Audio podcast [1]: Rosie Campbell’s Fireside Chat

Rosie and Ahmed cofounded Manchester Futurists in early 2017 while working together at the BBC. A year later, Rosie waved goodbye to the UK and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to become Assistant Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI), a technical AI safety research team at UC Berkeley. Recently, she joined the Partnership on AI (PAI) to lead research programs on beneficial AI strategy, spanning areas such as responsible publication practices, explainability in AI systems, and benchmarking techniques for safety and fairness.

In this fireside chat, Rosie and Ahmed will cover a range of topics such as:

  • What it’s like to move from Manchester to California
  • The latest thinking on AGI and transformative AI
  • Research at PAI, CHAI, and beyond
  • Productivity, mental models, systems, and optimization
  • Questions from the audience

Rosie Campbell is a Program Lead at the Partnership on AI (PAI) in San Francisco. She is interested in the safe development of AI for the long-term flourishing of humanity, and was recently named one of ‘100 Brilliant Women to follow in AI Ethics’.

Previously, Rosie was the Assistant Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) at UC Berkeley, and continues to advise the group on strategy and operations. Before that, Rosie worked as a Research Engineer at BBC R&D, a multidisciplinary research lab based in Manchester and London. There, she worked on emerging technologies for broadcasting, including an award-winning project exploring the use of AI in media production.

Rosie holds a Master’s in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s in Physics, and also has academic experience in Philosophy and Machine Learning. She is fascinated by emerging tech, society, and the future, and cofounded Manchester Futurists to explore these issues. Rosie is also a productivity nerd and enjoys thinking and writing about how to optimize systems, and how to use reason and evidence to improve the world using the framework of Effective Altruism.

The Future of the Book with Emma Nuttall

mcrfuturists-emma

Humans have been telling stories for as long as we can remember but the future of storytelling and, in particular, the future of the book, may be more complex than we can imagine right now. What we do know is that since storytelling is an essential part of being human; we will certainly continue to innovate and find ways to express the stories we want to tell. 

But what about the humble book? Will there still be space for books in the future? 

Our speaker for November, Emma Nuttall, is a Doctoral Candidate researching emerging narrative tools for storytellers using digital platforms. Her practice-led PhD has included theatre work, she has co-written locative based experiences and produced digital fiction pieces for smartphones. And yet, she is still fairly certain that the book will stick around for a long time yet. 

Her talk began by looking at exactly what a book is:

This is an important starting point for the simple reason that as writers become more experimental in their work, the boundaries of what constitutes a “book” are being pushed all the time. From cutting words and phrases out of an existing work to create a new work – a process known as erasure – to sewing sentences together to create a page, writers are playing with the notion of what a book is all the time. The introduction of digital media is giving this process even greater freedom and writers are certainly making the most of the mediums available to them.

If one genre has benefitted from the expansion of narrative mediums, it’s horror. Ghost stories are best told when they can be brought to life and many authors have used a range of techniques to do just that. 

Kate Pullinger, author of Breathe, says that technology can feel possessed. This is an interesting idea, particularly when you consider that we are surrounded by cameras all the time and our lives now revolve around the tech we carry with us. It’s easy to freak out when you consider how easily we have allowed tech to seep into every aspect of our lives, though this is probably a subject for another blog later on! 

That more and more people are now reading on screens, including phones, tablets and eReaders, is definitely shaping the way some writers design their method of storytelling. Stories can now be told through a series of tweets, can be delivered in bite-sized chunks through text or email and can even become interactive. A good example of this is location-based storytelling, where people gather at a particular place and receive instructions to play a part in the narrative. 

Locative based storytelling is a fascinating area for study. No-one at the event will ever get the whole story and each participant is watching the story unfold while being watched by others. The location also takes the story off the page to an extent but still relies on the written word to create the story in the first place. 

From locative based storytelling, it is easy to bounce into VR, AR and video games, as well as mixed media pieces and more experimental modes of storytelling. And yet, even with the sudden emergence of so many different mediums, the book, centuries old, continues to form a solid foundation for every foray into new media experiences. 

Listen to the Full Talk

Reading List to Take Home

Six Conversations, Duncan Speakman

Night Film, Marisha Pessl

Death Book, Andreas Winklemann

Breathe, Kate Pullinger

The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall

Sites to Visit

http://www.ifbook.co.uk/

https://electronicliteraturereview.org/

Our Next Event:

The Future of Personal Data: Designing a ‘Qualified Self’ 

https://www.meetup.com/Manchester-Futurists/events/267164054/ 

The Future of Persuasion with Graeme Phillipson

Graeme says what you see is all a matter of perception

Our October meet-up was all about The Future of Persuasion with Graeme Phillipson. As our group was a little smaller, we decided to move from our usual room to a slightly smaller room. The great advantage was that the talk became much more personal and our wonderful audience got stuck in with plenty of challenging questions for our speaker!

The talk started with Graeme explaining how video can be manipulated and compressed without people noticing a particular difference in the quality. This is a really important point because, in the era of ‘fake news’, we all need to be much more aware of what we are looking at. A critical eye is a good skill to have!

As it turns out, our perception is everything and we all see slightly differently as Graeme pointed out with his favourite graph.

Graeme then moved on to talk about the ways that companies can subtly manipulate what we see. Companies like YouTube and Google are constantly assessing what we would most like to see and use split testing to present content. This practice is problematic because as we are not good at deciphering the quality of content, we can be easily misled, a process exacerbated by an algorithm that tends towards populism rather than truth.

The Gangnam Style Problem and Flat Earth Theory both illustrate how algorithms can be problematic. As Graeme explained, YouTube initially recommended videos according to popularity. So, if you started by watching one video, the next would be on a similar subject but would have more views. The problem was that no matter where the watcher started, they would, at some point, inevitably end up watching Gangnam Style, which is one of the most popular YouTube videos ever.

To counter this problem, YouTube has altered the algorithm so it no longer recommends the most popular video but a more niche video on the same topic. This has lead to the Flat Earth Theory problem. Most Flat Earthers credit their ‘enlightenment’ to videos they have watched on YouTube. Why? Because YouTube now promotes more niche content which tends to lead watchers down information rabbit holes. As people watch more content ‘proving’ that the Earth is flat, they are more likely to come to believe that it’s true, perpetuating the theory and increasing the popularity of the videos themselves.

Unfortunately, Graeme didn’t offer a neat solution to the world’s information problems – mainly because there isn’t one. However, his talk was a great illustration of how we treat information and how easy we are to deceive. His message could be boiled down to this: think critically about every source of information and watch Hyperland by Douglas Adams.

Graeme said, “It was really interesting to present here and a lovely bunch of people to talk to. There was some debate as we were going through, which was great to have!” 

Listen to the Full Talk

Reading List to Take Home

The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff

Our Next Event:

The Future of the Book with Emma Nuttall

https://www.meetup.com/Manchester-Futurists/events/266144844/