Reflection 4
Our readings this week wrapped up Big Data Big Design and left us with some interesting parting thoughts. I think humans become too obsessed with innovation and technology and lose sight of societal needs, something Preston brought up in class. I resonate with his statement that sometimes we create without focus, making things just because it seems “cool” rather than creating for a set purpose or to integrate something into our society to help us. Rumman Chowdhury touched on this point pretty extensively as she asks us if technology is running the person rather than the person running the technology.
Early sketches of Praxis Inquiry 2.
This is an important consideration to bring into Praxis Inquiry 2 as we explore autonomous cars. Controlling the vehicle is often times one of the only things we actually enjoy about driving… Once we take that away we lessen the likelihood of experiencing joy in our cars and rather being overwhelmed with stress. Self driving cars has been a “dream” for the future for as long as I’ve known. But who’s dream is it? Who actually wants to sit there and stare at the road and give up complete control? But in order to fulfill this dream, we would allow ourselves to reshape society before we figure out how we can make the technology fulfill us. Meena brought this up to me today while discussing my project plan for Praxis Inquiry 2… She advised me to figure out how my car will bring joy and fulfillment as well as protection (my main focus). And that’s really at the core of it, a lost vision of what truly brings us joy and how we can design towards that.
This is where we remember that designers that work with machine learning hold power and agency because we make these decisions and can begin to fuel the next innovations in society. Caroline Sinders brings up human-rights centered design, something I was really interested by and especially resonated with, hence my designs for this class so far. We want to bring in questions of security and data privacy into the beginning of our practices so that we can design with more than just ethics guidelines directing us. I especially liked how she emphasized that “we don’t want society to be the quality assurance tester when designers release something.” I think this is so important when it comes to ML and AI! We need to make sure that we are releasing safe products and interfaces before we do irreversible damage through not enough testing.
We are constantly testing things to ensure that what we care about is being protected. The conversation around data being the measurement of things we care about made a lot of sense in my brain, even though I’m not sure exactly why we tend to measure so many things, like all of those random data sets that were mentioned in the reading. But maybe that’s why we have so many missing datasets, because we aren’t able to measure and simplify everything that we care about. I like that. Some things should be left as they are. :)
The last bit of the reading went deeper into the different kinds of machine learning, which I really appreciated. It helped me make connections about the different kinds of AI I interact with and helped me understand the workshops we have completed in class when discussing algorithms. My closing thought on the reading is that I am excited for the future when this AI and ML stuff comes a little easier to me. I liked the sentiment that interactions with software may become an extension of our creative selves rather than this difficult learning curve. As a beginner designer, I sure hope I experience that!
This week in AI I found the letter calling for the cancellation of ‘Augmented Intelligence,’ an upcoming AI art auction at Christie’s, to be really interesting. I have to agree with the 2,000 artists that signed it, auctioning off AI generated art that pulls from copyrighted work while the model was training seems inherently wrong to me. I don’t think that all AI art is bad per se, but when it begins to use other artist’s styles and completed pieces to create off of, without any craftsmanship and then funding the generator instead of the artist, it just feels cheap and wrong.
