Dear Commons Community,

Reuters is reporting that President Trump has replaced U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo, and has asked Gina Haspel to lead the CIA.  As reported:

“The resignation represents the biggest shakeup of the Trump Cabinet so far and had been expected since last October when reports surfaced about a falling out between Trump and Tillerson, 65, who left his position as chief executive of Exxon Mobil to join the administration.

Trump publicly undercut Tillerson’s diplomatic initiatives numerous times, including on Monday when the former secretary of state’s comments about Russia appeared to be at odds with those of the White House.

Tillerson also appeared out of the loop last week when Trump announced he would meet with North Korea’s leader and become the first sitting U.S. president to do so.

“Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen.

Congratulations to all!” Trump said on Twitter. “

In my mind, Tillerson was one of the saner and more competent secretaries in the Trump cabinet.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times op-ed columnist Michelle Goldberg has a piece today reviewing Betsy Devos’s interview with Lesley Stahl on CBS’s  60 Minutes last Sunday.  Goldberg describes the interview as a “disaster” and analyzes much of DeVos’s comments as indicative of her obliviousness to issues about race especially when it comes to student discipline.  Here is an excerpt:

“On Sunday evening, CBS’s “60 Minutes” broadcast an interview that Lesley Stahl conducted with Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s education secretary and one of the richest members of his very rich cabinet. It was overwhelmingly seen as a disaster for DeVos, who struggled to answer very basic questions. She couldn’t say, for example, why schools in Michigan, her home state, have largely gotten worse since the widespread introduction of the school choice policies she lobbied for. When Stahl asked whether, as secretary, she’d ever visited a failing school to find out what went wrong, DeVos said, “I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.”

Like many things in Trump’s administration, this performance was shocking but not surprising. Before becoming secretary of education, DeVos had never worked as an educator or a policymaker; she was a donor to education reform efforts favored by the right, such as school choice and vouchers. Her confirmation hearings last year were an embarrassment. She appeared to be unfamiliar with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, a federal civil rights law. After taking office, she described historically black universities and colleges, founded in response to segregation, as “pioneers when it comes to school choice.”

As this comment suggested, DeVos is, at best, oblivious about race. That obliviousness — or worse — is behind one of the more disturbing moments in her “60 Minutes” interview. In a sick irony, some on the right would use the recent school shooting in Parkland, Fla. — allegedly committed by a young man who carved swastikas into the magazines for his semiautomatic rifle — as a pretext to roll back civil rights protections for students of color. On “60 Minutes,” DeVos, whom Trump has chosen to lead his new school safety commission, appeared to signal she’s on board.”

Goldberg concludes with the implications of Devos’s comments on racial discrimination and school disciplinary policies.

“Speaking to DeVos, Stahl compared situations in which white kids are punished for classroom disruption by a trip to the principal’s office, while for black kids, “they call in the cops.” DeVos refused to say such a discrepancy is wrong: “Arguably, all of these issues or all of this issue comes down to individual kids.” Stahl pressed her on whether this “disproportion in discipline” constitutes “institutional racism.” DeVos said she was committed to “making sure students have opportunity to learn in safe and nurturing environments.”

The comparison Stahl offered was a hypothetical, but it captured the heart of the issue. Black public school students are suspended at 3.8 times the rate of white students. That discrepancy alone doesn’t necessarily demonstrate discrimination, but there’s evidence that students of color are punished differently from white students for the same infractions. Lhamon told me about one elementary school where a black girl was suspended for poking a student with a pencil. When a white girl in the same grade threw a rock that hit another child in the head and broke the teacher’s sunglasses, she was made to help the teacher clean the classroom during lunch.

The DeVos interview has already sent a message that schools can be less mindful of stark disciplinary disparities. Combine this tacit license to discriminate with the Trump administration plan to encourage the arming of teachers, and you have a recipe for something combustible. There’s a lesson here that applies across the administration. Don’t let the clownishness distract you from the bigotry.”

Devos proves again her weak credentials as education secretary.  Obliviousness indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof weighs in this morning on President Trump’s decision to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Kristof does not see this as a good idea and fears that Trump is being played by Kim and that there needs to be more diplomatic foundation building before such a meeting occurs.  Below is an excerpt that provides the core of Kristof’s thinking.

“It’s infinitely better that North Korea and the United States exchange words rather than missiles.

Yet President Trump’s decision to meet Kim Jong-un strikes me as a dangerous gamble and a bad idea. I’m afraid that North Korea may be playing Trump, and that in turn Trump may be playing us.

