The next wave of AI is rooted in human culture and history

Understanding humans is essential to the design and experience of a technology. For decades, major corporations have turned to social scientists for insight into human behavior, culture and history. At Intel, Genevieve Bell, a prominent Australian anthropologist with a Ph.D. from Stanford University, has been tracking societal trends across the world to help build technologies that are fine-tuned to the needs of the people who will interact with them.

Bell started working at Intel in 1998. She brought her anthropological research and fieldwork techniques to the world of microprocessors, wearables and artificial intelligence. Over the years, her formal role has evolved from director of user experience at Intel’s research lab to VP of corporate strategy. But regardless of the titles, her work has remained firmly focused on studying the patterns and complexities of human behavior across cultures. In her self-proclaimed role as a “full-time anthropologist and part-time futurist,” she examines the meaning of “intelligence” within the context of machines, while she continues to trace its cultural impact on humans and their relationships.

At a time when robotic helpers and virtual assistants are starting to infiltrate our personal lives, the need to assess the implications of this new kind of interaction feels more pertinent than ever. I recently called Bell to talk about the social impact of building relationships with our machines and the ways in which the story of AI is deeply connected to the history of human culture.

In what ways does the study of human societies and cultures drive technological innovation? And how does that translate into your work at Intel?

I think of it as this challenge where we have built machinery and then we say, “Here it is, now use it.” We need to have a more balanced approach, which is to have a robust understanding of people’s pain points and also their aspirations. What are they trying to get done? What are the barriers to that and what do they wish were possible? And conversely, what do they not want to have happened. With those things, you can develop a set of insights about what people care about, and that should be a part of the design process. It’s not just about designing technology but government services and infrastructure should have an eye on those things too.

At Intel, I would like to imagine that is part and parcel of how we do things. What are the experiences this technology can deliver? What can we make possible with our technology that wasn’t possible before? When you look at the range of places where Intel is engaged these days, you can see that. As we’re thinking about new technology objects, whether it’s wearables or other things like sensor technology that’s closer to the body, we think about what people want to get done. How do we build technologies that speak meaningfully to that? Even on our side, where we’re thinking about data and the cloud – we’re moving to a world where it’s more machines talking to machines – we need to be paying attention to, what are the consequences to all of that data movement? Paying attention to the experiences that technology could or should deliver, and also what are the barriers that you’re trying to remediate, are all part of what it means to think about people when you’re building technology.

How does your experience and work as an anthropologist inform your perspective of artificial intelligence?

My mom is also an anthropologist, and the joke in my family is that anthropology is less a vocation and more a mind-set. It’s a way of looking at the world that I don’t know how to escape from. I had an ex-boyfriend once tell me I was a terrible person to go on a vacation with. He said, “You treat vacation like fieldwork,” and I was like, “I treat life like fieldwork.”

For me, there are some key tenets to being an anthropologist that I bring everywhere. I want to make sense of something as a story. When I first started thinking about artificial intelligence, I wanted to know two things: What was the work that the phrase artificial intelligence was doing? So what was that language doing, and what did it privilege and erase? And then I wanted to know its history. Where did it come from? What are the other stories and narratives that it’s attached to? That leads you to ask questions about who coined the phrase and why?

As an anthropologist, I wanted to interrogate AI not just as a technical agenda but as a cultural category. I wanted to look at the intellectual history of it. I found myself reading [Alan] Turing and his incredibly provocative question: “Can a machine think?” And the whole notion of the Turing test — Is there a moment where we as humans can no longer distinguish ourselves from the machines? It’s a really interesting formulation both of a technical idea but also a cultural one. It’s also where you can see the cultural ambivalences and anxieties too. In the conversations in the press and public culture, AI is often accompanied by everything from the language around the robot apocalypse, the singularity, to the idea that they’ll replace or kill us, all depending on the narrative. I was interested in why those two stories were so tightly coupled. Why have the conversations around AI always necessitated this other conversation? Unpicking that was also a very anthropological endeavor.

Turing’s ideas are incredibly prominent in the narrative around AI. But there are also ideas generated and popularized by Hollywood. As someone who is examining the language and meaning of AI, how do you define it?

