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The problem we are facing is not the high-level intelligent invention as AI we all know will be smarter than humanbeings, but if it will have the negative capability which firstly mentioned by John Keats means

several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason – Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.

From this point, the difference between the organic and the inorganic maybe an interesting ket point. If AI is created in an organic way, will it be easier for it to understand humanbeing as a similar existence?

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First of all, there is a story from an Alexa user’s grandson, and I’d love to call it ALEXA PROBLEM:

My grandmother is 94 and loves echo. She has such a nice voice and sometimes my mother worries that she is asking Alexa too many questions. She gets her morning news, has books read to her, looks up information my grandmother is interested in, and now they talk almost every night. And turns on and off her lights, along with waking her up in the morning.

In this description, there is almost no word about the action of grandmother, and the only one is “talk”. In the context, Alexa seemed like grandmother’s digital prosthetics.

There is a humanoid robot named Sophia just became a citizen.

Mark Goldfeder, an Atlanta-based rabbi and law professor, has reached a similar conclusion: If an entity acts human, he wrote recently, “I cannot start poking it to see if it bleeds. I have a responsibility to treat all that seem human as humans, and it is better to err on the side of caution from an ethical perspective.”

The obvious conclusion is that rights ought to be accorded not on the basis of biology but on something even more fundamental: personhood.

Ryan Calo, an expert in robotics and cyber law at the University of Washington in Seattle, says our laws are unlikely to bend that far. “Our legal system reflects our basic biology,” he says. If we one day invent some sort of artificial person, “it would break everything about the law, as we understand it today.”

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A quick note of An Essay on the New Aesthetic by Bruce Sterling.

New Aesthetic isn’t a gaudy, network-assembled heap, information visualization, satellite views, parametric architecture, surveillance cameras, digital image processing, data-mashed video frames, glitches and corruption artifacts, voxelated 3D pixels in real-world geometries, dazzle camou, augments, render ghosts, nostalgic retro 8bit graphics from the 1980s.

“New Aesthetic” isn’t about “robot vision” from “digital devices”.

Robots lack cognition. They lack perception. They lack intelligence. They lack taste. They lack ethics. They just don’t have any.

Aesthetics are, by definition, how beauty is perceived and valued in a human sensorium. Aesthetics is therefore an issue of metaphysics. Perception, beauty, judgment and value are all metaphysical issues.

 

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后悔是一种基于认知判断而诱发的高级社会情绪。

Regret is an advanced social sentiment based on cognitive judgment.

This is said by Xiaokun Xu and Xiaolin Zhou from Brain Science & Cognitive Science Center of Peking University. A Simple and effective explanation of regret – it is happened in society and depends on the level of one’s cognitive ability.

Like fair and pain, human beings achieve such negative emotions from evolution to strengthen survivability.

In the digital situation, regret also happens between the social relationship.

Close your eyes for a minute, and “imagine the worst thing you have ever done, your most shameful secret. Imagine that cringe-inducing incident somehow has made its way online.” You no longer have control over that tiny digital trace of your incident, which is now stored online as a picture, text or video. A prospective employer, current partner or future grandchild might get hold of it. Your life could change for the worse in the blink of an eye.

In the article Praise for regret: People value regret above other negative emotions, written by Colleen Saffrey, Amy Summerville, and Neal J. Roese, published in NIH (National Institute of Health), there is a study offering meticulous explanations,

Regret was seen to be the most beneficial of 12 negative emotions on all five functions of

  1. making sense of past experiences
  2. facilitating approach behaviors
  3. facilitating avoidance behaviors
  4. gaining insights into the self
  5. preserving social harmony

Moreover, Kahneman and Miller said,

Regret has been defined as a counterfactual emotion.

It means that regret’s basis rests on a counterfactual inference (i.e., that the past might have unfolded differently, particularly if a different decision had been made).

This is the ability people obtain from practice, and apply in practice to outperform themselves.

Regret is a negative emotion hinging on the recognition that a personal action could have made the past better (Landman 1993; Zeelenberg 1999).

In the Behavioral Economics, this is named as Regret Anticipation.

