Ben Udell asked: "...So, my question, which I find I have trouble
posing clearly, is, granting that IA involves an extension of mind in its
abilities/competences as well as its cognitions, does it much extend volition
and feeling (including emotion)?"
In my view it clearly does, as does AI. The question for me is to what
end? Clearly improved computation can serve scientific advance and human
well-being. But the opposite is also true.
Human cognition occurs in embodiment and involves that embodiment,
regardless of the logic of the cognition. A "pure" intention to change
direction while walking, though unacted upon, will show up in the track sign,
because it gets subtly muscularized in the act of simply thinking it. Consider
too what Peirce stated about the nominalist outlook that dominates modern mind
and culture and science: "The nominalist Weltanschauung has become incorporated
into what I will venture to call the very flesh and blood of the average modern
mind," CP 5.61.
So what if that nominalist Weltanschauung has as its telos the
progressive absorption of human purpose to the nominalist, materialist telos of
alienated purpose, incorporated as the machine: a mythic expansive projection
of the automatic that would define the universe itself as a vast machine,
earlier a ticking clock, now a calculating computer?
Then one might expect the very flesh and blood of the average modern
mind to progressively take on characteristics of the schizoid machine. As Lewis
Mumford put it, "The new attitude toward time and space infected the workshop
and the counting house, the army and the city. The tempo became faster, the
magnitudes became greater; conceptually, modern culture launched itself into
space and gave itself over to movement. What Max Weber called the 'romanticism
of numbers' grew naturally out of this interest. In timekeeping, in trading, in
fighting, men counted numbers, and finally, as the habit grew, only numbers
counted" (Technics and Civilization, 1934, p. 22). Technique outstrips
purposive conduct.
"Intelligence augmentation" is not necessarily the same as the
augmentation of intelligence, because, at least as I understand it, the term
means technical means, and not the growth of purpose. An ever increasing
plethora of devices pour ever more information in today, but for the bulk of
people, the likely result is what I term "brain suck." One example: Children in
the US between 8 and 18 now watch an average of 7 hours 38 minutes of screens
per day, 7 days per week. That does not count school time. Some fragment of the
information is probably augmenting intelligence, but the overwhelming bulk of
it is augmenting the very flesh and blood of their minds by the moral
equivalent of embedding emotional computer "cookies" to know marketed
commodities and to desire new commodities permanently.
The schizoid machine Weltanschauung works optimally by conditioning
though augmenting pleasure, as though sensation were emotion, especially in a
society that can redefine the purely commercial process benignly as
"intelligence augmentation."
Gene Halton
-----Original Message-----
From: C S Peirce discussion list [mailto:PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] On Behalf
Of Skagestad, Peter
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2011 9:20 AM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
Ben,
Thank you for your comments, which I have been chewing on. I wish I had some
insightful responses, but this is all I come up with.
You wrote:
"I find it very hard to believe that the second computer revolution could have
very easily failed to take place soon enough after the first one, given the
potential market, though as you say below, you were mainly concerned (and I
agree with you) to reject a monocausal technological determinism."
PS: We are in the realm of speculation here, and I cannot claim to be an
economic historian, but I do not believe the evolution of either interactive or
personal computing was market-driven. When you read, for instance, the
Licklider biography "The Dream Machine" (I forget the author's name), you find
Licklider knocking his head against the wall trying to persuade IBM to provide
time-sharing, the first major breakthrough in interactive computing. Eventually
there emerged entrepreneurs - notably Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mitch Kapor -
who recognized the market potential of the new technology. But by then
networking, word-processing, email, and GUIs had already been developed, mostly
by government-funded researchers guided by the augmentationist vision. What
would have happened if Licklider, Engelbart, and Sutherland had not been guided
by this vision, or if they had not obtained government funding? I think the
answer is that we simply do not know.
This may be the place to add that, when I wrote "Thinking With Machines" and
"The Mind's Machines", I did not yet recognize Sutherland's significance. Bush,
Licklider, and Engelbart were the theoreticians and advocates for IA, but
arguably - and in fact argued by Howard Rheingold - Sutherland's "Sketchpad"
was the single most important technological breakthrough. I was privately
rebuked by Arthur Burks for this omission.