I fear that Trump is being played because at the outset, apparently in exchange for nothing clear-cut, he has agreed to give North Korea what it has long craved: the respect and legitimacy that comes from the North Korean leader standing as an equal beside the American president. And I worry that we in the media and the public are being played because this is a way for Trump to change the subject from a Russia investigation and a porn actress to himself as Great Peacemaker.

To be clear, I’m all for negotiations. Ever since I began covering North Korea in the 1980s, I’ve favored direct talks between the United States and North Korea, and I’ve called on Trump to send emissaries to meet Kim Jong-un.

But direct talks should be conducted by seasoned diplomats, offering an eventual summit meeting only as a carrot at the end of the process — and only if the summit serves some purpose higher than changing the headlines in the U.S. and legitimizing Kim’s regime abroad. A face-to-face should advance the interests of two countries, not just two leaders.

There’s a misperception that the North Koreans’ offer of a direct meeting is a grand concession. Not at all. It’s something they’ve been seeking for decades, but past presidents refused.

So a summit constitutes a huge gift to Kim, and it’s puzzling that our Great Dealmaker should give up so much right off the bat.”

Good analysis!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Jerome Kagan, the Daniel and Amy Starch Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has a new book entitled,  Five Constraints on Predicting Behavior, that focuses on the relationship between brain activity and psychological processes.  As the title indicates, this book examines five conditions that serve to constrain inferences about the relation between the brain and behavior.  It is a brief book (170 pages minus the references) but delves deeply into the issues of the brain and the mind.  An understanding of the brain’s contributions to behavior, Kagan argues, requires investigators to acknowledge these five constraints in the design or interpretation of an experiment. Neuroscience is not my field and some of the explanations  about brain function are a bit murky for me, however, I found that Kagan makes most of the material approachable. Here is an excerpt from a review (see below for the full review) by Maura Pilotti that appeared in Metapsychology. 

“Five Constraints on Predicting Behavior is a seminal narrative that has the potential of reshaping the growing field of cognitive neuroscience. The principal reason is that his narrative addresses the obstacles that have prevented neuroscientists from understanding how time-bound, electrochemical states and changes, which define brain patterns across time, can translate into phenomena of perception, cognition, and behavior. Thus, it is not a narrative on any specific psychological phenomenon, but a call for action that offers a broad overview of the current state of the field. It does so by identifying critical hurdles in the practices through which understanding of the links between brain and mental states is pursued, as well as by offering encouraging solutions that require a paradigmatic shift in the way evidence is collected and interpreted.

In the introduction to his book, Kagan mentions as culprits theories and methods that are currently inadequate to uncover the formula(s) by which spatially defined electrochemical changes become perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions. He also mentions the scarce funding of young investigators whose efforts can move the scientific enterprise in the right direction. He then directs his attention to five critical issues, which constitute the fabric of his narrative. From his standpoint, these issues represent serious obstacles in the quest to understand how brain matters give rise to psychological and behavioral phenomena. Kagan notices that, in order to generate reliable and valid interpretations, (1) the context of data collection, (2) the role of expectations, and (3) the quality of the sources of evidence cannot be disregarded. He also mentions that (4) selective consideration of co-variation, rather than patterns of change, is counterproductive, and warns of the (5) dangers of blindly borrowing the language of the social and behavioral sciences to discuss brain-related phenomena.

All things considered, Karan’s narrative is informative, refreshing and enlightening.”

I agree with Dr. Pilotti’s review completely and would add that there are kernels in Kagan’s book that are important for his main audience but also for social science researchers.   For example,  on page five as he sets up the rationale for the book, Kagan quotes Niels Bohr that “the validity of every conclusion depends on its source of evidence.”  Bohr was referring to the quantum controversy as to whether light was a wave or particle but Kagan application to his subject is most appropriate.

In sum, a good read!

Tony

——————————————————–

Metapsychology  

Review by Maura Pilotti, PhD
Feb 20th 2018 (Volume 22, Issue 8)

Five Constraints on Predicting Behavior, written by Jerome Kagan, is a seminal narrative that has the potential of reshaping the growing field of cognitive neuroscience. The principal reason is that his narrative addresses the obstacles that have prevented neuroscientists from understanding how time-bound, electrochemical states and changes, which define brain patterns across time, can translate into phenomena of perception, cognition, and behavior. Thus, it is not a narrative on any specific psychological phenomenon, but a call for action that offers a broad overview of the current state of the field. It does so by identifying critical hurdles in the practices through which understanding of the links between brain and mental states is pursued, as well as by offering encouraging solutions that require a paradigmatic shift in the way evidence is collected and interpreted.