The language of AI is interesting. “Artificial” is a word whose oppositional points are things like natural, real or increasingly organic. In the 1950s, artificial was a really good word. It meant things like tidy and scientific and unmired by the messiness of biology. And intelligence is in the opposition to emotionality, affect, irrationality and stupidity. You start to see the notion that AI is rooted in, about something that would’ve been clean and tidy, uncomplicated by human emotions and irrationality and somehow pristine.

For me, artificial intelligence is a catchall term and it’s one that’s cycled in and out of popularity. It’s back at the moment. It’s an umbrella term under which you can talk about cognitive compute, machine learning and deep learning, and algorithms. It’s a catchall because it means everything and nothing at the same time. It’s a cultural category as much as a technical one. One of the challenges for AI is that it is always and already twinned with the cultural imagination of what it would mean to have technologies that could be like humans. And that’s a preoccupation that preexists Hollywood. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein 200 years ago and that is in some ways one of the quintessential stories about a technology trying to be human. And that in and of itself is based on earlier stories like the Golem out of Jewish Kabbalism and the notions that thread through almost every major world culture and religion about humans trying to bring something to life and about the consequences of that, which are always complicated and rarely good.

“We talk about artificial intelligence, but we often don’t talk about artificial affect or artificial emotionality or morality or artificial souls. All of those are in some ways a part of our intellect.”

In most cultural traditions, the only people who get to make things come to life are gods, and humans shouldn’t do that work; nothing good will come of it. That’s been around for thousands of years. It doesn’t surprise me that artificial intelligence kind of echoes back to that history.

For me, it means a constellation of scientific, technical and regulatory agendas to develop a set of technologies that have the capacity for thought that mirrors a piece of human intellect but not all of it. In its most narrow sense it’s about technologies that will allow a certain class of decision-making. In its current instantiation, circa 2016, it’s a lot about pattern-matching and the capacity to look through data sets.

One of the challenges now is: What is the value of our humanity? Is what it means to be human reducible to our intellect? If so, what do we imagine intellect is? And if not, then what are we designing out of the system that we might actually want to have in the system? We talk about artificial intelligence, but we often don’t talk about artificial affect or artificial emotionality or morality or artificial souls. All of those are in some ways a part of our intellect. We don’t think about that because we sometimes have the capacity to drive intelligence down to playing chess or Go and the ability to doing a Q&A. Frankly, most people’s intellect is much more expansive and complicated than that.

In what ways do you think these mainstream ideas of AI get in the way of our understanding of it? Is there something you’d like to see changed in the narrative around it?

We frequently dismiss the fears without acknowledging that they are based in a little bit of truth. Humans have built technical systems for a long time, and they’ve often had unintended consequences. And sometimes those unintended consequences were quite difficult to live with. We built cars but it took us another 70 or 80 years to build safety equipment into them. We had cars long before we had seat belts or traffic lights and road rules. There is a piece there that says maybe when humans go, “Oh, that’s how I feel about that,” it’s not because they’re afraid of the science, they’re afraid of themselves.

What would happen if we took the fears seriously enough not to just dismiss them, going, “You’ve watched too many Terminator movies”? But actually took them seriously and said, “Here are the guardrails we’re implementing; here are the things we’re going to do differently this time around and here are the open questions we still have.” That’s an interesting way of doing it, but the other way is to be acutely aware that most science fiction, while based in fact, sells more when it’s dystopic and not utopic. So you have the distinct clash between scientists who are often techno-deterministic and optimistic and science fiction, which is techno-deterministic but pessimistic. How do you diminish the delta between those two things? How do you acknowledge the anxiety and not make it irrational while also moving people through it?

You often talk about the “preoccupation to make something like us, to bring something to life.” What are the cultural implications of doing that?

It’s different in various cultures. There are lots of stories in cultural narrative about who gets to bring things to life and under what circumstances. And those vary by cultural traditions, and there are also very different notions about what can be sanctioned and what can’t. Even within late-Industrial, post-Enlightenment West, our ideas about what can think has changed dramatically.