You continue:
"I know almost nothing about computer programming, but I was a Word and
PowerPoint "guru" for some years. It's just that I think that some relevantly
able people would soon enough have recognized the tremendous potential for
personal computers. As the 1990s wore on, companies ended up stocking their
cubicles with computers although most users never heard of, much less learned
to use, more than 1/10 of the power of such programs as Word and PowerPoint,
and workplace pressures tend to lock people into short-sighted views of the
value of developing skills on word processors, spreadsheets, etc. ("quick and
dirty" is the motto). Well, "1/10" is just my subjective impression, but
whatever the vague fraction, it was small but enough to make the companies'
investment worthwhile. (And probably the added value per added "power" doesn't
equal one and involves diminishing returns, especially in terms of empowering
collaboration beyond interaction)."
PS: I think this is absolutely true, and I just want to add that Engelbart's
particular vision of IA has largely failed to materialize, due to the general
unwillingness of corporations to provide training for their employees.
Engelbart never set much store by user-friendliness; his project was to provide
intellectual leverage through machinery and training. Probably his most
cherished input device was not the mouse, but the keyset, with ten keys on
which the user could enter chords. It never went anywhere, as it would take
about three weeks of training to gain proficiency with it.
Moving on, you say:
"Looking over Joe's paper, I'd guess that he wasn't aware of the
interaction-collaboration distinction, or didn't remember it while writing the
paper, and that by "interactive" he meant interactive and collaborative alike.
I'm not all that clear on the distinction myself. I tend to think of it not
only in terms of people and computers but also in terms of various programs or
computer systems (with attendent interoperability challenges) interacting
(requesting and receiving data) and collaborating (asking each other to work on
solving problems)."
PS: I think this is true, and my disagreement with Joe here may be purely
verbal; i.e. by "interactive" he probably meant to include the collaborative
aspect.
Finally, you raise this question:
"Thinking, actively cogitating, is even less pure cognition than are looking
(in order to see) and listening (in order to hear). The idea of reasoning, as
_deliberate_ self-controlled inference, evokes the idea not only of active
ability/competence (or able and competent doings themselves) but also of active
willing. While ability/competence implies an end for which one cares to act,
aside from the end's being in question, active willing implies an end for which
one cares to contest, in a contest over what ends will prevail. (Ironically
"competent" comes from a word meaning "competing" but the connotation of the
competitive has been lost by the word "competent" in English, a loss partly
enabled, I suspect, by the difference in stress location and consequent vowel
pronunciation.)
So, my question, which I find I have trouble posing clearly, is, granting that
IA involves an extension of mind in its abilities/competences as well as its
cognitions, does it much extend volition and feeling (including emotion)?
Well, certainly it extends the reach of people's wills and feelings. But how
mental is it if its processes are chiefly competential and cognitive? Are they
such? Or are volitional and affective processes, not merely secondarily as
needed for competence and cognition, in there even in the programming, not
usually recognized?"
PS: It is a very interesting question. I confess that I never thought beyond
the purely cognitive aspect of mind, and I have no new insights regarding
volitional or affective processes at this point. But anything listers have to
add on this will be welcomed.
That is my two-cents' worth for now. My plan is to move on to the next part of
Joe's paper tonight or tomorrow.
All the best,
Peter
________________________________________
From: C S Peirce discussion list [PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] on behalf of
Benjamin Udell [bud...@nyc.rr.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2011 2:59 PM
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
Peter, list,
This slow read is quiet enough that I might as well send some minor comments
that might provide a little to chew on, I don't know. But before those, let me
first of all thank you for leading the slow read and for your heart-warming
reminiscences of Joe.
The second computer revolution - inevitable after the first?
Joe quotes you:
In the sixties computers were huge, expensive machines usable only by an
initiated elite; the idea of turning these machines into personal
information-management tools that would be generally affordable and usable
without special training was advocated only by a fringe of visionaries and was
regarded as bizarre not only by the general public, but also by the mainstream
of the electronics industry. The second computer revolution obviously could not
have taken place without the first one preceding it, but the first computer
revolution could very easily have taken place without being followed by the
second one.
