A Future Worth Thinking About

This summer I participated in SRI International’s Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series. The meetings were held under the auspices of the Chatham House Rule, which means that there are many things I can’t tell you about them, such as who else was there, or what they said in the context of the meetings; however I can tell you what I talked about. In light of this recent piece in The Boston Globe and the ongoing developments in the David Slater/PETA/Naruto case, I figured that now was a good time to do so.

I presented three times—once on interdisciplinary perspectives on minds and mindedness; then on Daoism and Machine Consciousness; and finally on a unifying view of my thoughts across all of the sessions. This is my outline and notes for the first of those talks.

I. Overview
In a 2013 aeon Article Michael Hanlon said he didn’t think we’d ever solve “The Hard Problem,” and there’s been some skepticism about it, elsewhere. I’ll just say that said question seems to completely miss a possibly central point. Something like consciousness is, and what it is is different for each thing that displays anything like what we think it might be. If we manage to generate at least one mind that is similar enough to what humans experience as “conscious” that we may communicate with it, what will we owe it and what would it be able to ask from us? How might our interactions be affected by the fact that its mind (or their minds) will be radically different from ours? What will it be able to know that we cannot, and what will we have to learn from it?

So I’m going to be talking today about intersectionality, embodiment, extended minds, epistemic valuation, phenomenological experience, and how all of these things come together to form the bases for our moral behavior and social interactions. To do that, I’m first going to need ask you some questions:

• How do you walk home? Where are your keys?
• What do you do when a police officer pulls you over?
• What kinds of things to you struggle with whether you should tell a new romantic partner?
• What strategies do you have for keeping yourself out of institutional mental care?
• Without looking, how many exits to the elevator lobby are there, and how fast can you reach them, encountering the fewest people possible?
• How many tampons did you pack for this week?

Each of those questions represents a category of knowledge developed out of the phenomenological lived experience of members of a group of people. So the purpose of them is to ask yourself what would have to be true about your life to have to have those questions not be questions for you, but automatic behaviours and considerations and constantly engaged experiences.

While you think about what your relationships to them indicate, let’s talk briefly about the construction of gender and race and sexism and racism and the body:

• Social Construction of Gender:
  • Political Philosophy: Alison Jaggar
  • Feminist Ethics: Susan Moller Okin;
  • Feminist Epistemology: Lorraine Code

• Social Construction of Race:
  • “Race is not biologically real—it is socially and politically constructed via law, public policy and social practices.” (Fletcher, Heitzeg, Wygal, “Race as A Social Construct: Resisting The ‘Pseudo-Science’ Of Race.” 2013)
  • “Race is an exceedingly slippery concept. Although it appears in social life as ubiquitous, omnipresent and real, it is hard to pin down the concept in any objective sense, this is because the idea of race is riddled with apparent contradictions. While it is a dynamic [phenomenon] rooted in political struggle, it is commonly observed as a fixed characteristic of human populations; while it does not exist in terms of human biology, people routinely look to the human body for evidence about racial identity; while it is a biological fiction, it is nonetheless a social fact.” (James, “Race as A Social Construct: Resisting The ‘Pseudo-Science’ Of Race.” 2008)

• Social Constructions of Disability:
  • Daniel Kish, born blind; engages the world and does “amazing” things like cross the street and ride a bike
    • Says that social conditioning of blind children that makes the difference in how they engage the world. (“How To Become Batman,” NPR, 2015)

• But Constructed Does Not Mean “Without Impact or Meaning”

• Studies and first-person reportage of the lived experience of disabled and other human persons with differing types of bodies:
  • Ashley Shew’s “Up-Standing Norms” (2016)
  • Kim Sauder: “When Celebrating Accessible Technology is Just Reinforcing Ableism”(2015)
  • Rose Eveleth: “The Hidden Burden of Exoskeletons for the Disabled” (2015)
  • Daniel Kish and other blind people don’t simply “will” themselves to sightedness; they use echolocation

• Intersectional Identity and Oppression Theory:
  • “I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”
    • —Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989)

Crenshaw centers black women not to say that only black women can be intersectional subjects, but as an example of how groups that have been cast as single axes of identity can be better understood via intersectionality. By bringing these theories into conversation with intersectional identity and oppression theory, we can talk about precisely this.

• And We Can Even See Evidence of Prejudice in Algorithms:
  • ProPublica’s “Breaking the Black Box” series (2016)
  • Sentencing Algorithms
  • Women’s Names
  • “Black-Sounding” Names
  • Dylan Wittkower (2016)
    • Nikon’s facial recognition response to smiling people of Asian Descent: “Did Somebody Blink?”
    • HP’s motion camera that couldn’t see black faces
    • Photographic technology advanced to capture dark horses before dark-skinned people (because the white owners of horses would want clear photos of them)
  • Dylann Roof’s Google History

II. Social Valuation of Knowledge and Its Sources
Let’s explore how experience, knowledge, and their methods of valuation will necessarily differ from one kind of mind to another—be that between animal species and other organizations such as rivers, or even within any one species—even as there may be points of meaningful similarity.

• Intersubjectivity of Knowledge Construction:
  • Communities and (or of) individuals holding different perspectives and different systems of knowledge based on those perspectives and experiences.
  • Husserl and Stein on the construction and verification of the world via intersubjective means
    • Not “objectivity,” as such, but co-creation and co-arising access.