In the last 20 years, zoology has pushed those boundaries a great deal where we are now more willing than ever to allow that animals have many things that we once regarded as human. Capacity for logic, dreaming, intergenerational transmission of knowledge and language, tool-making – those were the things we thought made us human. There’s also stuff around symbolic and magical thinking in animals that has in some ways finally blown the boundary line. We’re now willing to acknowledge that all different species of birds recognize things, engage in pattern-matching and recognition. Studies of crows, in particular, suggest that.

“In most cultural traditions, the only people who get to make things come to life are gods, and humans shouldn’t do that work; nothing good will come of it. That’s been around for thousands of years. It doesn’t surprise me that artificial intelligence kind of echoes back to that history.”

Even in our own tradition we’re increasingly blurring the boundaries of what makes humans distinctive versus everything else. For a long time there was a bright line between what was human and what wasn’t. Frankly, if you think about the last 300 years, not all humans were on the bright side of that line. If you think about the way the West thought about the Aboriginal people in my country, 200 years ago, they weren’t fully human. If you think about the way most constitutional documents enshrined women, they were mostly human but didn’t have the capacity to vote. You know the idea of who is in and who is out of humanness is contested territory. Think about even the last 20 years around homosexuality or politics around gender and race, you can clearly see even the notion of who is human and who isn’t human amongst humans is complicated. One of the lines we have historically drawn is about the capacity for thought or intellect; that was one of the things that sanctioned an object to reflect about itself. We’ve credited different sorts of humans with that capacity over the years. What it means to be human is never as straightforward as it seems. We’ve been contesting that category for a really long time.

Particular challenges around AI are tied up with all of those stories, too. Part of the reason it feels tricky is that all of the pieces in that equation are not as stable as they appear. Reality is, we’ve had these internal debates about what’s human and what isn’t for a very long time, and this is one more complexity on top of that. To stabilize those debates, what people are doing is making the human piece easy, and it clearly isn’t.

A still from Frankenstein, 1931. Image: Universal Film Archive/Getty Images.

In constantly engaging with technologies, we’ve been building a new kind of social relationship. In what ways are we knowingly and unknowingly building that relationship through artificial intelligence? Using the voice, for instance. It’s a subtle but profound way to connect with a machine and it’s being used across devices now.

I’m right there with you. Voice is a surprisingly intimate way of engaging with things. Text is one thing, and I’m willing to bet many of us type things we would never say. Much of the internet is predicated on people typing things they would never say. With voice, it’s not as simple as the only time we talk is to other people. We talk to gods when we pray; some of us pray out loud. We talk to our pets. Some people talk to their cars. But most of those other objects don’t talk back. Your pets may recognize your voice and alter their behavior; if they’re cats, usually not. But there’s a piece [of] those are intimate exchanges because of voice.

I got an Alexa [Amazon’s personal assistant] when it first came out last year and I was shocked at how it felt like a personal relationship because I was talking to it. I had asked Alexa to set an alarm, and when it went off I said thank you. I literally said to myself, “I just thanked a machine, good Lord!” I found that because she and I interact via voice it feels much more intimate. I’ve read up on how people are using it, I am by no means alone. There’s something about the voice interface that’s really interesting as a social experiment.

What’s fascinating there is I suspect you can get to relationships with technology without AI as the backbone, if you can have relationships and connection without it necessarily behaving like a human. If it did, you can imagine other values coming into play. Maybe it’s about emotional intelligence and not problem-solving intelligence. Imagine a point when Alexa or another similar object is back-ended by more data than she currently has. If she has spent enough time in my kitchen, then she knows enough about me to say: “You have an 8 o’ clock meeting, the traffic is terrible, you’re late! Get out of bed, get on the road!” She can start to be not so much bossy, but nurturing. So the frame there is not about recommendations, which is where much of AI is now, but is actually about nurture and care. If those become the buzzwords, then you sit in this very interesting moment of being able to pivot from talking about human-computer interactions to human-computer relationships.

Within the context of this new human-computer relationship, what should we be most aware or cautious of?

