Aza Raskin Tried To Fix Social Media. Now He Wants To Use AI To Talk To Animals - Types Of Gardening

Aya Raskin, co-founder of the Earth Species Project and the Center for Human Technology, wears glasses from the Stochastic Art Residency machine shop where she lives. “The glasses are the lens through which we see the world, and hopefully we can take off our human glasses to see the mind of another animal,” he says.

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In the early years of the Cold War, a series of underwater microphones tracking the sounds of Russian submarines picked up something different from the depths of the North Atlantic.

The ghostly sounds did not come from enemy ships or aliens, but from humpback whales, a species that was on the brink of extinction by humans at the time. Years later, when environmentalist Roger Payne found the tapes in a US Navy warehouse and listened to them, he was deeply moved. Whale songs revealed majestic creatures that seemed to be able to communicate with each other in complex ways. If only the world could hear those words, Payne argued, the humpback whale could be saved from extinction.

When Payne released the recording in 1970 as a single from the Humpback Whale album, he was right. The album went multi-platinum. It was played in the United Nations General Assembly and inspired Congress to pass the Endangered Species Act of 1973. In 1986, commercial whaling was illegal under international law. The world population of humpback whales has grown from about 5,000 individuals in the 1960s to 135,000 today.

For Aya Raskin, this story is an indication of how much humanity can change when it experiences a moment of connection with the natural world. "It's this powerful moment that can wake us up and spark a movement," Ruskin told TIME.

Ruskin's concern for animals comes from a very humane source. A former Silicon Valley host, he pioneered infinite scrolling in 2006, a feature that has become the basis of many social media apps. He founded Songza, a streaming startup that was eventually acquired by Google. But Raskin is slowly snapping at the industry when he realizes that technologies that can change people's behavior for the better are mainly used to keep people addicted to their devices and spend money on unnecessary products. In 2018, he co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with his friend and former Google engineer Tristan Harris, as part of an effort to ensure that technology companies are designed to benefit humanity, and not the other way around. She probably agrees with academic René DiResta that "freedom of speech is not freedom of opportunity." The phrase has become an effective way for responsible technologists, legislators, and political observers to distinguish between users' constitutional freedom to say what they want and the privileges enhanced by social media megaphones.

Raskin talks about the song of the whales because he is the co-founder and president of the Earth Species Project, an artificial intelligence (AI) non-profit organization that aims to decipher the language of animals ranging from humpback whales to great apes and crows. The question of whether it will actually be possible to accurately "translate" animal communication into something similar to human language has not yet been clarified. Meaning is socially constructed, and animal societies are very different from ours. But Ruskin is optimistic, it's worth it, because the connection between animals can be powerful enough to motivate people to protect the natural world at such a critical time in the fight against climate change.

The Earth Species Project applies artificial intelligence techniques for natural language processing, human translation software, and chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT to animal records. While they haven't yet "deciphered" the animal's speech, computer scientists at a non-profit organization have recently developed an algorithm that can distinguish the sounds of an individual animal (the algorithm works well for bats and dolphins, and not bad for elephants). from several records "dynamics". Raskin says that solving this problem, known as the "cocktail problem" because it's comparable to the difficulty of focusing on one person's conversation in a room full of people, is the first step to unraveling the mysteries of the animal kingdom.

See also: AI chatbots are getting better. But an interview with ChatGPT reveals its limits.

While troubleshooting social media and understanding animal speech may seem completely different, Raskin sees them as part of a shared mission. Raskin says the Land Types Project and the Center for Human Technology are "billion-dollar industry-changing experiments." They share the same goal: to change society for the better, not through the traditional Silicon Valley way of building an app or business model, but by changing the culture.

Time spoke to Ruskin this summer. In this expansive talk, we discuss not only animal translation but also the state of social media, applying these lessons to the rapid development of artificial intelligence and how to make room for humanity and society. Fast: the world is changing.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Before I start talking about the Earth Views Project, I want to talk about your life. Your father was Jeff Raskin, a well-known Apple expert on human-machine interaction, who left a huge mark on this company. You yourself were the founder of Silicon Valley, who worked to subtly change human behavior through technology. So let them sound the alarm on social networks. Now you are trying to talk to animals using artificial intelligence. Tell us about your trajectory.

