While AI scientists bring technical expertise to the development of AI, humanities scholars contribute valuable perspectives on the ethical, social, and cultural dimensions of AI technology. The optimal understanding of AI and its implications requires a collaboration between these disciplines, leveraging the strengths of each to navigate the complex landscape of AI development and integration into human society. The assertion isn't that one group understands AI better than the other but that each contributes uniquely and importantly to the broader understanding of AI's role in society.
The issue at stake is the notion of the MAD SCIENTIST
Here I wish to allude to Fritz Lang´s Metropolis and the mad scientist in the film, Rotwang. He plays a pivotal role in the film's narrative and thematic construction, embodying themes of obsession, technological hubris, and the perils of unchecked scientific ambition.
Consider that Metropolis is made almost 100 years ago, and yet its vision remain all the more visceral and urgent given that 2 of the richest people (men) in the world share similar visions of outer space domination. One admittedly crazier than the other...
Fritz Lang himself recounted an anecdote about being summoned by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, who allegedly praised Metropolis for its visionary depiction of a society and expressed interest in having Lang make films for the Nazi regime. Lang, who was of Jewish descent (though he was raised as a Roman Catholic and was not practicing Judaism), fled Germany for Paris that very evening, according to his own account, and later moved to the United States.
While Metropolis might have been admired by the Nazis for its artistic and thematic elements, any specific admiration of Hitler for the character Rotwang would be speculative and not grounded in historical record. It's essential to differentiate between the thematic interpretations of the film and the ideological appropriations or admirations of its elements by historical figures. The film itself, released in 1927, predates the Nazi regime and offers a complex, dystopian vision of the future that critiques extreme disparities in wealth, the dehumanization of workers, and the misuse of technology—themes though not aligned with promoting any specific political ideology, but pertinent to this very day - making Metropolis, in my opinion, the best Sci-Fi ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hCJ0bEuD9U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0agVZwux1Hs
The Transposition of the CLOCK
The intensity with which the machine disciplined and cadenced the working class body had psychical consequences that varied across time and place, an intensity that began even earlier with the clock. E. P. Thompson (1967) is the first scholar to substantively engage with the geographical unevenness with which abstract, syncopated clock time came to replace the event-driven agrarian renderings of natural time in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The clock, he says, helped to create a temporal regime that disciplined and coordinated not only the factory floor, but all aspects of commercial and industrial life.
Cited from: The Machine-Phallus: Psychoanalyzing the Geopolitical Economy of Masculinity and Race. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287122963_The_Machine-Phallus_Psychoanalyzing_the_Geopolitical_Economy_of_Masculinity_and_Race [accessed Feb 28 2024].
Deetya Reddy Yerradoddi I guess what I am referring to is once there was a major chism between Engineering and the Humanities. That was when machines were mostly structurally or electrically engineered. But now because of the overlapping between the Natural and the Artificial, it´s more difficult for AI engineers to anticipate the Human outcomes.
Take Game Design, just as an example, Ian Bogost is whom lots of gamer Bros worship at. And his background is Comparative Literature.
The relationship between Humanities and AI Scientists is intriguing, and their differing perspectives contribute to a rich discourse. Let’s explore why Humanities folks might grasp AI concepts in unique ways:
In essence, both perspectives are valuable. The synergy between Humanities and AI Scientists can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of AI—one that combines emotional depth with computational rigor.
The question is misguided in that it confounds understanding AI with understanding what people expect of interactions. One relates to a technical aspect of engineering design the other does not and is related more to the field of HCI. HCI is a subdiscipline that is more than likely taught as an elective in engineering and computer science curriculum. With the emergence of LLMs the need to teach HCI (and HRI for that matter) along with a more structured approach to prompt engineering has become more pronounced.
The second thing to clear in the question is that it is not more difficult to predict human outcomes but to appropriately train a neural network with techniques such as zero shot learning that uses massive amounts of data that cannot be fully validated. This is a point where current business attitudes of using marketing technology that should still be in the lab is not correct. Though this is not new and it has been going on with software for a long time. Software development practices on the market have allowed software to be sold that is not ready and the attitude is to let the user debug the software.
A third thing to note is that the field right now is at the peak of inflated expectations and there is a mismatch between what is expected and what the technology really is.
So, I would say it is not a problem of understanding but of caring. There are tools and there are processes in place to properly address this 'misunderstanding'. It is a matter of using the tools and not allowing market forces to dictate erroneously the introduction of new technologies.
Arturo Geigel I agree with you in terms of caring, which I term as the Sextuary Sector, please refer to the following:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sextuary-sector-work-based-human-touching-caring-tieu-tieu-le-phung/?trackingId=UJ3nfIS2QkSYtenSdi2Maw%3D%3D
A question I would ask is what we care about - the present or some hypothetical future...
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