I find it very hard to believe that the second computer revolution could have
very easily failed to take place soon enough after the first one, given the
potential market, though as you say below, you were mainly concerned (and I
agree with you) to reject a monocausal technological determinism. I know almost
nothing about computer programming, but I was a Word and PowerPoint "guru" for
some years. It's just that I think that some relevantly able people would soon
enough have recognized the teremendous potential for personal computers. As the
1990s wore on, companies ended up stocking their cubicles with computers
although most users never heard of, much less learned to use, more than 1/10 of
the power of such programs as Word and PowerPoint, and workplace pressures tend
to lock people into short-sighted views of the value of developing skills on
word processors, spreadsheets, etc. ("quick and dirty" is the motto). Well,
"1/10" is just my subjective impression, but whatever the vague fraction, it
was small but enough to make the companies' investment worthwhile. (And
probably the added value per added "power" doesn't equal one and involves
diminishing returns, especially in terms of empowering collaboration beyond
interaction). Well, all of that, even the point about the continuing though
shrunken need for special skills, is a quibble. The second revolution was not
destined but only enabled by previous technology and was brought about by
people seeing the potential. As you say below:
I made the point that the emergence of the personal computer was not a given
consequence of the invention of the microprocessor, but also required a
particular vision of what computers were for. In so doing I was simply
rejecting technological determinism, not advancing any monocausal thesis of my
own.
Interactive or collaborative.
You wrote,
PS: I do not totally agree with Joe here. I gladly admit that I never tried to
identify what was fundamental to the IA tradition, believing that job to have
been already done by Engelbart. But interactive computing, while essential to
IA, has been endemic to computing of all kinds during the past forty years. I
played chess games with the MIT computer as early as 1973; it was interactive,
it had time sharing, but there was nothing about it that specifically related
to IA. I would agree that collaborative computing is central to IA: more of
that later.
Looking over Joe's paper, I'd guess that he wasn't aware of the
interaction-collaboration distinction, or didn't remember it while writing the
paper, and that by "interactive" he meant interactive and collaborative alike.
I'm not all that clear on the distinction myself. I tend to think of it not
only in terms of people and computers but also in terms of various programs or
computer systems (with attendent interoperability challenges) interacting
(requesting and receiving data) and collaborating (asking each other to work on
solving problems). So I look forward to your discussion of the difference and
of the distinctive importance of collaborative ends to IA, also comparing to
Engelbart's idea of what's fundamental to IA.
Exosomatic mind - all cognitive?
Peirce once expounded a trichotomy of feeling, will (sense of resistance), and
general conception. Presumably all three can be conscious or unconscious, and
thus seem attributable to mind. How really mental is something that is almost
exclusively cognitive?
In his paper, Joe wrote,
Peter Skagestad understands the dictum "All thought is in signs" to mean that
thought is not primarily a modification of consciousness, since unconscious
thought is quite possible in Peirce's view, but rather a matter of behavior --
not, however, a matter of a thinker's behavior (which would be a special case)
but rather of the behavior of the publicly available material media and
artifacts in which thought resides as a dispositional power. The power is
signification, which is the power of the sign to generate interpretants of
itself. Thinking is semiosis, and semiosis is the action of a sign. The sign
actualizes itself as a sign in generating an interpretant, which is itself a
further sign of the same thing, which, actualized as a sign, generates a
further interpretant, and so on. As Skagestad construes the import of this --
correctly, I believe -- the development of thinking can take the form of
development of the material media of thinking, which means such things as the
development of instruments and media of expression, such as notational systems,
or means and media of inscription such as books and writing instruments,
languages considered as material entities like written inscriptions and sounds,
physical instruments of observation such as test tubes, microscopes, particle
accelerators, and so forth.
Thinking, actively cogitating, is even less pure cognition than are looking (in
order to see) and listening (in order to hear). The idea of reasoning, as
_deliberate_ self-controlled inference, evokes the idea not only of active
ability/competence (or able and competent doings themselves) but also of active
willing. While ability/competence implies an end for which one cares to act,
aside from the end's being in question, active willing implies an end for which
one cares to contest, in a contest over what ends will prevail. (Ironically
"competent" comes from a word meaning "competing" but the connotation of the
competitive has been lost by the word "competent" in English, a loss partly
enabled, I suspect, by the difference in stress location and consequent vowel
pronunciation.)
So, my question, which I find I have trouble posing clearly, is, granting that
IA involves an extension of mind in its abilities/competences as well as its
cognitions, does it much extend volition and feeling (including emotion)?