It’s the same things we are cautious of in all relationships. We already have different scales of relationships in our lives. [But] machines will not be humans, so this is a different kind of relationship. It’s a reasonable set of challenges for us as citizens and consumers but also for technologists and designers to think about things like: What’s the nature of this relationship, and what happens when you break up? Am I keeping my stuff or are you taking it back? How does that manifest itself as data? What are the values built into those things and how do you navigate different value systems? People who are designing AI will build into it assumptions about how the world will be. And, you know, there are places where we’ll need to ask: What is the vision of the world that is being enacted here?

Speaking of designing AI and building ideas into it, there’s been a lot of talk about the need for diversity. And recently at the AI Now symposium in New York, where you were a speaker, an interesting point was made about the inclusion and need for the female perspective. What are your thoughts on that?

In order to build the next generation of technology, you need to have as many points of view in the room as you can. For me, that is absolutely a call to say it’ll be good to have more women; in some places, it’ll be good to have any women. Not just more women, but also people who come from different economic and cultural backgrounds. People from different interdisciplinary backgrounds are hugely important for the next wave of technology. You need to have people who are historians and philosophers and even poets. There has to be this capacity to think differently about data, time, history and logic. It requires as many different ways of thinking as you can possibly tolerate. The reality is, managing that is hard. It is easier to have teams that look and think like you. There is less tension. But it also means there’s less debate. We need to be more willing to allow that it will be harder but that it is good and the outcome is infinitely better. So for me, it’s about: How do you ensure you have as much good thinking in the room and as much diversity of thought and lived experience and positionality as you can get? More women is just the start of that, and it’s a critical start. But I worry. We keep saying it’s important, but we don’t do enough about it.

McDonald’s hands out activity trackers with Happy Meals

For more than three decades, McDonald’s has handed out toys with Happy Meals. It’s been long argued that the gifts incentivize parents and children to eat more fast food, leading to health issues like obesity and diabetes. While we’ve seen more educational and surprising tech inclusions, like VR goggles, toys that promote fitness and physical activity have been very few and far between (although the company did once include a pedometer with special Go Active! adult Happy Meals back in 2004).

With the Olympics now dominating headlines, the fast-food giant is encouraging kids to get moving with a new “STEP-it” fitness tracker. Every Happy Meal sold in the US and Canada will include one of six wrist-worn pedometers that also blink slowly or quickly depending on a child’s activity. “Step-it is in line with McDonald’s general philosophy for Happy Meal toys, which is to make toys that encourage either physical or imagination-based play,” McDonald’s Canada Senior Marketing Manager, Michelle McIImoyle, explains to CityNews.

McDonald’s says that the toy will be available for four weeks, during which it will advertise the tracker on TV and include it in pre-roll ads on YouTube (presumably on kid-focused videos). It’s one of the main 2016 Olympic sponsors and is the official restaurant of the Games, so it makes sense to include the trackers and perhaps incentivize younger viewers to be active while US and Canadian athletes compete in Rio.

Via: Wareable

Source: CityNews.ca

Grovemade and Joey Roth team up on wooden desktop speakers

Grovemade has a knack for crafting tech accessories out of wood. For its latest product, the company teamed up with designer Joey Roth on a set of desktop speakers that are made from that natural material. You might remember Roth’s ceramic speakers from a few years back, among a collection of other audio and industrial designs. This time around, Roth lent his expertise to Grovemade’s Speaker System: a pair of desktop speakers with a horn design and 2-inch drivers that’s paired with a 2x25W amplifier. The speakers are made from solid maple and walnut to complete the look of the fully analog audio setup.

Working with wood is the key element to Grovemade’s overall product line. Whether it’s an iPhone case or a keyboard tray, the company knows a thing or two about working with the natural materials. For its Speaker System, each shell is machined in-house from a solid piece of hardwood with a hand from Autodesk’s Fusion 360 software. The pieces are then assembled with epoxy, sanded down to their final shapes and given two coats of oil to seal the wood. Stainless steel stands are covered in leather to mask any exposed hardware and giving the round speakers some solid footing for your desk.

