Abbe Boulah’s Weblog

WHAT AM I MISSING?

What I see and perceive:

So many voices decrying the current state of the country and the world. To the point of using powerful and sometimes questionable means to achieve change. So many voices questioning and deploring proposed changes — but not offering better answers. And so many voices — on all sides — denouncing the proponents of the ‘other’ side as morally, legally and judgmentally deficient, using questionable characterization, using derogatory words with which to describe those proponents and blame them for the problems.

What I think or suspect I understand:

All sides seem to agree that the current state of affairs is in need of change. I find some of the complaints justifiable — things are not as they ought to be

What I find curious and difficult to understand 

The suggested or implied remedies — if any are even suggested among the compaints — seem to amount to two basic attitudes:

One:   to insist that the principles and rules governing the current state just should be applied and properly adhered to; (‘Constitution’, ‘tradition’).

The Other:  to return to models, principles and rules (regime designs) that go back in history before the ‘current’ system was fougth for and introduced. As if they did not include the problem features the current system tried to corrrect. But didn’t they actually lead to the current problems?

What I am curious and puzzled about: the missing

Viable but detailed suggestions from the many parties deploring flaws as to ‘what else’ could and  should be thought out, developed, discussed, and even tried out ‘instead’: — even from groups who claim to be ‘humanity’s best means’ for survival or redemption — some of which have been around for ages, and some who claim to have and know how to use the marvelous ‘new tools’ we now have…

What I know:

Not only are there many knowledgeable, well-intentioned, intelligent, creative people in this country but all over the world, who could get together for this task —but also that new and better answers are possible: I know because even I have worked out some tentative answers I’d like to discuss.

But where are they, what am I missing?

Where are the ideas and solutions we could bring together not just to better discuss but also bring to implementation for a better future?

Thorbjørn Mann

Concern 

The rapidly increasing use of ‘AI’  — ‘Artificial’ or  ‘Augmented’ Intelligence — tools for many different kinds of tasks that require what resembles resembles human reasoning —  raise the question of how such programs should be dealt with in the Planning Discourse.  There is little argument that there are many information-gathering and data analysis functions at which AI programs are impressively faster and more efficient than humans.  There is also justifiable uneasiness about how the results produced should influence the decision process. ‘

At the extreme ends of sentiment, potentially flawed and dangerous reactions emerge: Blind faith and and acceptance of AI-based solutions at one end: The tendency to invoke ‘data’, ‘facts’ and science, that preceded AI, as the sole justifiable basis of public policy is strengthened by it. On the other end, the very effectiveness of these tools raise concerns that significant planning decisions determined solely by algorithms will excluding legitimate considerations by humans, and can lead to blind and violent rejection;  the very concept of an organized large scale discourse support platform can be seen as a ‘Big Brother’ power instrument that must be resisted. 

So the question of how these concerns should influence policy in general and the design of the platform in particular deserves attention and discussion. 

Discussion:

The question can be approached from several plausible directions, not all of which can be explored here.  One significant perspective is that of making the basis of ‘judgment’  of AI algorithms sufficienlty transparent to the public  to alleviate the ‘Big Brother’ concern. This will require work both on the AI development side and, significantly, on the side of education of the public, to be able to understand and critically evaluate and judge the explanations. The importance of this task cannot be overstated: mere ‘trust me’  assurances on the part of officials, purveyors of the AI programs, even of ‘independent’  review committees installed to produce the assurances will not be enough: How ‘independent’ can review committees be if installed by the authorities, AI providers and their lobbyists?  

Another approach to explore this question, is the following: to look for provisions in the platform that separate  ‘reasoning’, data analysis, performance calulations, simlulations,  etc. that best can be done by AI tools, from ‘reasoning’ involving evaluation judgments that should be contributed by humans, as clearly as possible. (Of course the transparency reviews of the AI tools should be part of these provisions as well.)

Whether such a ‘clear separation’ of reasoning, or even a reasonable approximation for practical purposes is possible, is of course up for discussion. In other words: Are there meaningful distinctions between questions that can or should be ‘answered’ by humans exclusively, and those where AI produced results should be given equal or even exclusive consideration? 

Some optimism about this issue is based on the structure of what I have called the typical ‘planning argument’. Turning the standard logic sequence of ‘premies, premise, therefore conclusion’ around to the more colloquial ‘proposal, because premise, premise, premise’ or: («Proposal A should be adopted because  A will result in B (given conditions C) and B ought to be pursued, and conditions C are/will be given.»)  The pattern contains two premises that can be taken to plausibly rely on AI analysis: the factual-instrumental premise ‘A will preduce B, given C’  and the factual premise ‘Conditions C are/will be given’.  But the premise ‘B ought to be’ as well as the conclusion ’A ought to be adopted’ itself are ‘deontic’ or ought-claims. Is it meaningful to accept a procedural rule of assigning the ‘right’ to judge or calculate the plausibility of premises only to the former (‘factual’) premises and the right to judge (or assign ‘weights of importance’) to the deontic claims only to humans?  Or to accept the rule that AI data and plausibility calculations of fact-premises should be given ‘due consideration’ by humans, but that the aggregation of judgments of both kinds to indications of overall support for the proposal A should include  human judgments only:  the decision should be based on human judgments  only? 

