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Between Two Atlases

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I realize I have gone an awfully long time without posting any meaningful content here. While there are many good reasons for this, and many posts that were started but never published, I shall not go into that now. Suffice to say, my family has been through a lot over the last 4 years so this blog had to take a back burner to far more important fires I had to contend with. That said, I spent the last 8 hours (wow, I just realized what time it was) banging my keyboard to get this brain dump out of my head. I’m a little rusty, so please bear with me as I attempt to put some form to my free flowing thoughts. I apologize ahead of time for the length and the side notes. But hey, this is all straight from my brain to the page. I’m doing inline side notes because otherwise they will make very little sense if you wait until the end.

TL;DR

This post talks about emotions and technology. It talks about humans and AI. It provides insights into my opinions and observations on these topics based on my education, my understanding (which I’m always working toward improving), and my lived experiences. If you find your opinions, observations, understanding, or lived experiences are different from mine, great! Diversity in thought and perspective is the key toward a broader understanding of the human condition.

Note: My content and opinions are a form of my personal self-expression based on my lived experiences, education, and observations, which are in no way representative of my employer(s).

It’s the end of 2024 and as I update my books read challenge to complete my 30 for the year (1), I am amused by the fact that towards the beginning of the year I read Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Dr. Brené Brown and I have finished out the year with Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Dr. Kate Crawford (2). The juxtaposition of these two books defines my non-fiction reading quite well. They are both social scientists that lean in from complementary angles in very different ways. The first is all about uncovering truths about your emotive life and how you relate to the people and your lived experiences through various emotional states. The second uncovers truths behind the advancing technology that is slowly but surely inundating us and its impact both on us and the world that sustains us.

  1. A modest number really, but it’s a stretch goal for me given my full time jobs of leading a design team and parenting 3 children. It’s a little less than 1 book a week and I’m only able to accomplish that through listening at 2.5 time speed to my non-fiction and physically reading everything else. To be honest, I usually have one audio, one e-book, and one physical book going at the same time.
  2. This was one of seven books on AI I read this year but out of all, this and one other (see 3) had the most profound impact on me as it very eloquently put into a single volume many of the things I’ve tried often to share with others on what AI, at this time, really is and how it impacts people and the world around us through many behind the scenes ways.

Why I would recommend these books: Both authors go beyond the façade of their fields and expertise to surface information that lurks deep beneath and tugs at what it means to be human and retain our humanity in the rapidly changing experience that is this 3rd decade of the 21st century.

Why I personally enjoyed their works: They are both backed by research and they’re both written by women. As a woman who is a social scientist as well as a technologist, I find myself at their intersection.

Here are a couple of short descriptions on each.

Atlas of the Heart – Brown delves into the myriad of emotions and related experiences, 150 of them that surfaced in her research and 87 she narrowed that research down to write about, to map out how we move through life via many hues of feelings as we navigate from one moment to the next. Her intent, at least my perception of it, was to provide a guide to being able to find yourself no matter what your emotional state might be and then to find the path navigate forward from where ever you are to wherever you want to go.

Atlas of AI – Crawford explores all of the things that make up Artificial Intelligence determining that it is “…neither artificial nor intelligent … [it] is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications (3)” (Crawford 2021, 8). In my experience, when most people think of AI, it manifests as some sort of mystical black box that performs magic to generate conclusions faster, better, and more accurately than humans ever could. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth (4) and Crawford does her due diligence to show why that is the case.

  1. Another book to read on AI classifications and how they can be not only incredibly biased but also unjust is Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Dr. Joy Buolamwini
  2. Mini rant time: I have always referred to ‘Generative AI’ as ‘Derivative AI’ as algorithms do not generate anything on their own. All of their conclusions are derived from already existing data (usually stolen or biased or coerced or built on faulty origins – some without even knowing the source and many who do not consider consent an issue) that is classified or collected or maintained by exploitive human labor practices. GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out as the saying goes.

If you want to learn more about these books, I highly recommend them. I’ll leave it to their authors to fully inform you on their topics of expertise.

Switching gears now — while the rest of this post is inspired by my latest readings, it doesn’t directly relate to the books themselves. With that said, here’s a few of my hot takes based on my personal observations and experiences concerning AI as a social scientist and technology designer in 2024.

As the head of a design org (5), AI is both intriguing and terrifying. Neither in and of itself, rather, of how it is used and misused – especially considering my chosen field. Many see it as a shortcut, others see it as a necessary evil, and some see it as the death knell of their livelihood. My take is this, if you remove the human element out of design, you lack the ability to understand the human impact as well as the ability to embrace human innovation (6). Computers do not have a cognitive load, a culture, a spoken language, disabilities, emotions, or needs and wants. And, they cannot on their own create something out of nothing.

