Tag: conversation

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Colloquy of Mobiles at ZKM — Progress Update #15

Colloquy of Mobiles at ZKM

Above and below: Replica of Gordon Pask’s 1968 “Colloquy of Mobiles” by TJ McLeish and Paul Pangaro now installed at ZKM. All photos courtesy of Morgane Stricot, ZKM.

Today we celebrate the  anniversary of the unveiling of our replica of Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles on February 26, 2020, at Centre Pompidou in Paris where it was part of the extraordinary exhibition MUTATIONS / CRÉATIONS 4: NEURONES / LES INTELLIGENCES SIMULÉES.

Colloquy of Mobiles at ZKM

That opening was rich in energy and interactions as demonstrated in these short videos.

In March the exhibition had to close prematurely due to COVID.

Thereafter the great staff of Centre Pompidou and ZKM disassembled, transported, and reassembled Colloquy at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, where it has become part of the permanent collection.

We look forward to the museum’s reopening to the public and the opportunity for TJ Mcleish, Colloquy’s master fabricator, to travel to ZKM and animate the replica to make it fully operational once again.

Read more about Colloquy here.

 

 

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Cybernetics, AI, and Ethical Conversations

“As a designer, I shall act always so as to increase 
 the total number of choices for a user.”

Quote above: An approach to interface design based on Heinz von Foerster’s Ethical Imperative where “choices” are distinguished from “options” — options are anything that is possible, while choices are only those options that are viable and well-suited to this user in this moment.

More and more, today’s AI makes the world we see and the world we live in — and we need to respond. In a presentation hosted by the AiTech Agora at TU Delft, Paul Pangaro responds with a proposal for collaboration that bridges AI and cybernetics with conversation.

Click for video of presentation.          Click for full abstract and slides.

“Pandemic” comes from “all” and “people”, meaning something negative that effects us all. While not biological, today’s AI foments polarization, pushes irrelevant products, spreads social bias, and surveils our lives. AI touches billions and sways more of us,  in more invasive and uncontrolled ways, every day.

AI came out of cybernetics, a practice that evolved from a series of trans-disciplinary conversations called the Macy Meetings. This history offers a way forward. Continue reading “Cybernetics, AI, and Ethical Conversations”

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Update — #NewMacyMeeting #1 — Why Can’t Cybernetics Tame Pandemics?

Click here for the video of this panel.

Click here for direct link to panel description on the conference webpage.

Click here for updated description of #NewMacyMeetings initiative.

Here are more details for our first meeting of the revival of the Macy Meetings in cybernetics on Sunday September 13th at Noon EDT, first reported in this prior post, as follows:

Our speakers Larry Richards and Ben Sweeting will respond to the provocation, “Why Can’t Cybernetics Tame Pandemics?”  Then our respondents will each answer the questions, “Where did the speakers agree?” and “What did they leave out?” Our confirmed respondents are BCE Scott and Patricia Ticineto Clough. The speakers are then allowed to respond, and the process repeats. Read below for a longer description of context and intention.

This one-hour session is part of the 2-day 2020 Global Conversation Conference, a joint effort of the American Society for Cybernetics and the British Cybernetic Society. Registration is required but a donation is completely optional. Please go to this ASC page for more information and the link to register. You will receive a Zoom video invitation thereafter.

The moderator the session, Paul Pangaro, has initiated #NewMacy in response to 21st-century global pandemics for which COVID is only one, while certainly vivid and immediately threatening. Click here for more details on the overall direction of the #NewMacyMeetings.  Read on below for the detailed description of this first experiment In the revival of #NewMacy. Continue reading “Update — #NewMacyMeeting #1 — Why Can’t Cybernetics Tame Pandemics?”

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Colloquy Begins Journey to Paris and Centre Pompidou — Progress Update #11

TJ McLeish working with Colloquy

(Banner Image: TJ McLeish upgrading Colloquy in preparation for its heading to Europe. Perrier in tribute to Gordon Pask.)

After many weeks of toiling, master fabricator TJ McLeish has completed the mechatronic, digital hardware, and software upgrades to Colloquy 2018 in preparation for its crating and shipping to Centre Pompidou in Paris. There it will be shown in their major exhibition, MUTATIONS / CRÉATIONS 4: NEURONES / LES INTELLIGENCES SIMULÉES from 26 February through 20 April 2020.

When first created by Gordon Pask and shown in London in 1968, Colloquy of Mobiles was unlike any immersive gallery experience. Five interacting, human-scale mobiles (see photos below) held a “conversation” with each other through light and sound, exhibiting cooperation and competition. In significant ways, Pask’s “colloquy” (a “speaking together”) of mobiles from 1968 exceeds the interactivity of today’s conversational interfaces.

On the 50th anniversary of Pask’s original creation, the Colloquy 2018 Project implemented a replica faithful in appearance and behavior, while utilizing modern mechatronics and digital technology. With the success of the replica, the world-renowned Centre Pompidou requested that it become part of a major upcoming museum exhibition. Similarly, the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, has asked to acquire the work for their permanent collection.