According to all mentioned above, it is easy to find a closed loop system:

Regret anticipation.png

In addition, people also have Regret Right to choose if we will adhere to the choice we made or give up it.

Regret anticipation2.png

Normally, the Regret Right is invisible or in other words, isn’t taken seriously when making any choice. People usually do not have that much chance to use this right. But in this post-digital age, the situation is different. People does not only have the Regret Right, but are usually asked to make a decision after having made a choice.

delete.jpeg

In this context, Digital Regret means one who owns visual Regret Anticipation and  a kind of strengthened regret right.

However, do people realize that Digital Regret is unnatural? In one hand, people do have greater freedom to eliminate the negative sense from regret by choose NO, or cancel the event in progress, or delete posts. In other hand, it’s reasonably to doubt that every regret rights in digital context may designed within complex logic of economics: The final decision is not what people want to make, but others want them to make. I know an art project of an app about preventing regret. Its working mechanism is that the app will always remind you what may happen when you make any decision, again and again. (I can’t memorize the name now, but later I will find and share it)

By the way, this article is not mainly focus on how regret mechanism works (I do have great interest about it, maybe later I can make a further research about it). People have a too strengthened Regret Right, whenever they feel Digital Regret they can easily cancel or delete or establish a group of whom the information is invisible to. The habit people develop in digital regret effects their life as well.

Ctrl+Z, as Saleh mentioned, has already been one of the most radical influences to human beings’ daily life because of offering a extra simple way to digest or prevent regret emotion.

Their is also an EU Data Protection Regulation “right to erasure” about Ctrl+Z.

The right to erasure (the right to be forgotten)

This right regulates (online) data privacy in the EU, imposing on “data controllers” such as Google the legal duty to delete portions of information upon a user’s request, when the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the latter have been infringed. It intersects the key social values of identity, privacy, memory and reputation as they are redefined in the digital age.

By Ctrl+Z, people can undo anything you have done in a digital way, and undo an undo, and undo an undo of undo… In this background of Digital Regret, I believe there will be consistent growth of demand and desire of Ctrl+Z or I called Regret right in not only digital life but also physical life. The post-designer’s responsibility is not to stop, but to provide more regret right to users.

 

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What’s a humanbeing in the post-digital age or post-post-digital age?

I get the inspiration from Deleuze, and also found this project of Stelarc.

Reference: ParaSite

So long as we think of the body as a given functional form, says Deleuze, we will not know what a body can do, what it is capable of.

In our opinion, the device, software and any future forms of digital products as AI, can be defined as humanbeings’ prosthesis. Which is A commonplace talk of an old scholar. And such inorganic, explored humanbeing, Deleuze described it as BwO, a body without organs.

To become a BwO is to destratify the body, to reconnect it with the intensive, impersonal, transhuman matter that composes and surrounds it, to open it up to new connections and assemblages, to explore the innumerable things it can do beyond the restricted set of habitual actions that characterize the organ-ized body.

digitalidentity-01

Since a man was born, he started to own the relationship with family, with friends, with lovers and haters. In this kind of relationship, the one’s identity is covered or maybe packaged (I haven’t found a more accurate verb to describe), it’s packaged in an natural, original, naked body which is opposite to Deleuze’s body without organs. And in the present, as we all know, the public space has shifted to the digital world, a man inevitably owns more and more relationship with people online and also with device.

These relationships split one identity to several identities, the man generate various identities in devices.

It’s Getting Difficult, and Increasingly Controversial, to Authenticate “Real Humans”

There are three main ways of proving an identity. One involves something you know – like a password or your mother’s maiden name. This method assumes the authorized user will have information no unauthorized user does. But that’s not always the case: For 145.5 million Americans affected by the Equifax security breach revealed in September 2017, reams of previously private information may now be known to criminals.

A second method of authentication is with something you have – such as a key to your home’s front door or a smart card to swipe at work. This assumes a limited number of people – possibly as few as one, but it could be a small group of users, like a family or co-workers – are allowed to enter a physical space or use a digital service.