  1. I am the Senior Director/Head of Design at Blizzard for Battle.net, recently acquired by Xbox (Microsoft).
    • Reminder, thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own and are NOT representative of my employer(s).
  2. Helping humans innovate WITH technology has been one of the many focuses of my career. I was part of the inaugural group who helped pioneer SAP’s Innovation Services in innovation management and was accredited with the SAP Innovation & Advisory Skill granted to those who showed the ability to identify appropriate business models, processes, applications, and data as well as applicable intelligent technologies needed to bring them to life.
    • I worked for SAP Innovation Services in Blockchain where I led the design practice (the discipline rather than a team), helped design blockchain backed systems, and led workshops to help Fortune 500 companies identify where blockchain could be useful for them. This was a similar situation to AI where it seemed every company clamored for the ‘latest and greatest’ tech without fully understanding it. Most companies just needed a database rather than adopting blockchain technology and it was my job to help them understand that even if it meant we were not selling them our blockchain services.
    • I LOVE technology. I am not against technology in any way. That said, I believe technology should by made by humans, for humans, and should work with them rather than strive to replace the human contribution in any way. As the quote goes, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes”. – Johanna Maciejewska

When it comes to things like art, writing, or even product design — if you want to embrace homogeny and “be different just like everyone else” then AI will suit you just fine and before long people will start to recognize how what AI has produced for you is no different than what it has produced for the next person/project/organization. When it all comes from the same source material, be it the data sets or the algorithms (and believe it or not, most reference the same things as it’s very hard and costly to build a large categorized and classified data set) it will all start eventually looking, feeling, acting, and working the same. If you actually care about making something for humans to embrace with their multi-contextual origins, wants, needs, and differing abilities, AND you want to make something for them that is differentiated from all the things that have come before it, humans are integral to the process.

Relating back to the emotional part of this post a bit. The emotional labor involved in protecting my designers, informing them, assuaging their fears, as well as educating and advocating for the human side of all that we do is intensive, but worth it. This is part of the reason why such books have made it on to my TBR (to be read) list and will continue to do so.

As an anthropologist (7) and information scientist (8) who specializes in cyber anthropology and social informatics (where humans and technology intersect) I am especially concerned with the human element, specifically culture, context, consent, and exploitation. Humans are not binary code made up of 1s and 0s and our experiences cannot be distilled down to an algorithm (9). This is where most systems, including a lot of AI, fail a diverse population. As I addressed in my Ph.D. dissertation, systems alone cannot provide everything that humans need to understand or interpret or utilize the world around them. Lived shared experiences are a necessary part of the human condition and one that AI cannot recreate.

  1. During my mixed undergrad degree (anthropology, philosophy, and psychology) in the early 2000s, I did my ethnographic field methods research on the Motivations of Guilded Players in World of Warcraft – where my research was entirely online. This led me to getting my M.S. in Applied Anthropology with a focus on Design and Business where I studied the Fedora Project (the group behind what is monetized as Red Hat Linux) and their online experience for my Masters Thesis in my research on How to Grow, Maintain, and Sustain an Online Open Source Development Community.
    • While I use the term Cyber Anthropology other people have used Digital Anthropology or Digital Ethnography to describe this work. Though I was not the first to do this, I was one of the first to do it in World of Warcaft or MMORPGs in general.
  2. My Ph.D. is in Information Science and my dissertation is An Ethnographic Study of Parental Information Behavior when Assessing Video Game Content for their Children where I researched how American parents did or did not use the ESRB (video game rating system) when making decisions about video game appropriateness. I developed a model of how a parent’s interaction with information on behalf of their children changes as their children age and what to do to develop a healthy relationship with their children and their children’s evolving media interactions over time.
    • Funny enough, many parents in my study wanted to see other humans interact with the content via play-throughs over trusting a system like the ESRB or simply reading reviews. With the advent of sites like Twitch this is much easier to do today than it was when I was researching this topic 2010-2016.
    • Why mention my degrees at all? I mention them for two reasons. 1) As a woman, I find I’m taken a little more seriously when I show that I have credentials in relevant fields, (See book: The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart) and 2) To show that while I embrace technology (I’ve worked in technology all my life) I focus on the human-computer partnership where the two collaborate together for work and play rather than putting humans second or treated as an expendable after thought on the path toward unsustainable profit growth.
  3. This is where Dr. Buolamwini’s book finds its place. Other books to consider are Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Dr. Cathy O’Neil and Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble. These last two are on my 2025 TBR list along with several others.
    • While all of the books I’ve mentioned so far are by women with Ph.D.s, that is not a criteria for being on my TBR list, it just so happens that women with Ph.D.s make up a large majority of the people calling out the industry. I’ll leave it up to you to decide why that might be.