A few kinds of procedural provisions both for the assessment judgment of premises to form plauibility and weight judgents for individual arguments, and the aggregations of the resulting argument weights into plausibiity measures of the proposal have been sketched for discusiion. The provisions could be seen as part of the needed effort to make the reasoning ‘transparent’. It should be noted that all such results will be judgments by individuals, and thus legitimately different, not any abstract universal or even common ‘group’ judgment. Any AI results claiming to have been based on ‘due consideration of all pertinent concerns, pros and cons’  would have to show that it has been given all the judgments of humans affected by the problem a plan aims to solve, and by all proposed ’solutions’. This aspect alone seems to be a strong argument in favor of separating AI-produced judgments about plans from the judgments of humans. And that the way the planning discourse will deal with this issue urgently needs more thorough discussion. 

Comments?

Wrong question?  If so:  what is the better, real question or problem? 

*  AI is ‘Inevitable’: To the extent results to questions produced by AI programs already already are virtually indistinguishable from comments produced by humans, to the same questions, isn’t it futile to even consider the question whether such contributions to the discourse should be admissible or not?  There will be human participants who will insist on using the tools to produce their own entries. And if such entries are indeed difficult or impossible to distinguish from genuinely human entries, any effort to prohibit them may lead to rejection of actual human comments. So better question: AI based entries will be part of the discourse — but shouldn’t the way entries will influence  the decision be based on the merit of entries, regardless of whether they have been constructed by huans or AI algorithms? 

Comments?

Picking up a cup of coffee at the counter in the coffee shop, the old man went out on the deck under the large oak tree, briefly enjoying the view – the park, the walkway along the shore of the little lake. Habit, for many years now. Looking for an empty seat at a small table, — not the large round one where there used to be conversation between the regular customers. There was no such conversation anymore. The old friends and acquaintances  had disappeared. Some had died, others had given up on conversation for the same reasons he did not even expect it now:  his failing hearing that even hearing aids could not assist: they only delivered more noise but no understanding. Most of the tables were occupied by studious-looking people — all younger — laptops or cellphones  diverting their attention even from the arrival of new customers.  But his habit kept him coming back He picked a seat  with some sun, — it was still early spring, with a chill breeze — and a view of the lake. His little notebook and the four-color pen at the ready for any insights that might occur to him, about various ideas and projects he was still ‘working’ on, that might perhaps, one day, turn into a book. 

No new ideas came to him today. Instead, curious memories of events he had thought were long forgotten. One, in particular, kept him reflecting about how the most innocent little incidents, — pranks, jokes,– sometimes had unexpected larger consequences. Interfering  in others’ plans and strategies in ways that even the most thorough efforts at anticipating forces that might help or interfere would not have been able to conceive or foresee. 

One such incident involved a prank from his school days — a secondary education institution in a mid-size town. Its principal had the curious habit of sending out brief memoranda with announcements or new rules he kept inventing or reminding his students and faculty about. Such as invoking, at the first snowfall, the stern prohibition of snowball fights in the courtyard.  

These memoranda were always typed (this was long before computers or even electric typewriters) on a single sheet of cheap newsprint paper. On the bottom,  there was a stamp — like the old office rubber stamps that showed the sender’s address or  read ‘copy’  or ‘file’ — that listed all the classes by level and number, and a space for the instructor’s initials to sign off after they had been read out in the respective class. This stamp was unusual in that it had a wonderful violet hue ranging unevenly from blue to red — evidently, because the secretaries having typed the messages randomly used a blue or red stamp pad, whichever happened to be closer at hand. The ritual was for the first teacher to come by the secretary’s desk  on his way to his next class, to pick up the memo, read it to the students, and then send a student to take it to the next class, and so forth, until every class had been duly notified.

It so happened that one such memo had been left in the class of the old reveler in ancient memories, The last one that day, of no further use. One student was intrigued by the graphical uniqueness of the stamp, and had an idea of an unusual prank:  what if such memo could be constructed on a similar-looking paper, with some ridiculous but sufficiently plausible new rules to fool at least some instructors into reading it in their classes, and perhaps cause some confusion? The very uniqueness of the memo, the stamp, the paper, the old typewriter font, made it a challenge. But it also ensured, if successfully forged, would make any strange message seem quite in line with the principal’s unusual communication habit, that seemed to serve some need to remind everybody of his position of power. 