Well, certainly it extends the reach of people's wills and feelings. But how
mental is it if its processes are chiefly competential and cognitive? Are they
such? Or are volitional and affective processes, not merely secondarily as
needed for competence and cognition, in there even in the programming, not
usually recognized?
Best, Ben
----- Original Message -----
From: Skagestad, Peter
To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
Sent: Saturday, December 03, 2011 11:43 AM
Subject: [peirce-l] SLOW READ: THE RELEVANCE OF PEIRCEAN SEMIOTIC TO
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AUGMENTATION
I am now opening the slow read of Joe Ransdell's paper 'The Relevance of
Peircean Semiotic to Computational Intelligence Augmentation', the final paper
in this slow read series. I realize that Steven's slow read is still in
progress, but we have had overlapping reads before.
Since we are conducting these reads to commemorate Joe, I will open with some
personal reminiscences. In the fall of 1994, I bought the first modem for my
home computer, a Macintosh SE-30. At about the same time I received a
hand-written snail-mail letter from my erstwhile mentor the psychologist Donald
Campbell, who had just returned from Germany, where he had met with Alfred
Lange, who told him about an online discussion group devoted to Peirce's
philosophy. Campbell was not himself very interested in Peirce, but he knew I
was, and so passed the information along. And so I logged on to Peirce-L.
My connection was very primitive. I used a dial-up connection to U Mass
Lowell's antiquated VAX computer, which I had to access in terminal-emulation
mode, whereby my Macintosh mimicked a dumb terminal for the VAX, which ran the
VMS (Virtual Memory System) operating system and VMS Mail (later replaced with
the somewhat more user-friendly DECmail). It was extremely awkward to use, but
it was free.
I had never met Joe Ransdell before - I only ever met him face to face once -
although we knew of each other's work. Joe immediately caught on to my
difficulties in navigating VMS, and coached me patiently in the technical side
of things offline, while constantly prodding and encouraging my participation
in the online discussion. While never leaving one in doubt of his own opinions,
Joe consistently stimulated and nurtured an open and critical, yet at the same
time nonjudgmental exchange of ideas and opinions. The intellectual environment
Joe created was an invaluable aid to me in developing my ideas on intelligence
augmentation and the relevance of Peircean semiotic thereto.
Now to the paper, available on the Arisbe site at
http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/ransdell/ia.htm. It is the
longest paper in the slow read - 30 single-spaced pages plus notes - and
December tends to be a short month, as many listers will no doubt be too busy
with other things to pay much attention to Peirce-L in the final week or so of
the month. My feeling is that we will probably only be able to hit the high
points, but we will see how it goes. Since this is the last slow read in the
series, we can also go on into January, should there be sufficient interest. I
should add that the paper generated considerable discussion on the list when
Joe first posted it about a decade ago; I do not know how many current listers
were around at the time, but I believe both Gary Richmond and Jon Awbrey took
active part in the discussion.
As I see it, the paper falls into four parts. The first part - roughly one
fourth of the paper - sets out the concept of computational intelligence
augmentation as articulated in three published papers of mine, along with some
reservations/revisions of Joe's. The second part adumbrates the
Peircean/Deweyan conception of inquiry, the third part examines Ginsparg's
publication system as a model of intelligence augmentation, and the fourth part
examines the role of peer review in inquiry, sharply distinguishing editorially
commissioned review from what Joe understands proper peer review to consist in.
Personally, I shall naturally have most to say about the first part. This does
not mean that I think the list discussion ought to focus on this part, at the
expense of the other parts. This is decidedly not my view. But given the
attention Joe devotes to my work, I think the most valuable contribution I
personally can make here is commenting on, and engaging in discussion on, what
Joe has to say about my work.
I am not here going to rehash Joe's admirable and scrupulously fair
recapitulation of my writings on intelligence augmentation - although people
may, of course, want to raise questions/comments about this or that point in
his recapitulation. What I propose to do in this initial post is make a few
introductory comments on intelligence augmentation, offer my take on FJoe's
differences with my articulation, and then propose a few questions for list
discussion - in full awareness that other listers may find other questions to
pose that may be as worthy or worthier of discussion.