• But Who Gets to Be A Knower?
  • “That Swimsuit Becomes You: Sex Differences in Self-Objectification” (Frederickson, 1998)
  • “Countering the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Gender Schemas” (Chachra, 2015)
  • The Carl Brandon Society
  • James Tiptree, Jr
    • Who was really Alice B. Sheldon

III. Kinds of Minds
Drawing from the above theories, as well as disability studies and the ever-growing stance from within the autism self-advocacy community that autistic and other neurodivergent expressions of mind are not states to be “fixed,” but rather to be respected, appreciated, and learned from:

• Neurodiversity:
  • “…all atypical neurological development as a normal human difference that should be tolerated and respected in the same way as other human differences.” (Jaarsma, Welin, “Autism as a natural human variation: reflections on the claims of the neurodiversity movement.” 2012)
    • Term is first attributed to Judy Singer in the 1990’s
    • encompasses Autism, ADHD, other types of “nonstandard” neurological function
  • “I don’t want to be ‘cured’ of autism, thanks” Anya Ustaszewski (2009)
• Evidence from the embodied and extended mind hypotheses
  • Robin Zebrowski “An Android’s Dream: On Bodies, Minds, and Maybe Machines” (2017)
  • Japyassú & Laland “Extended Spider Cognition” (2017)
• Non-human Animals:
  • “4,300-Year-old chimpanzee sites and the origins of percussive stone technology” Mercader, et al (2007)
  • “New Caledonian crows attend to multiple functional properties of complex tools” St Clair, Rutz (2013)

And so we see that the generation of intersectional embodied and phenomenal frameworks may be seen as crucial to the generation of values and norms.  Any system that has been generated by humans will have artefacts of human bias, within it. What kinds of strategies can we undertake to furnish such a mind with the tools to bracket out—that is, be aware of and account for—its own bias? What will humans need to do to deal with our own biases, such that new strategies and perspectives from machine mind partners can be assessed and incorporated?

IV. Now We Can Discuss:

• Phenomenology and epistemology of Gender
• Phenomenology and epistemology of Disability
• Phenomenology and epistemology of Race
• Phenomenology and epistemology of Neurology
• Phenomenology and epistemology of Sexuality
  .
• And Their Ethical Implications
  • If it is the case that we build our systems of ethics out of our moral behaviours, and if we make implicit valuative judgements about what kinds of minds, bodies, and lives are valid, then denying the personhood of particular kinds will continue to produce things like
    • Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments
    • Guatemala Syphilis Experiments
    • Forced Sterilization and the Eugenics Movement as a Whole
    • Autism Speaks

V. Putting it All Together

Given the evidence from the embodied and extended mind hypotheses and the first-person reportage of human persons with differing types of bodies, it is highly plausible that regardless of the origin of consciousness, the phenomenological experience of a machine mind will be drastically different from that of a human mind. If a machine’s phenomenological experience is different, then that will necessarily mean that what it can easily define, categorize, and utilize—”know”—about the world in which it lives will be different. Taking knowledge and truth as components of an intersubjective and pragmatic framework, we ask “what can be known” in the context of its usefulness or harm, while acknowledging that even those contexts are subjective.

Some of this has touched on examples such as the various reasoning behind granting legal personhood to rivers and nonhuman animals, and the Autism Rights movement’s increasingly important position demanding that neurotypical individuals and groups recognise that people with autism don’t need to be “fixed,” but rather need to be understood from their own perspective and within their own context. This respect for alterity thus needs to be extended to every type of mind, as it helps form one component of an intersectional identity theory, providing a potential phenomenological framework by which a machine mind might communicate itself to us.

If we do manage to generate at least one mind that is similar enough to what humans experience as “conscious” that we may communicate with it, what will we owe it and what would it be able to ask from us? How might our interactions be affected by the fact that its mind (or their minds) will be radically different from ours? What will it be able to know that we cannot, and what will we have to learn from it?

Additionally, the generation of intersectional embodied and phenomenal frameworks may be seen as crucial to the generation of values and norms. A system that has been generated by humans will have artefacts of human bias, within it. What kinds of strategies can we undertake to furnish such a mind with the tools to bracket out—that is, be aware of and account for—its own bias? What will humans need to do to deal with our own biases, such that new strategies and perspectives from machine mind partners can be assessed and incorporated?

The frameworks of knowledge that will develop out of machine minds will be dependent upon the kind of minds that they are—on the interplay of their experience of socially-constructed categories in which they sit, and with which they otherwise engage. What they will value and what they will consider harmful will likewise depend on this, but will also in part arise out of the starting parameters with which they are encoded. My aim is to highlight a need for and to precipitate and engage in a shift of values, such that humans are willing and able to listen to a machine mind when it tells us that we are causing it harm. To do this we will have to be flexible and adaptable, capable of recognizing and respecting both the similarity and the alterity of all the minds we create and encounter.

Anything less than the above runs the risk of encountering something seeking to communicate its suffering to us, saying “Please Stop Harming Me,” and our responding, “That is not what I consider suffering or harm, so I have not harmed you, and you are not suffering.”

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Later, we’ll talk about the ways in which that compassionate impulse can be turned against us, and ways to guard against that.

Until Next Time.