice book about permaculture and society is Cultural Emergence by Looby Macnamara
[16:45] Cristina Cochior: the phrase "appropriate data" from Timnit Gebru still haunts me
[16:46] Welcome to Slow reading!For help on using BigBlueButton see these (short) tutorial videos.To join the audio bridge click the phone button. Use a headset to avoid causing background noise for others.To join this meeting by phone, dial: +31 15 201 0064Then enter 21282 as the conference PIN number.
[16:46] To invite someone to the meeting, send them this link: https://bbb.tbm.tudelft.nl/b/aga-9ab-8g7-tu1
[16:46] Renée: I know, it's freaky
[16:47] Renée: permaculture as an overarching structure where you understand things within a loop
[16:50] Noemi: Thank you for sharing!
[16:54] Michelle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOgzQLnQcHI
[16:54] Michelle: you can't hear me
[16:54] Michelle: don't know
[16:54] Michelle: okay
[16:55] Michelle: I was wondering if we could have a look at her work together
[16:55] Michelle: and maybe watch this youtube video together
[16:56] Cristina Cochior: next time you mean or in between?
[16:59] Cristina Cochior: @michelle: this one is also great text by her http://schemasofuncertainty.com/algorithms-as-cartomancy
[16:59] Michelle: when?
[17:00] Sieta: Ok!
[17:00] Michelle: at 4?
[17:01] Michelle: I have a meeting from 14-16
[17:01] Michelle: sure I can come after that
[17:01] Sieta: I can be there until 15:30
[17:01] danae: psa: this friday i'm at this SEX TECH TALKSHOW in case you want to join <3 https://twitter.com/touchyfeelytech/status/1385551389368127492
[17:01] Cristina Cochior: I can join too
[17:02] Cristina Cochior: @danae: when is the talk with you and timnit?
[17:02] danae: was yesterday!
[17:02] danae: five people went haha
[17:02] Cristina Cochior: recorded?
[17:02] danae: idk
[17:02] Cristina Cochior: 5 very lucky people
11/05/21
[16:09] Renée: It's still not working
[16:10] Renée: I have to find an alternative
[16:10] Renée: coming back soon
[16:11] cristina cochior (she/her): https://3rd.obfuscationworkshop.org/
[16:32] cristina cochior (she/her): https://etherdump.vvvvvvaria.org/publish/slowreading.raw.html
[16:33] cristina cochior (she/her): https://etherpump.vvvvvvaria.org/p/slowreading.raw.html
[16:57] Renée: https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/extracted_hightlights
[17:03] cristina cochior (she/her): https://etherpump.vvvvvvaria.org/p/extracted_hightlights.raw.html
[17:24] cristina cochior (she/her): https://share.riseup.net/
[17:26] Sieta: blob:https://share.riseup.net/2bf1f64c-d093-471d-8f89-4eb4263eec0a
[17:36] Agathe Balayn: https://www.wordclouds.com/
[17:39] Sieta: bathroom breakkkk brb
[17:41] Welcome to Slow reading!For help on using BigBlueButton see these (short) tutorial videos.To join the audio bridge click the phone button. Use a headset to avoid causing background noise for others.To join this meeting by phone, dial: +31 15 201 0064Then enter 76515 as the conference PIN number.
[17:41] To invite someone to the meeting, send them this link: https://bbb.tbm.tudelft.nl/b/aga-9ab-8g7-tu1
[17:42] Linda: also need bathroom break
[17:43] cristina cochior (she/her): https://en.toolpage.org/tool/question-extractor
[17:53] Agathe Balayn: https://www.wordclouds.com/
[17:54] cristina cochior (she/her): artificial notes
[17:55] cristina cochior (she/her): pseudo couds
[17:55] cristina cochior (she/her): *clouds
So
Sonia
4:06 PM
https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/ddh/events/aesthetics-of-noise/
So
Sonia
4:07 PM
https://www.glass-bead.org/article/shattering-of-the-vessels/?lang=enview
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SCHEDULE +++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Week 1 - 26-01-2021 15:15-17:00 - introduction of the research group
- Week 2 - 09-02-2021 16:00-18:00
- To bring to The Show & Tell Session: What would you carry with you on your Desert Island to slow read? When considering AI and inequality, what are those seminal texts/artifacts/ that have shaped your thinking. (reference to Desert Island Discs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p009mhvv or https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p009mztt ) Bring one text (potentially to be read together and one other thing that can be anything else/media/object/catalyst/art/you name it.
- five to seven minutes max to present (aim for two minutes that you are presenting and no doubt it will slightly stretch longer)
- what you bring should also be connected to your expectations for this reading group :)
- Week 3 - 16-02-2021 16:00-18:00 - slow reading of Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing
- Week 4 - 23-02-2021 16:00-18:00 -
adjacent reading of Maturana and Varela’ Autopoesis & Dynamics in Action by Alicia Juarrero
- Week 5 - 02-03-2021 16:30-18:30 - reading of Dynamics in Action by Alicia Juarrero
- Week 6 - 09-03-2021 16:00-18:00 - reading of Dynamics in Action by Alicia Juarrero - continuing
- Week 7 - 16-03-2021 14:30-16:30 - code tour
- Week 8 - 23-03-2021 16:00-18:00 - little gardening
- Week 9 - 30-03-2021 16:00-18:00 - popcorn and screening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSK2ygnuXxE&t=82s
- Week 10 - 06-04-2021 16:00-18:00 - Personal encounters with AI
- Week 11 - 13-04-2021 16:00-18:00 - watchparty ?? or reading One Dimensional Man adjacent with ?
- Week 12 - 20-04-21 16:00 - 18:00 - Timnit Gebru
- Session 13 - 28-04-21 15:00 - 17:00 - 2020 SNEAK PEEK / Community networks: A people – and environment – centred approach to connectivity
- Session 14 - 11-05-21 16:00 - 17:00 - watching work of Flavia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOgzQLnQcHI or http://schemasofuncertainty.com/algorithms-as-cartomancy