Humans are messy and chaotic and regardless of their perceived similarities, are highly complex and individual beings who all have their own unique wants and needs that are sometimes chaotic and contradictory. This is all part of the human experience, which is why inclusive design, open design, universal design, and accessibility are so important to me as a designer. The very notion of letting an AI design something for humans on its own is the exact opposite of inclusive and open design. Not to mention the fact that accessibility and universality are often second thoughts for most able bodied humans. How do we expect an algorithm to make them a priority?

Given I’m a human who depends on this planet to sustain me, my family, and my loved ones, I’m also highly concerned with the the impact AI has on our environment. Just like how electric cars aren’t truly environmentally conscious choices when you consider where all their parts originate (especially those used to create the lithium batteries) or where they get all the power that charges them — AI also has a way of hiding its huge impacts on the environment. The biggest limitation on the technology behind AI today lies with its dependency on ecologically unsustainable amounts of energy and water to power it. Companies are consuming enormous amounts of these resources putting a strain on the infrastructure that humans depend on to live. The additional human health impact is multilayered from those who work in the mining and smelting side to others having to contend with power hungry data centers in their back yards causing a myriad of illnesses they are powerless to fight against (10).

  1. A few relevant articles on this topic

To put this in perspective, Crawford discusses a paper (11) that calculated the carbon footprint of one natural language processing model (NLP – think ChatGPT) which “produced more than 660,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of five gas-powered cars over their total lifetime (including their manufacturing) or 125 round-trip flights from New York to Beijing” (Crawford pg. 42). Is the cost to our planet worth it to have a conversation with a bot? What about the cost of the exploited human labor that was used to input the data into the NLP so it could work? All of a sudden that “free” AI art or prose isn’t so free after all, is it? As a note to employers, it may not be cost saving to you either as a recent MIT CSAIL study revealed there are economic limits to trying to replace humans (12). Given AI is largely not ecological, environmental, or economical, I have to wonder when the price (monetary and beyond) to create and run it will finally outstrip any perceived future profits companies believe they will glean from it.

  1. Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP: https://aclanthology.org/P19-1355/
  2. https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/rethinking-ais-impact-mit-csail-study-reveals-economic-limits-job-automation

In the end, I’m not trying to be a doomsayer here. I think there can be a time and a place for humans and AI to work together, but that’s the crux of it, working together. Here is why I was inspired to even begin this now way too long blog post. While AI has already started to find a place in the ‘hard’ sciences (13), I think we in the social sciences can also find our place in this ever changing landscape. Especially since even the use of AI in hard sciences can be detrimental if it is based on biased or skewed data sets and there is a lack of awareness on how this might be an issue for under represented populations.

  1. A few hard science examples:

And here’s where we begin to circle back to my previous statement about considering culture, context, consent, and exploitation when it comes to AI systems and how they are built and powered. As an information scientist and cyber anthropologist focused on the intersection of humans and technology, I find that myself and people like me, are in a prime position to be able to elevate the human side of this partnership that has largely been ignored or downgraded as an after thought. Both Dr. Crawford and Dr. Buolamwini point out in their books that content and data without context and consent can lead to technological failures and biases that directly affect people in the general population every day, whether they know it or not. And while I’m a proponent of inclusive and open design, I cannot ignore the fact that this can also cause problems for marginalized people who may be exploited as a means to an end of making a ‘better data set’ which could in turn be used against them. As I always stress to my designers, it is our job to not only think of how the things we design can help all people. It is also our responsibility to fight against ways they can be nefariously used as well.

The field of AI needs us more than it knows. We’ve moved past the time period of being ok with the field moving fast and breaking things to get a product out to market as quickly as possible, as the things moving fast are the depletion of our natural resources and those being broken are people caught on the exploitive labor side or the wrong end of an algorithm. While there may be short term profits for a few, the long term consequences will come for us all. And no, I’m not talking about some sentient robot uprising. I’m talking about ethics and sustainability. I’m talking about the ways not that AI can impact humans, rather the ways that humans can impact AI. While I’ve mentioned quite a few amazing humans above who’ve already had various impacts on AI, they are but a small part of a growing movement (14) that could always use a few more.

