Kathryn Hume: Chapter 1: AI Does Not Permit Polite Fictions

M-A-C-H-I-N-E-Y-E-A-I-X-I-X-E. It's Machine Learning from Assist. It's a podcast where we think and dream about the future of AI, the talking internet, and how we're reshaping our culture. This chapter is an excerpt from our longer conversation with Kathryn Hume. Katherine Hume came to us via Robin Sloan, a great friend of the pod. One of the things we loved about talking with Katherine is that she gets the poetry of language. She's also really smart about how that poses some major challenges with AI. She works at Integrate AI now and has done product, marketing, investment, mentored startups. Katherine gets that nobody really knows where this thing is going, and that's okay. But also, we can gather some clues about where we're going by looking at how humans don't change. We loved our time with her, and we think you will too. Enjoy.

Thank you for coming.

Thanks for having me.

So how have you seen the conversation change in the last 12, 18, 24 months?

Ooh, great question. I mean, there's certain things that stay the same and certain things that have changed. I'm a big fan, and when I'm thinking about even the future, and I'll come back to the question about like what's changed, of when you think, all right, so what's going to be inevitable? As opposed to being like, this technology is going to get to this point, which are normally just a fool's errand for us to try to predict where the tech's going to go. It's better to stay like, think like, what is going to stay the same? So Jeff Bezos from Amazon, Amazon, like he says, can I envision a world where customers are going to want to pay more as opposed to less for toilet paper? He's like, nope, that's not changing. So therefore, if I make decisions on my tech stack that make it so that prices will stay cheap or decrease, that will be good for business. You know, it's like that's an inevitability. It's an assumption I can work with. So I think about that with regards to like the future of AI where it's super hard for us to predict exactly what's gonna become possible and what's not. But there's a lot of aspects of human nature that are gonna stay the same that we can use as like a grounding as we think through things. As we go for the past and like what's changed over the past 2 years.

What are the specifics of that though?

Of like what's gonna stay the same?

Of the human. You said there's some things that are gonna, there's some things that aren't gonna change.

Yeah, so I think, I mean, maybe this is just my own sort of beliefs about humanity. I don't think we're ever going to want a world where we are isolated and alone and we optimize our technology so that each of us can live in our own little bubble. As much as it seems great to have like the eye of everything and like everybody gets to be in their own little island, 'Cause I feel like a lot of tech sort of is focused on the individual and like the power of the individual. I think we never want that, right? Like, yeah, and a lot of studies have shown that, you know, when you think about like longevity, right? What should we be doing? What should we be eating? How often should we exercise? What are all the little things that we can control in our lives so that we like live an extra couple of years when we're in our 80s and 90s, presuming that we're lucky enough to get there in the first place? And I think there's been a lot of studies recently that show that like, the best guarantor of longevity is that you spend time with other human beings. You feel loved, you feel connected, you feel like— part of it is you have a purpose when you're younger. When you're older, it's just like you're connected. Like someone's there. We're mammals, we're animals, we have limbic systems, and we like our hearts to be next to other hearts because they can regulate together. And I think that will always be there. And I think that, you know, A lot of those, you sort of read big picture narratives around AI and we worry about the machines becoming smarter than us. That is focused on some assumption that the most human aspect of our humanity is this little part of our brain that's the prefrontal cortex that does, like, rational calculations. And, like, God, that would be a horrible world if that's what we get reduced down to. Like, who wants that? So I think it's pretty inevitable that we are gonna really stay animals and, like, love, the aspect of us, of our animalness, and that we can think about developing technology to support that as opposed to alienate ourselves.

That's so interesting. Do you think AI actually saves us from the machines? Because the last 10 years, we've really been programmed to just be addicted to the machine.

Yeah, I mean, I think if we make design choices where we want that to be the case, for sure. So I know in the latest Android release, they've now added a couple of features where you you can sort of program, it's sort of like a dimmed color mode so that it enables you to sleep a little bit better. Or even like you can like decide that you no longer want notifications after a certain time or however you'd like to configure it so that you feel a little bit more autonomous as opposed to tethered to this machine that's guiding your every dopamine hit. So I feel like those preferences, it might be hard for us to determine exactly what we want from first pass and sort of like wake up on a Monday and be like, this is how I wanna live this week. I know, I certainly know that I try to, I always want to shift some habit and fail miserably by Monday afternoon. Like Monday morning I have high hopes and by like 4 o'clock I'm like, oh God.

Don't we all?

Yeah. With the inevitability of the 5 o'clock shadow, it's like done.

What do you find the most or least surprising about the current state of AI?

Ooh, great question. Let me think a little bit. I mean, I think I find the least surprising but the most boring is our imagination of AI as robots that are supposed to be more intelligent than we are and sort of have an antagonistic relationship with us. Least surprising because science fiction has had a big impact on our cultural imagination. So like, and the science fiction writers, by the way, were drawing upon the Judeo-Christian tradition. So, and like the medieval and ancient epics. So there's like 2,000 years of intellectual history shaping what we consider to be the future, but it's kind of old and stale. So it's not surprising at all that that's what we're worried about, but it's also so restricting as opposed to our sort of opening up our minds to have more creative sources of inspiration where, I don't know, animals are super intelligent. Dogs, imagine being a dog and being able to smell the world they do. Like they do, right? And imagine if we were to use that as a source of inspiration for thinking about some cool product, what would that look like?

How do you have such optimism for AI? And how do you give that to more people? Or how do you have so much?

I mean, I think math is cool. And a lot of people aren't interested in understanding— all this is is linear algebra that ends up having these miraculous Turing test-like experiences where the Turing test is like, you see a computer seems intelligent. A computer is intelligent if we mistake it for an intelligent agent, when on the back end, all that is is math. So somehow modifying— we have to modify our educational system to make math more fun and not just this thing we have to go through to sort of develop intuitions. That said, I also think that there's a lot of concerns and ethical risks and things we need to be thinking about with AI. They're often different than the ones we worry about. It has to do more with some of the existing inequalities in society that are being exacerbated and reflected as through a convex mirror with these tools. But I'm even optimistic about that because it's not the— like, the linear regression is not evil, right? A mathematical model, it can't be— it doesn't even make sense when you say something like that. What it is doing is, as this guy Jonathan Zunger wrote on the internet, AI does not permit polite fictions. So we walk around with our, like, nice little polite lies that we tell one another related to how well we get along with one another in society and, like, how much we've progressed since the 1960s. And these systems come along and they're like, nope. There's still a lot of systemic racism. There's still violence. There's still bias that's in the data. The data, it's showing us loud and clear. So we have to be very mindful as practitioners developing these systems of where things can go wrong. And I think that there's a lot more work to do to sort of up the ethical awareness and consciousness of a lot of people not just technologists, but basically dialogue between philosophers, policymakers, ethicists, technologists, et cetera. Can't just lay all the burden on the engineers at Google. That's not the solve. What short-term feels like this unbearable burden of trying to develop systems that are fair and not have all these mistakes take place is actually a wonderful long-term opportunity to try to become more aware of inequalities and do something about it. But again, it takes that shift in framework. If we view AI as a tool that we are empowered to design and build and shift and not this source and force we can't control. All right.

Thanks for listening. Get in touch on Twitter @Assist. DMs are open. We're super interested to hear who you think should appear on the podcast. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode and share this with someone who cares about how we make sense of these changing times. Machine Learning is made by Paul Ciuffo and Michael Elsesser for Lamina House.

Machine Learning.

Have a great day.