1968: Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles, London
2018: Colloquy of Mobiles Replica, Detroit

Final preparations for this future of Colloquy 2018 were completed at Omnicorp Collective Detroit this past weekend, with the help of current and former students of the MFA IxD program of the College for Creative Studies, where the project was initiated 2 years ago by McLeish and Paul Pangaro. (You can read here about replicating Pask’s original Colloquy.) A wide range of upgrades were made to improve the reliability and behaviors of the mobiles before transferring the work to Artpack Services for crating and shipping.

Continue reading “Colloquy Begins Journey to Paris and Centre Pompidou — Progress Update #11”

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I Want a “Turning Test for Conversation”

After Dubberly Design

(Diagram after Dubberly Design Office)

That’s not  a typo — A Turning Test. For Conversation.

We all know the Turing Test for Intelligence — when a human will judge if a machine is “intelligent.” I want a machine that will judge if a conversation is “intelligent.”

That’s right, “intelligent” — the quotes mean it’s ambiguous and we ought to discuss it. The meaning of “intelligent”  is subject to opinion and personal values. For me, intelligent conversations are forward-moving, collaborative, generative — they go to new and interesting places. And for you?

I like this proposal for a Turning Test because: Continue reading “I Want a “Turning Test for Conversation””

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Computing Conversation — A Lecture

Is it possible to ‘compute conversation’? I mean — is it possible to write heuristics that respond in surprising and stimulating ways, enabling a back-and-forth exchange among intelligent participants?

Gordon Pask not only thought so, he designed and built a series of machines that did so, as far back as 1953. Sure, some of those conversations were simple and his machines could not understand language or listen to speech — but all the mechanisms he built had memory (and so could learn) and displayed novel, unexpected behaviors (and so kept their co-participants engaged in the interaction). As a result, all of Pask’s machines could hold a form of conversation with humans (or sometimes, with other machines!).

The photo above is a control panel from 1958: Pask’s ‘Eucrates‘ environment, where a ‘teacher’ machine attempts to train a ‘pupil’ machine comprising neural nets (yup, neural nets in 1958). There are knobs labelled ‘awareness’ and ‘obstinacy’ — and don’t miss the wackiest one, ‘oblivesence.’ (Pask was British, so I hold to the definition in British dictionaries: ‘willful forgetfulness.’)

Wait… what? Continue reading “Computing Conversation — A Lecture”

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Designing Our World

Design as ConversationTo “design our world” has been the goal of every human generation. Every day we wake up to an invitation to become whom we wish to become. I believe the role of design is to help all of us to achieve that goal for ourselves — that is, to be designers of our own world.

Ambitious, I realize. As is trying to tame wicked problems through design.

But what is “design” anyway? Why isn’t “design thinking” enough? And what’s this got to do with cybernetics, anyway? I offer viewpoints in my Heinz von Foerster ’17 Lecture, entitled Designing Our World: Cybernetics as Conversations for Action. See the abstract, video, and supporting materials here.

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Conversation Theory in One Hour

Gordon Pask at his desk in the late 1980s.

I was invited to give a presentation about Gordon Pask and his Conversation Theory at the annual conference of the American Society for Cybernetics in June 2016. My great friend and colleague, Jude Lombardi, has kindly produced and edited a video of my hour talk, which begins with an introduction to Pask as an experimentalist and “maker”. From this foundation Pask built a scientific theory of how conversation works, including a detailed formal “calculus of cognition.” He also offers the principle that consciousness is conserved in the same sense that physics says that matter and energy are conserved. Continue reading “Conversation Theory in One Hour”

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What’s in Your Bot?

There’s been a huge rush toward using AI (artificial intelligence) to build “conversational UIs“—user interfaces that allow us to type or speak to computers in natural language. Sorta. It’s the latest interaction mode and it comes after people interacting with machines, then talking to each other through machines, then talking to machines. Kindah like a conversation (but not really). Here’s a diagram of that progression:

Untitled
Cover of the proposal to NSF, “Graphical Conversation Theory”, written by the MIT Architecture Machine Group, 1977

Today, when you hear about all that, “AI” means a specialized kind of AI that’s hugely popular called machine learning. (Yeah, I didn’t make that a link, you can just google it. We all know that we all know how. You’ll find some OK stuff about it. )

So when Siri or Cortana, Amazon or Google, Apple or Facebook, IBM or GE—all of  whom are infected with the AI meme—deploys the machine-learning brand of artificial intelligence, it might be good for you to think about it. (But then, that’s up to you.)

I think about machine learning being everywhere in the virtual world whenever I make a typo on my mobile and my text gets snatched away from me and turned into drivel. (Or every time I ask my intelligent assistant two related questions in a row and it behaves as if I’m the schizophrenic in the chat.)

And here’s how I think about it: Continue reading “What’s in Your Bot?”

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Luigi’s Pizza: A Parable

Say you want to eat somewhere and you ask for my recommendation. I say, “Sure, I’ve got the best place for you: Luigi’s Pizza, on the corner of First & Commerce.”

You say, “Great, thanks—but why do you recommend Luigi’s?” What if I replied… Continue reading “Luigi’s Pizza: A Parable”