JR: "Peter Skagestad - philosopher and Peirce scholar - identifies two distinct
programming visions that have animated research into computationally based
intelligence which he labels, respectively, as: "Artificial Intelligence" or
"AI" and "Intelligence Augmentation" or "AI". The aim of the present paper is,
first, to describe the distinction between these two type of computational
intelligence research for the benefit of those who might not be accustomed to
recognizing these as co-ordinate parts of it, and then, second, to draw
attention to a special sort of Intelligence Augmentation (IA) research which
seems to me to warrant special emphasis and description, both vbeause of its
potential importance and because Skagestad"s account of the distinctive
features of IA research does not seem to me to capture the most salient
characteristics of this special part of it, perhaps because it may not have
occurred to him that it is distinctive enough to require special attention in
order to be recognized for what it is."
PS: I'll return to what I may have paid insufficient attention to and why.
First a little history. As far as I know, the concept of intelligence
augmentation was first articulated by Doug Engelbart in his classic 1962
"Framework" report, where it denotes the use of computers (or other artifacts)
to augment human intellect by creating human-computer systems whose behavior is
more intelligent than that of the unaided human. Engelbart acknowledges an
affinity with the concept of "intelligence amplification," earlier articulated
by the cyberneticist W.R. Ashby. Based on my reading of Ashby, however, his
concept of intelligence amplification is broader and encompasses both AI and
Engelbart's intelligence augmentation. Finally, the term "intelligence
amplification" was later embraced by the computer scientist Frederic Brook, who
used it much in the same sense as Engelbart's "intelligence augmentation," and
who, to the best of my knowledge, was the first to use the abbreviation "IA"
and explicitly contrast it with "AI".
Now, my thesis, advanced in three papers cited by Joe and available at Arisbe,
was that IA, as understood by Engelbart, presupposes a conception of the mind
as being exosomatically embodied, and that such a conception, unbeknownst to
Engelbart, had been articulated by Peirce, and summarized in his dictum "all
thought is in signs." Joe does not disagree with this, but does not think I go
quite far enough:
JR: "In developing Skagestad's conception further in the direction indicated I
also ground this in Peirce's dictum, but I do so by making explicit a different
(but complementary) implication of the same Peircean dictum, namely that all
thought is dialogical. (JR's emphasis)"
PS: A footnote indicates that I agree with this, which I do, but I want to
raise the question whether this implication is actually ever made explicit by
Peirce himself. Signs presuppose interpretation, and interpretation presupposes
interpreters, which is made very explicit by Josiah Royce in his most Peircean
writings, but did Peirce himself make this explicit? I am not saying he did
not, but I am curious about references.
Joe goes on to make some valuable observations about the evolution of IA that I
had not made, to wit, that a great deal of what we now recognize as IA, notably
word processing, came about rather serendipitously, because programmers needed
to document their work and wanted to do so without taking their hands off the
keyboard. I have no argument with that. I made the point that the emergence of
the personal computer was not a given consequence of the invention of the
microprocessor, but also required a particular vision of what computers were
for. In so doing I was simply rejecting technological determinism, not
advancing any monocausal thesis of my own.
I move on to what I take to be Joe's most important reservation to my treatment
of IA:
JR: "I do not think that Skagestad has succeeded so far in identifying
precisely enough what it is that is fundamental in the IA tradition that runs
through Douglas Engelbart, J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, Alan
Kaye, ... Tim Berners-Lee... That is, I do not find any place where Skagestad
describes IA in a way that seems to capture what the various facets of it to
which he appeals have in common. ... My own hunch - and it is a little more
than that, but it seems worth mentioning in a suggestive spirit here - is that
the key to the identity of what Skagestad characterizes as the IA tradition in
computational research lies in the conception of interactive computing..."
PS: I do not totally agree with Joe here. I gladly admit that I never tried to
identify what was fundamental to the IA tradition, believing that job to have
been already done by Engelbart. But interactive computing, while essential to
IA, has been endemic to computing of all kinds during the past forty years. I
played chess games with the MIT computer as early as 1973; it was interactive,
it had time sharing, but there was nothing about it that specifically related
to IA. I would agree that collaborative computing is central to IA: more of
that later.
Those are my initial thoughts on pages 1-8 of Joe's paper. Some of it was
admittedly fast, as much of it is Joe's recapitulation and as I see it
unproblematic exegesis of my papers. But others should feel free to revisit any
details I have skipped which may merit closer attention. I will sit back now
and let others weigh in.
Peter Skagestad
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