My mother worked in a hospice for palliative care. From her I learned what it means to take good care of someone. My father developed the Macintosh project at Apple. And it also happened to a very human sense of caring before it was taken over by the dedication and attention of Silicon Valley industrial machines. You can still ask this question: what is this technology for?

One of the things that makes humanity unique is not how we use tools, as many species use tools, but how our tools change us. There is no person without the use of some technology. Be it language, fire or something else. What people are missing is that our technology is changing our social structure and our culture. Just look at the plow. It changed our way of life, created food surpluses that allowed us to move to the cities, which changed the nature of families and relationships. If you are going to use animals to plow your fields, which is no longer in line with the animist tradition, then change your religion. Growing up, especially with my father, I had a vision of how important technology is to who people become. We get to choose what we do with technology, and our identity and how we relate to the rest of the world is at stake.

My father was very interested in the concept of ergonomics: how people bend. If you don't understand and study ergonomics, you will end up making things like chairs that really hurt us. There is the ergonomics of relationships, of community, of society, the way we bend and bend. If we are blind to ergonomics, we break. If capitalism is not ergonomic for our ecosystem, we break the container we live in. And it's a straight line. For almost all of my work, I ask myself: How do we do the things that make us function as humans, how does our biosphere work, how does our technosphere work, so that we can do the things that help us thrive overall? . ?

He did a lot to make technology more humane. But deciphering the language of animals is out of the question. How are they related?

Civilization cannot exist without culture and the accumulated knowledge that comes from language. It's right here in the heart of a person's personality. The more you watch, the more you understand the human identity associated with language, and that tells you that there is something really important that we need to consider. Because if tomorrow we could remove all carbon from the atmosphere, as we should, the root problem, namely human arrogance, would not be solved. We must change the way we see ourselves, our relationship with ourselves and therefore with the rest of the world. It is a connection with technology. Once we can change this identity, it creates completely new behaviors and opportunities to solve these problems. The great hope is that these are moments in time when our point of view changes. And this change of perspective changes everything.

People spoke loudly and transmitted culture for 100,000 to 300,000 years. For whales and dolphins, that's 34 million years. Smart things usually last a long time. Imagine the knowledge that a culture that has existed for 34 million years can contain. It just confuses me.

Do you remember where you want to change people's point of view?

Yes, I think it's a position of interdependence. If in general you can empathize and see someone or something less than the other, then suddenly you are more connected than ever and your field of attention expands.

Many linguists understand that human language is connected to our brain structure and life experiences. Of course, when it comes to animals, these two things are very different. Maybe there are whale concepts that people just don't understand. Do you think it's really possible to talk to a whale? Or explain that the whale is talking more abstractly?

I consider it very important to keep these two poles. First, it is very anthropomorphic. How do you think we have these feelings, animals too. On the other hand, there is an exception for humans when we think that we are so special that we have nothing in common with other animals. And, of course, the truth will be somewhere in the middle. I think there will be things that we can find common ground on, that we can communicate directly with, and then there will be things that we don't share. So this part will be a much more metaphorical kind of communication.

And I don't really know what will be more exciting. Are these the parts that we can directly translate into human experience, or the parts that we can't? But I think what people often forget is that this pool of shared experiences is huge. [Raskin shows his screen.] This is a pilot whale carrying her calf, which has been dead for three weeks. Grief is undoubtedly a deeply shared experience. Here is a chimpanzee browsing Instagram who can and often uses it to follow other chimpanzees. So, here's what really survived. The answer, of course, we do not know, because we are engaged in science. It's like a journey into the unknown. But we have to be very open so as not to fall into the human exception. Just as we should not fall into anthropomorphism.

I want to switch and talk about social media. You helped create the phrase "free opportunity for free speech." What influence do you think this idea had? And do you think there is much more to be done?

I think this is a very useful idea to go out into the world. René DiResta, who wrote the article that introduced this idea to the world, did a great job. Obviously, he did a good job, but he needs to do more, because we are constantly blocked in this false division that அம்ப்பு சுயும் அயார் அயார் ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு ப்ப்பு

But this sentence points to something more important, namely that we need to think as a society as a whole. Facebook's share price has halved, which I don't believe, obviously we're the only ones. But even though we've been successful, the stakes are much higher now because we're still a product. Just as a tree is more valuable as a tree than a living tree, and a dead person is more valuable than a living person, so we will be more valuable as restless, confused, narcissistic tribal people than as complete and complete individuals. .

Shoshana Zuboff pointed out that capital moves things from market to market. And once they are on the market, they can be mined, mined, corroded and polluted. And that's what happened to people's attention and commitment. Off the market, now on the market. We have to think about the next level. We know that if you let the markets run without protective barriers, they will always rise to break what is growing inside them. If your liver starts growing without feeling anything, it will eventually take over your body and you will die. This is how cancer works. And that is why bazaars should always be equipped with railings so that they are safe for the body in which they grow. We did it for the stock market. We do this for things like human organs. We never did it with attention or promise. It's a market that needs rails, otherwise you'll be racing down your brainstem all the time.

When I think about it on a higher level, I see this basic equation. EQUIPMENT AND VEHICLE ARE AS STRONG AS A CAR. But with technology, democracy is more like democracy. And if we do not solve this problem, the most important values ​​for us will not have a place in the future.

Powerful machine learning systems are rapidly becoming available to businesses and the public. You can create realistic images. others can create realistic texts. It took 10 years for technologists to implement a consistent set of social media guidelines, and in the meantime, social media has destabilized our world. We are now seeing a very similar revolution in its early stages in accessible generative AI. Do you think there should be ethical red lines for technologies like GPT-3 and Dall-E?

Who knew HE would come first in art, history and relationships? The story has always been that our work comes first. But in fact it comes from things that we consider fundamental to human identity. And we haven't done it yet.

I think that social networks and artificial intelligence do a few simple things. That's it: the scale of the effect should match the type of railing you're standing on. I mean if you touch a million people instead of 500 million or a billion people, you will probably have a different value than if you just touched 50 people.

Then he must enter a world where we know that when something is posted on the Internet, it is posted by a person. And it's scary for many reasons. All of a sudden, that means you need stronger online identity protections, which, if you don't do it right, will open up a whole host of authoritarian things to watch. But the other side of the coin is that if we do none of this, then we will see the end of video and photo evidence as a reliable medium. This is a neutron bomb for internet credibility. Thus, we must draw this line between our privacy, personal security, the ability to speak and express ourselves, and the ability of society to listen and understand. We want to balance these things.

Lastly, I think one of the most important lessons that Silicon Valley has yet to learn is that "democratization" is not the same as "democratization." If you give everyone a James Bond supervillain weapon, bad things will happen. I think of it this way: the phrase "चैटबट" is also used in a wrong sentence. Because it makes you think of the 90s. Whenever you say "chatbot", replace it with "general relationship". Recently there was a Google engineer who got fired for thinking his language knew about the model. And takeaway food. The real question is that if he feels that his relationship with this language model is so deep that he is ready to stand up and dismiss it, this means that many people will feel that they are aware of the language models, with which they are facing. . you suddenly realize that relationships are the most transformative technology for people. This means that loneliness will become the greatest threat to national security. For example, there are relationship scams where people go on Tinder and start a relationship and then get scammed and ask for money. People should be expected to lack solidarity, lack of understanding, lack of belonging to a group or community. Вот почему мы выйдем на этот фронт.

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Как вы предлагаете нам поступить?

Сначала нам нужно провести настоящий, честный разговор об этих проблемах. Потому что прямо сейчас мы застряли, говоря о том, насколько это крутая технология. против что это значит? Какие противоположные энергии вот-вот проявятся? Для юристов, которые имеют непропорциональную власть над своими клиентами, их обязанность состоит в том, чтобы служить наилучшим интересам своих клиентов. Нам необходимо переклассифицировать эту энергетическую технологию как относящуюся к доверительным отношениям.

Парадокс технологий в том, что они дают нам возможность эксплуатировать и в то же время дают нам возможность служить и защищать. Вот почему мы входим в нашу темную ночь, если постоянно застреваем не в том пути. Это будет эстафета, от утопии к антиутопии, вплоть до финального испытания. И я думаю и о Центре Человеческих Технологий, и о Проекте Земных Видов как о попытках систематически склоняться к Золотому Веку против нашей темной ночи.

Перспектива конфиденциальности - Адам Гринфилд и Аза Раскин