Grovemade touts “an acoustically rich sound” that does justice to lows, mids and highs without the help of digital signal processing. If you want to put that claim to the test, you’ll have to hand over $599 for the walnut set and $499 for maple option. You won’t have to wait to grab a set though, as both are available now via the source link below.

Source: Grovemade

Hunter Fan Company Releases First HomeKit-Enabled Ceiling Fan

Hunter Fan Company has announced that Signal, the first ceiling fan with HomeKit support, is now available for $379 through its website, Amazon, Build.com, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Menards, and in lighting showrooms throughout the United States. The Symphony, a cheaper version with white blades, will launch in the fall for $329.

Hunter Fan Company first introduced the Signal and Symphony at CES 2016 earlier this year. The smart ceiling fans connect to a home’s Wi-Fi network and, through HomeKit, the fans are able to be controlled using Siri voice commands. Using Scenes and Triggers, the fans can interface with other HomeKit products like lights and thermostats for a full connected home experience.

Tags: HomeKit, Hunter Fan Company
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BEA and Tap & Go Now Support Apple Pay in Hong Kong

Nearly one month after Apple Pay launched in Hong Kong, the iPhone-based contactless payments service has expanded to The Bank of East Asia (BEA) and Hong Kong Telekom (HKT)’s Tap & Go contactless payments network.

BEA customers can add eligible MasterCard and Visa credit cards to Apple Pay and receive 5,000 bonus points between now and August 22, while the first 30,000 customers that complete three or more Apple Pay transactions between now and October 31 will receive a 25% cash rebate of up to $180.

Likewise, HKT Tap & Go customers that add prepaid cards to Apple Pay, and complete three or more Apple Pay transactions between now and August 31, will receive a cash rebate of up to $50.

Eligible cards can be added to Apple Pay by tapping the “Add Credit or Debit Card” option in the Wallet app on iPhone 5 and later running iOS 8.1 or above.

Other banks with Apple Pay support in Hong Kong include the Bank of China (Hong Kong), DBS Bank (Hong Kong), Hang Seng Bank, HSBC, and Standard Chartered.

Apple Pay retailers in Hong Kong include 7-Eleven, Apple, Colourmix, KFC, Lane Crawford, Mannings, McDonald’s, Pacific Coffee, Pizza Hut, Sasa, Senryo, Starbucks, ThreeSixty, and elsewhere contactless payments are accepted.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tag: Hong Kong
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Nuance Updates Dragon Dictation for Mac With 24% Accuracy Boost, New Batch Mode

Voice dictation company Nuance today announced a collection of new software upgrades, including Dragon Professional Individual (version 15), Dragon Legal Individual (version 15), and Dragon Professional Individual for Mac (version 6). As with all versions of Nuance’s software, the new updates are said to feature “powerful dictation, transcription and customization capabilities” to allow users helpful and responsive dictation features with an emphasis on workflow.

The Dragon software lets its users precisely dictate reports, spreadsheets, emails, and other documentation using only their voice. Specifically on the new Mac release, the software has had its accuracy boosted up to 24 percent over previous iterations of Dragon. Helpful tips will get new users “up to speed quickly,” while further educating existing Dragon fans into the complexities of Nuance’s product.

“This latest suite of professional productivity solutions brings with it some of the most advanced capabilities to drive documentation productivity – with higher accuracy, speed and efficiency,” said Peter Mahoney, senior vice president and general manager of Dragon. “Combined with Dragon’s optimization for portable touchscreen PC’s and the ability to sync with Dragon Anywhere, professionals are able to keep up with documentation demands from just about anywhere their business takes them.”

In the new update, Nuance has introduced a “Batch Mode” to allow users to transcribe multiple audio files at once, as well as introducing full text control to empower “users to work even more quickly and accurately by voice.” Using Apple’s accessibility API, Dragon Professional Individual for Mac supports Apple Pages, Apple Keynote, Apple Numbers, Microsoft Outlook 2016, Scrivener, and other document creation programs.

