SEMINAR PRESENTATION
If you knew a person had no experience of the world but was good at stringing words into coherent sentences, what would you want from such a conversation? If you had to be trapped in conversation with either a human or an AI, which partner would you choose?
These are questions already demanded of us. Today’s technology attracts us into interactions, mediated by algorithms designed by others, without our knowing what they do.
What is conversation? What do we want by being human?
What are the consequences of questions we are not asking?
Special thanks to Dr Jill Fain Lehman for her insights into the nature of meaning for humans vs. AIs.
*Note: The current recording misses my opening lines: "Thank you very much, Sam. And thank you for your elegant support, all the way along... I'm appearing to you as if giving a presentation but I would like to break the frame of that, as well as to just speak and not show slides, I feel this is more of an exploration and an invitation to conversation, which, as Sam has said, has been the center of my work from the very beginning. The challenge on this topic, as I'm sure everyone realizes, is that every hour, something new comes in about it. And that moment when that tossing about occurs, and whatever framing or synthesis I had in mind is broken, that is part of the challenge..."
DownloadPosition Paper on #NewMacy: Responding to the Pandemic of "Today's AI"
DownloadPrivate I, a novel by Ashlei Watson, Jill Fain Lehman, Paul Pangaro (2022)
DownloadAdditional Links specific to this talk
ViewDr Jill Fain Lehman, “Separating Truth and (Speculative) Fiction”, Generative AI Invited Talk, Carnegie Mellon University
DownloadCybernetics and the AI Crisis: A Bilingual Synthesis
DownloadAndrew Pickering's call for "Next Macy Meetings"
DownloadBlog Post on #NewMacyMeetings
DownloadLinks about Designing for Conversation
Paul Pangaro is President, American Society for Cybernetics; and Visiting Scholar, School of Design & School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon Universiy. His career spans startups, teaching, performance, and consulting. He has been applying models of conversation to the design of interactions and organizations since his Ph.D. in Cybernetics (Brunel UK) with Gordon Pask. His researching and making is grounded in the twin concepts of “design for conversation” and “design as conversation.” He is co-lead of the #NewMacy Initiative where his personal focus is responding to the pandemic of today’s AI algorithms. His work can be found at pangaro.com.