The challenge led to a conspiracy by a small group of students, that turned out surprisingly successful. A matching sheet of typewriter paper, slightly yellowed like the original, was found; as well as a parent who owned an old typewriter with the same font. The two or three conspirators had a lot of fun concocting plausible-sounding messages, and settled on three or four.  He only remembered two: One referred to the usual chaos of the area where students using bicycles were allowed to store them.  The message declared that only students who could prove that they lived a certain distance from the school would receive a permit card to store their conveyance in that place in an orderly fashion on penalty of losing the permit. They would be able to pick up such cards in the chart storage room where the rolled up maps of the Roam Empire, the pictures of mammals, fishes, birds and of course the map of the country as well as that of city were stored.  A geography teacher or a janitor would be there, to check the distance on the city map before issuing the permit.  

Another new rule involved the grand central staircase of the school’s four-story building. It was an elaborate affair, with a first broad run going from the main corridor up to a  landing, from which there were two further runs,  one to the right, one to the left — returning to the central hallway at the next level. At the bell ringing for breaks, this stair was often the venue of confusion and even collisions between students running up or down in different directions. So the memo declared succinctly that from now on, there would be a strict right-hand traffic:  going up on the right side of the main central run, and using the right-hand upper run; and going down on the opposite run and then the ‘left’ side (seen from below).  The old man could not remember the third and fourth message, to his consternation —though he had actually been one of their collaborative authors,  but he satisfied himself thateven remembering the two was a good sign, considering his advanced age. 

The forgery of the stamp, he did remember well, however, was the masterpiece of the plot. Evidently, no stamp with the classroom pattern was available, nor could two adequately faded red and blue  stamp pads be found. It was achieved with a fine-point calligraphy pen dipped in watercolor of the varying blue-to-red colors, letter by letter,  and took some time and patience on the part of a student who had good grades in art class.  He wistfully regretted that no grade would be given for this homework. The result was indistinguishable from the original, at the expected cursory sight by the teachers. A sloppy pair of initials  resembling a hastily written ’47’ more than a faculty signature (to protect any of the faculty from suspicion of being the author) was scrawled on one of the class check-off spaces, indicating that it had already been read there.

It remained to get the memorandum into proper circulation. None of the conspirators were seated close to the door, but fortunately, a new student who had rcently been transferred from another school had been assigned to that (otherwise undesirable) seat. Being new and needing to gain respect and acceptance in this new tribe, he could be persuaded into taking the memo, and at the call from one or two of the conspirators that ‘someone knocked on the door’ would jump up to open the door, and then hand the memo to the teacher. Accompanied by some other random noise, the call came as soon at the teacher had ventured far enough from the door, the hand-over was performed without raising suspicion. The message was read — any chuckles from students were common enough at such readings and did not alert that teacher to anything unusual, and the memo was sent to another class without incident. 

The next break revealed the unexpected great success. There was a line in front of the chart storage room — but no teacher was there to issue bike permit cards. At the staircase, however, one faculty member had taken it upon himself to direct the traffic, loudly hollering “Righthand traffic!” — to the consternation of other students and faculty who had not gotten the news:  it turned out that after a few successful proclamations, the memo had arrived in a class taught by the principal himself, who confiscated it, visibly shaken by some emotion that students could not identlify.  The new, peaceful traffic pattern had just taken hold when the principal interferred to cancel the new rule. 

No further mention nor efforts at implementation of the new policies came to the attention of the conspirators;  after a few days, it seemed that the incident had just been forgotten.

However, several weeks later, a few students had gone to a new public  sauna outfit in town, that had announced a special promotion student discount on Thursday afternoons. It so happened that there also was a group of distinguished (by corpulence) men sweating away in the same hot venue, who turned out to be members of the liberal party in the city council  of that town. And they were discussing a crisis that had arisen in the very school — which was under the jurisdiction of the city.  It seemed that a vicious struggle had arisen between the principal’s effort to get one particular faculty member fired, whom he suspected of having launched a forged memo to the school (for unclear purposes other than self-promotion); and that faculty member who accused the principal of having lost control and confidence of the faculty. It was known that this very faculty member himself had previously insinuated ineffectiveness on the part of the principal, and made no effort to hide his own aspiration to that post. As luck — bad or otherwise — would have it, it was also the same teacher who had so impressively directed the new traffic pattern in the staircase. But he vehemently insisted that accusing him of the authorship of that memo was  just a lurid part of the principal’s own efforts to denigrate and discredit him so as to get him fired and removed as a competitor for the position. 

The poor city council members seemed at a loss about what to do about this affair. The discussion in the hot room got hot — it seemed that there also were issues about party affiliations involved — but had to be discontinued for the group to get into the ice cold pool to cool off.  So there was no opportunity, if there had even been an effort on the part of the students, to enlighten the council members to the naked  truth of the matter — that they were looking at the very authors of the infamous memo. 

There was no indication as to whether and how that crisis had been resolved — neither one of the suspected/accused parties were fired from their respective positions, at least for some time after that incident. And the old man had lost track of any further developments, since his family moved to another city soon afterwards and he had enrolled in a different school.  

But he could not resist a secret chuckle at the memory of the incident. And he resolved to use it in his social network activity to remind his social network systems thinking friends of the unpredictability of spurious context interference into social systems behavior patterns and change strategies.