I just published the “Machine Love Is Coming to a Screen Near to You” story https://link.medium.com/8bnajA7ByBb. It’s riffing off the Machine Love paper by @joelbot3000, telling abt how it is influencing my research agenda, & the release dates of my 4-volume serialized AI book. Please RT.
notes/quotes from july 2023 article – Machine Love Is Coming to a Screen Near to You:
love the freedoms of my work life that allow me to call different faces of my creativity into play in response to various situations. I like to ponder how our lives could be unimaginably richer if everyone had such freedoms. No wonder I became fascinated by the saying attributed to Martin Luther King, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
That sounds like a koan paradox, challenging but worth engaging with it. What does the “nobody… until everybody” mean in practice beyond a moral imperative? How can we grow that meme into a material, world-shaping force? As I dove deeper into that inquiry, it touched my nerve of solidarity and became a teaching device, guidance for my work in the world.
yeah.. me too
So, recently, when the AI revolution broke out, I welcomed it with the question, how can we unleash its emancipatory potential for freeing all of us from wage slavery and other forms of enslavement? How will AI support the self-organization and coordination between people and their composable communities and networks for realizing such macro-scale goals?.. t
ah.. music to my ears.. (but music dies by the end.. oi) if only you could hear/feel/see this
There is an ongoing banter between the companion in evolutionary spirituality and the radical sociologist, two aspects of myself. The companion says a peaceful and well-aligned world requires individuals who are peaceful and well-aligned within themselves. The radical sociologist agrees, but he comes back saying yes; however, such individuals will appear at the requisite scale only in a deliberately developmental society where the highest goal of all institutions and the society at large is the flourishing of each individual..t
yeah.. both.. brown belonging law: the opposite of belonging.. is fitting in.. true belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are.. it requires you to be who you are.. and that’s vulnerable.. –Brené Brown .. et al..
in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
Today, it’s easier because I came across a paper that has blown my mind more open and was also heartwarming, which I can rarely say about a scientific experiment. I am talking about Machine Love, by Joel Lehmanm, which gave my research a new impetus and became one of the sources of inspiration for my forthcoming book on Prometheus and the Rise of Compassionate AI. Don’t take the title wrong; I’m not saying that AI has human-like compassion, and the same is true for the “loving machines.”
joel @joelbot3000 is part of (at least the paper is part of it) ai objectives institute.. which was instigated by peter eckersley before he died.. a bit about it here: peter on ai
link is to 38 page pdf by joel.. abstract:
From social media to recommendation and search engines, the impact of machine learning (ML) upon our lives and society continues to grow. While ML generates much economic value, many of us have problematic relationships with social media and other ML-powered applications. One reason is that ML often optimizes for what we want in the moment, which is *easy to quantify but at odds with what is known scientifically about human flourishing.t. Thus, through its impoverished models of us, **ML currently falls far short of its exciting potential,.t which is for it to help us to reach ours. While there is no consensus on defining human flourishing, from diverse perspectives across psychology, philosophy, and spiritual traditions, love is understood to be one of its primary catalysts. Motivated by this view, this paper explores whether there is a useful conception of love fitting for machines to embody. While such machine love might seem like an error of category, historically it has been generative to explore whether some kernel of a nebulous concept, such as life or intelligence, can be thoughtfully abstracted and reimagined in a different medium, as in the fields of machine intelligence or artificial life. This paper forwards a candidate conception of machine love, inspired in particular by work in positive psychology and psychotherapy: ***to provide unconditional support enabling humans to autonomously pursue their own growth and development.t. While many alternate conceptions are possible, this one benefits from not requiring machines to simulate emotional affect or relationships, instead focusing on biasing an ML system’s actions to support our growth. Through proof of concept experiments, this paper aims to highlight the need for richer models of human flourishing in ML, provide an example framework through which positive psychology can be combined with ML to realize a rough conception of machine love, and demonstrate that current language models begin to enable embodying qualitative humanistic principles. The conclusion is that though at present ML may often serve to addict, distract, or divide us, an alternative path may be opening up: We may align ML to support our growth, through it helping us to align ourselves towards our highest aspirations.
I expanded Joel Lehman’s adaptation of Fromm’s aspects of loving action into a 4-layer social stack. The 4×4 matrix below is my first approximation of a larger field where Machine Love can also be relevant, which I will unpack in subsequent research.
As the Principal Investigator at Future HOW, I used the same 4-layer social stack for framing our broader research interest, introduced by the four questions below.
Our method is semi-structured, transdisciplinary action research. It’s action research because the emergent nature of AI development and use as social practice calls for 1. testing the hypotheses framed by our research questions in real-world use cases, 2. conducting a self-reflective inquiry to improve our practices, and 3. solving problems in the situations in which those practices are carried out.
It’s transdisciplinary action research because AI is born into, and destined to help us cope with a “breakdown/breakthrough” challenge of our species. That represents a problematique so vast that only transcontextual epistemics have a chance to address it fully..t Correspondingly, we need a transdisciplinary methodology because a multi-disciplinary or even interdisciplinary approach won’t suffice.
Presently, we restrict our focus to the micro- and meso-layers, the individual and the community. We have enough use cases for working on how the human-AI co-creativity contributes to both human and AI self-development, albeit in different senses of the term. We don’t yet have confirmed use cases in groups, organizations, and communities with challenges to which they want to apply our “Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI) in Networks of Human & AI Agents” framework and semi-structured, transdisciplinary action research methodology. If you lead, are a member of, or know about any group that may benefit from an exploratory conversation, please get in touch.
dang man.. confirmed cases.. apply chi ness.. need to let go..
be you. 