The release on the Mac — as well as Dragon on the PC — uses Nuance’s new “Deep Learning Technology” to learn each of its users’ voice patterns and accents. This allows Dragon to recognize and adapt to the environment, be it in a quiet office or outside, which is a possibility thanks to the company’s Dragon Anywhere mobile app that launched late last year. Over time, this speech data is accrued to improve Dragon’s voice dictation features and result in a more naturalistic readout of transcribed speech.

The English version of Dragon Professional Individual for Mac will go on sale for $300 on September 1 (digital) and September 14 (retail) in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Nuance is also holding a special upgrade pricing scheme, selling Dragon for $150 for users who own registered versions of Dragon Dictate for Mac, versions 4 and higher. Those interested in the other Dragon software bundles can find out more about Dragon Professional Individual for PC and Dragon Legal Individual on Nuance’s official website.

Tags: Nuance, Dragon
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Samsung Galaxy Note 7: The coolest thing you’ll find in the box isn’t the phone

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is probably one of the hottest phones in 2016. Announced a few weeks ago, the Note 7 is now on pre-order, hitting shelves on 2 September.

We’ve unboxed the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 and some of the best bits of this phone are lurking in the bottom of the box.

Sure, the 5.7-inch Quad HD display with HDR is amazing, as is the waterproof yet compact body of this waterproof phone, but one of the key changes for this model is the introduction of USB Type-C. 

This new connector has been appearing on a number of phones over the past few months, but it wasn’t a feature of the Samsung Galaxy S7 that launched earlier in the year. 

Moving to a new standard of connector might sound like a small thing, but anyone who already has a USB Type-C device will know that change brings a wide range of challenges with it. Not in terms of function, but in terms of day-to-day practicality.

Pocket-lint

Fortunately Samsung has seen sense and bundled a whole range of accessories in the retail box for the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. There’s the adaptive fast charger for starters, which is a welcome inclusion (some manufacturers make you buy fast chargers), along with the separate USB Type-C cable, meaning you can charge from any USB device.

To make your old accessories even easier, Samsung has also included two additional adapters. The first, the larger, of these takes you from regular USB to Type-C. This means you could connect a full-sized USB drive, for example. 

The second, smaller, adapter converts Micro-USB to USB Type-C, meaning that you can use existing cables or chargers, or accessories that have a Micro-USB connection on them.

Overall, it means more flexibility, meaning you don’t have to throw out old accessories like external batteries, just because the Note 7 has a new connector type.

It’s geeky, but we love it. 

We have the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 currently under review and we will be publishing a full and final verdict in the near future.

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Xbox One S 500GB and 1TB release date confirmed, consoles now on pre-order

Xbox has kicked off Gamescom in Germany with an announcement that we were expecting – the opening of pre-orders on the smaller capacity Xbox One S consoles.

There’s a catch however. This isn’t just the straight console, it’s the Xbox One S with FIFA 17 for download, so you’ll be getting one of the hottest games of the year bundled into the mix too. That’s the catch, but we’re sure you can live with that.

The redesigned Xbox One S is smaller than the original, moving to white, and gives the controller a tweak, including a lovely textured finish for more grip. But the biggest change – and one of the things that will be of greatest interest – is the support for 4K resolutions and the inclusion of an Ultra HD Blu-ray player.

• Xbox One S review: Best console and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player out there
• Xbox One S vs Xbox One: What’s the difference?
• Xbox One S vs PlayStation Neo (PS4K): What’s the rumoured difference?
• Best Ultra HD Blu-ray players: Spinning 4K discs

That means that the Xbox One S 500GB is the most affordable Ultra HD Blu-ray player on the market at only £249.99. Even if you step up to the 1TB version at £299.99, you’re still looking at an Ultra HD Blu-ray player that’s cheaper than both existing players on the market from Panasonic and Samsung.

Not only that, but the Xbox One S supports HDR (for future gaming) and will give you UHD services like Netflix 4K, making it one of the most compelling entertainment packages around.

The Xbox One S 500GB and 1TB consoles are now available for pre-order on the Microsoft website as part of the FIFA 17 bundle and the release date is listed as 22 September 2016. 

The Xbox One S 2TB console sold out, so get those pre-orders in.