A third way is by authenticating the individual human being – who you are – with some aspect of your biology. There are various type of these biometrics, such as fingerprints, facial recognition, iris scanning and voiceprints. This strategy, of course, assumes that the bodily feature is unique to the particular individual – and, crucially, that the digital system involved can tell the difference between people.

Replika is the byproduct of a series of accidents. Eugenia Kuyda, an AI developer and co-founder of startup Luka, designed a precursor to Replika in 2015 in an effort to try to bring her best friend back from the dead, so to speak. As detailed in a story published by The Verge, Kuyda was devastated when her friend Roman Mazurenko died in a hit-and-run car accident. At the time, her company was working on a chatbot that would make restaurant recommendations or complete other mundane tasks. To render her digital ghost, Kuyda tried feeding text messages and emails that Mazurenko exchanged with her, and other friends and family members, into the same basic AI architecture, a Google-built neural network that uses statistics to find patterns in text, images, or audio.

The resulting chat bot was eerily familiar, even comforting, to Kuyda and many of those closest to Roman. When word got out, Kuyda was suddenly flooded with messages from people who wanted to create a digital double of themselves or a loved one who had passed. Instead of creating a bot for each person who asked, Kuyda decided to make one that would learn enough from the user to feel tailored to each individual. The idea for Replika was born.

And there comes a paradox: People open up more easily to computers than humans.

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Part1 – Quick note – How Do You Make Music a Body without Organs? Gilles Deleuze and Experimental Electronica – by Christoph Cox

  • BwO = a body’s virtual field
  • events + becoming = being
  • experience + sign&symbols = emotion = symboled affect

So long as we think of the body as a given functional form, says Deleuze alluding to Spinoza, we will not know what a body can do, what it is capable of.

德勒兹说（这里他暗示着斯宾诺莎曾经说过的），只要我们把身体当作一个既定的功能性形式，我们就不可能知道身体会作什么、能够作什么。

To become a BwO is to destratify the body, to reconnect it with the intensive, impersonal, transhuman matter that composes and surrounds it, to open it up to new connections and assemblages, to explore the innumerable things it can do beyond the restricted set of habitual actions that characterize the organ-ized body.

要变成一个BwO，就要化解身体的分层，将身体与构成和围绕它的那些密集的、非人的、超越人的物质重新联结起来，释放身体让它能够接受新的联结和装配，去发现那些身体能够作的无以计数的事情，超越被机体化的身体，因为被机体化的身体能够作的是受习惯限制的一套有限的动作。

When one does this, one transforms the body from a given entity with a specified functionality and 3 direction of activity to a construction site of exploration and connection. One no longer actualizes merely the specific set of affects that constitute, for example, Man as a normal, rational, heterosexual, productive human being but the entire (or, at least a larger) range of affects of which this body is capable.

当我们这样去作，我们就能够将身体从一个有着确定的功能和活动方向的既定整体转化到一个允许探索和联结的场所。我们将不再局限于仅仅实现某一套特定的被具体化的感动（比如那些将人构造成正常、理性、异性 、有生产力的人的情感），而是能够实现整个（或者至少是更大的）一套身体能够具备的未知感动。

Part2 – Feeling – How Do You Make Music a Body Without Organs? – by Christoph Cox

Part3 – Are We Already Living in the Age of the Cyborg?

Part3 – New shapes

雷·库兹韦尔 | 2045年人类将能永生
我们将变得越来越非生物化，表现形式是非生物的部分占据越来越大的比例，而生物部分变得越来越不那么重要。实际上，非生物的部分——也就是机器的部分——将变得非常强大，它将能够完全理解和模拟生物的部分。即使生物的部分消失了，它也能够继续工作下去，看不出任何区别，因为非生物的部分已经能够完全理解它了。
我们还将拥有非生物的身体。我们可以用纳米技术创造出身体，并在虚拟现实里拥有一个虚拟的身体，感觉起来就像真的一样。虚拟身体的细节和真实身体感觉无二，我们正需要这样的东西，因为我们的智能直接与身体相连。然而，这个身体却不一定非得是开启了各种“故障模式”的生物身体。
Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology.