Extended Intelligences¶
Instructions¶
Write a post of your reflection and submit the deliverables on this week’s seminar.
Reflections¶
Through this week, I was surprised with the high accessibility to the available AI tools on the internet. It has been a rewarding journey as I am very interested in this topic.
Coincidentally, I happened to stumble across a twitter post here, which is a girl using her 8 years old diary entries to build a chat bot with GPT 3. Thus, I proceeded to try this on myself. It was a really eye-opening experience to me, and eventually I was able to apply this on my group project and personal project.
The hardest part of this class is to find the right datasets for our project. We designed an AI listening companion for the group project. For this to work, we have to find models that could convert speech to text, analyze emotions from different inputs such as sound waves, tone of voice, body gestures, facial expressions; and then convert the AI response back to speech. There is also a limitation in the type of datasets that we choose. For example, if we plan to have the listening companion use body gestures to analyze the user’s emotion. We might want to rethink using body gestures as part of the input as there are a lot of nuances and considerations depending on the culture and context.
During the presentation, interesting conversation rises around the theme of ethics in AI. In my personal point of view, at the end of the day, I think of AI and technology as a tool. A tool is neutral and has no positive and negative connotation to it. One analogy that might help understand this concept is trying to think of AI and tech as a knife. A knife can be a useful tool to help make our life easier, or it can be dangerous to use for evil means if it falls to the wrong hands.
As a designer, I think it is important to understand who we are and who we are designing with. This is important as it will prevent us from falling into the fallacy of assuming what we design is for everyone and it is the ultimate best solution.
It is also crucial to understand that we cannot solve all problems and please every user: it is important to know who the targeted users are. We might need to acquire someone that has the experience and expertise in our team should we desire to design for people with special needs and marginalized communities. That being said, I would understand my limitations as a designer, but that will not halt me from striving to get closer to my aspirations: hoping to use tech and AI in therapy and healing. I will try my very best to help people around me. Even if it is at a really small scale, one at a time, as long as they are one tiny little step closer to find peace and happiness, I would be content.
Another topic that was mentioned in our class is the reason why it’s so hard for tech innovation in the care economy is because the cost of failure is somebody’s life.
I think this is very true, but it is profoundly important for us to realize that this is not limited to the care economy. In fact, every digital product that we introduce to the world can change the way people live, and might cause a series of butterfly effects to the user. Do we ever stop and think what would be the cause of all the high tech and AI products would do to us in the long run? I guess not, we just adapted it as part of our everyday lives.
For instance, social media, cyber bullying and etc, they indirectly caused suicide related behavior. However, after learning about these news and real events, people do not quit using social media. What we can see is innovation and prevention strategies were applied to the product instead of banning them.
In this 21st century, we have to register the fact that we’re in the 4th industrial revolution, and slowly moving towards the 5th, which is human-machine cooperation.
Therefore, we need to comprehend better the relationship between human interaction with tech and AI, then only we could mitigate the negative causes that might come with these series of innovations. Ultimately, I believe that AI and tech can still play an important role in care services, as there are successful prototypes that really changed the life of a person.
Group Work¶
As a group, we designed an AI listening companion.
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