  1. A few social science contributions:

Though it may seem like I’m a bit late to this conversation, it’s something that’s been brewing in my mind for more than a decade. My work history includes IBM who acquired the company I worked for in 2013 (4 years after I started), which was the largest privately owned hosting company in the world before the acquisition. We specialized in infrastructure as a service including managing severs in large data centers which is one of the myriad of things I designed the interfaces for. They used our infrastructure as the basis of their cloud computing offering, for which I also designed interfaces and researched uses in its early stages (and I am a rare designer with an OTAA to show for it — IYKYK).

As previously mentioned, I was also a design consultant at SAP in their innovation services utilizing edge technologies (Blockchain, IoT, ML, and more). Thus, I’ve peripherally touched on this throughout the better part of my career. Now that I find myself over a large team of designers working for a company which was recently acquired by yet another large technology corporation, and one that is putting big bets on AI, I find myself squarely at one of these intriguing intersections of people and technology yet again. So, I’m doing what any good researcher does, I’m diving in and consuming everything I can (15).

  1. Books I’ve read this year on AI or related topics:
    • Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows (while not AI specifically, I felt it was related enough to include)
    • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman
    • AI Ethics by Mark Coeckelbergh
    • Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell
    • The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Anita A Farahany
    • Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust by Gary F. Marcus
    • Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini
    • Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sifting through this brain dump. It’s been a while since I’ve been inspired to write something like this and I’m glad I’ve been able to take advantage of my company’s imposed time off to do so.

Now, back to my TBR list.

p.s. The irony is not lost on me that the program I wrote this draft in originally kept trying to get me to use AI to “improve my writing”. For better or worse, this is all human made and no algorithms were involved in its creation.

#luckywelivedhawaii

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Having lived in Hawaii for almost four years this article in the Washington Post on people leaving Hawaii hits home in multiple places.

This picture is one of the last I took, December of 2016, while we were living on the island of Oahu. It was a beautiful place to live and as the hashtag states, #luckywelivehawaii, we felt lucky indeed. But, that luck only went so far. Working in the technology industry as a remote worker for an off-island company (we had one office on the island that I never visited – it was mostly for transient workers going between the far east and the US) I was able to continue to work in my field. Had I not had my remote job, however, I would have never found work on the island.

I interviewed for a job before moving out there, hoping that I’d be a great fit coming from the mainland with all of my experience and expertise (which by the way you should never do – Hawaii has her own way of doing things and it should be appreciated). The problem was, though the cost of living was at least 3x what we were used to in Texas, they paid a 3rd of what I was making to do the same work. In all my time living on the island, I never saw another job available in my field. And yes, I did look.

What I found instead were other workers like me who worked for mainland offices, on mainland hours, from our tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. There weren’t many of us, but we did exist. Other technologists, I found in the tech startup community, mostly tried to develop opportunities that focused on capitalizing on the tourist market, because it was the only market.  Either that or they did like Hello Makana, a company that ships Hawaiian delicacies all over the world, and catered to the people who had left and wanted a reminder of home.

Still, others who were once the white-collar workers of the mainland fell so much in love with the island that they found a way to make it work by doing things like becoming bee-keepers, tour guides, or were a part of the service industry in jobs like bartending and masseuses.

What I will never forget is the disparity between the tourists, the rich who make money off the backs of the tourists, and then the natives who were either exploited for the tourists or forced to work menial jobs because that’s all there was available. In the worst cases, they were destitute or completely homeless. Of those who were able to afford homes, they did so because they had multiple extended family members or multiple families living under one roof. Those homes they could afford were dilapidated, old, and generally unkept due to the cost of doing so.

Now, this is in no way meant to be representative of every possible Hawaiian experience on the island, just a snapshot of what my experience was there and one that falls in line with what the article reports. The natives will always have a soft spot in my heart. During our time there we did our best to avoid most of the tourist trappings and instead sought out experiences of the beauty and the nature of the island that helped the islands in one way or another. That will always be my recommendation to anyone who visits. Skip the tv dinner version and find a way to support the local culture and community any way you can.

Would I have stayed had I been able to find equal work for equal pay? It’s a possibility. What was more important were the opportunities afforded to my children, not only as children but also as adults. While we had to leave the island, part of it will always live within us. My children are better for having experienced their early childhood there. And, though they may never remember it, I have a lot of photographic evidence to help them relive as much as possible.

Relevant links:
To read more about the cultural perspective of native islanders here is an interesting piece I recently came across from a cultural anthropologist.
Here is a perspective from native Hawaiians on their culture versus the culture that is sold to tourists.
Here is yet another cultural look.

 

Am I techy enough?

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My first test against my tech cred in my Fedora research has been generating an ssh key and setting up my blog on Fedora Planet the Fedora blog aggregator. I looked this up on several resources, understood what it was, but not really how to make it work.

I uploaded several different keys I generated via several different sources and still no go. I finally figured out that it had nothing to do with where my blog was hosted, but rather, from where I was connecting i.e. my mac. So, I created a key on my mac and uploaded. Now, I had read on a mailing list found via google that it can take sometimes as long as an hour to propagate your key over to the authentication server. I am not sure how old this post was (simply forgot to check the date), but I thought it a good idea to wait anyway.

Sadly, that key didn’t work either. Then I found the cryptography fedora wiki entry. All other resources I had read had said to skip creating a password. This one stated that you needed to. So, again I generated a key and uploaded it.

So far still no go. I have someone who’s volunteered to help me. I just need to make a date with her online to get it done! As soon as I have this figured out I’ll post it for posterity in case someone else ends up being as newbish as me. 🙂

An interesting trend…

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This semester I am taking Design Anthropology. I took this class as an undergrad and it is one of the reasons why I chose to pursue my masters in anthropology. The experience in working with a tech company, in both cases Motorola, on a real research issue where we go out and do field work and then as a class analyze the data, is simply amazing. This semester we researched how people extend their experiences through second screens or mobile devices.

I spoke at the beginning of the semester about how I use my iPhone (and previously Blackberry and before that Treo – I’ve had a smart phone since 2002). Several of the things I do include using it to share my immediate experience with my friends such as picture blogging (Twinkle for Twitter and Flickr to Livejournal), actual blogging, looking up information for class while listening to the lecture and participating in the discussion, and researching products in stores while in the store. This is all in addition to checking my email, chatting, texting, playing games (Spore at the moment), reading blogs, and using many other programs. The class looked back at me as if I was an alien. Most use their phone only for talking or at most texting. So, I made it my mission to actually find someone to do my fieldwork on that did the same thing I did.

And I did! I chose First Saturday, a tech swap meet, to do my research. I knew I’d find SOMEONE that did what I did there. And sure enough, my partner and I spotted someone at about 3am trying to buy a Macbook. What we found out was that during the half hour we observed him he used three phones, 2 Blackberries and 1 iPhone, to chat with his partner who was there with him (he had one Blackberry), look up prices, research the product itself, and research a technical problem the Macbook was experiencing. Aha! I am not the only one! This does, however, bring me to an interesting trend – on the spot researching, and stores seem to be cashing in on it.

Two ads come to mind immediately of stores mentioning how they provide access to a computer right in the store in order to research the product and their competitors prices. I think though, that they should take this one step further – why not offer an in store wireless connection that mobile phones can use to do the research with. Through that connection offer a ‘homepage’ or default page that comes up when they go to connect with all of the in-store specials. These specials then list not only the store’s price, but also their competitors online prices as well as specs, compatibility, and upgrade information about the product itself.

While yes, I agree that few people will use this in the beginning, but imagine those people then SHARING that information with the people around them. Then those people the shared it with learning of it, using it, and then sharing it with others too. It’s an in store marketing device, one that they are already providing through the use of an in store computer, but one that is a bit more private and a hell of a lot more useful than most sales people.

This can then be extended even further than that – say using a barcode scanner or photo recognition software. Just imagine the possibilities when you put access to pertinent information in the palm of a consumers hand.

One example would be utilizing Target’s Amazon relation ship by putting URLs on the tags for all the electronic items in the store. Here I can go an extra step and actually read the reviews for the item I’m looking to purchase. I not only get to look up prices, specs, and other important information, but I also get to see what OTHER people think of the product too. Then, if I purchase it in store I can say perhaps get $5 off my next Amazon or Target purchase if I leave a review thus perpetuating the cycle.

Nintendo sees the light letting you download demos of games right to your DS in some stores. Bookstores should jump on that letting you read reviews of the latest releases right on your mobile device, or go one step further by allowing you to download ebooks/zines after checking out the real thing. Giving people access right in the store to information as well as reviews and then allowing them to EASILY share their experience with others is, in my humble opinion, one of the great ways to bridge the gap between the brick and mortar stores and their thriving digital counterparts.

The trend has already begun. Stores are already giving people access to computers right there in the store to do this – it’s time someone started taking just a bit further.

/end being a dork, usability junky and ex advertising agency information architect…

p.s. My chapter for our report to Motorola is on Complex Multiple Engagements – think of it as an analysis of our observations on how people strive to do things simultaneously or in quick succession through the use of technology – then design implications based on my analysis of these observations.

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