In the introduction to his book, Kagan mentions as culprits theories and methods that are currently inadequate to uncover the formula(s) by which spatially defined electrochemical changes become perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions. He also mentions the scarce funding of young investigators whose efforts can move the scientific enterprise in the right direction. He then directs his attention to five critical issues, which constitute the fabric of his narrative. From his standpoint, these issues represent serious obstacles in the quest to understand how brain matters give rise to psychological and behavioral phenomena. Kagan notices that, in order to generate reliable and valid interpretations, (1) the context of data collection, (2) the role of expectations, and (3) the quality of the sources of evidence cannot be disregarded. He also mentions that (4) selective consideration of co-variation, rather than patterns of change, is counterproductive, and warns of the (5) dangers of blindly borrowing the language of the social and behavioral sciences to discuss brain-related phenomena.

All things considered, Karan’s narrative is informative, refreshing and enlightening. He begins his probing analysis with the acknowledgment that data collection occurs in context and that the latter shapes the phenomena under observation and thus their interpretation(s). The term context is used to refer to the physical and social properties of the situation where the data of a study are collected, including the characteristics of the participants, the range of stimuli considered, and the features of the data collection procedures adopted by the investigator. Kagan argues that “context effects” limit the generalizability of the data and related interpretations. As such, they cannot be easily dismissed. On the contrary, context effects are intended to be carefully investigated not only to determine the extent to which phenomena and their interpretations may generalize to a variety of settings and circumstances besides those that produce them, but also to identify whether specific factors in such settings and circumstances shape the observed phenomena to the point at which very different configurations develop. Namely, he advocates the practice of systematic replication as a means by which explanations can be validated and their applicable range established. In doing so, he illustrates several helpful as well as compelling examples in which the context of observation matters. Kagan’s argument is particularly persuasive since scientists involved in the Reproducibility Project, led by Brian Nosek, have succeeded in replicating the findings of only a small number of famous psychological studies published in top journals (Francis, 2012; Open Science Collaboration, 2015).

Kagan’s comments on the relevance of the context of observation fit well with another concern he raises regarding the role played by expectations in shaping brain profiles. He argues that a participant’s response to a stimulus in either a lab or the field is the complex outcome of the information gathered from the stimulus and the context of occurrence, as well as prior knowledge that leads the participant to anticipate that stimulus or be surprised by its occurrence. Expectations may merely affect the intensity of a response, or shape its meaning and nature entirely. Thus, Kagan advises scientists whose goal is to explain how brain changes lead to perception, cognition, and action, to consider the properties of the situation in which data collection occurs in relation to the selected participants. Failure to do so may not only limit the generalizability of particular findings, but also question their interpretation and cast doubt on their validity and reliability. The same liabilities may emerge if the sources of the data collected, which determine the validity of the evidence gathered, are not given sufficient consideration, and are thus discounted or ignored. Kagan reminds the reader that the validity of interpretations, including the range of contexts, events, and individuals to which they apply, relies, first and foremost, on the validity of the data collected. As examples, he mentions scientists’ over-reliance on data gathered through subjective report measures, such as questionnaires, either to classify human psychological diversity into personality traits or to explain the impact of early experiences on later psychological states. People’s recollections of past events, including habitual behaviors and cognitions, are neither the events themselves nor the untarnished duplicates of such events. Memories, for instance, are shaped by the context of retrieval, including current perceptions (e.g., retrieval cues), emotional states, and intentions, and may even be illusory (Berntson & Cacioppo, 2009; Tulving & Craik, 2000).

The remaining obstacles to the progress of cognitive neuroscience are equally relevant. Kagan overviews several prototypical instances of scientists’ predilection for uncovering one-to-one relationships involving a variety of psychological, behavioral, and brain phenomena. Simplistic assumptions may span from mere co-variation to the postulation of a cause-effect relationship. The simplicity of a one-to-one relationship, whereby a psychological phenomenon is attributed to a single identifiable source, may be deceptively comforting. In fact, the principle of parsimony appears to be satisfied in a world forcibly made simple, and the chimera of straightforward applications and/or solutions can blind even the keenest minds. Kagan not only advocates attention to patterns of variables and non-linear relationships, but artfully demonstrates the value of data collection focused on patterns of measures representing likely causes and related outcomes. Lastly, Kagan acknowledges that the narratives of cognitive neuroscientists tend to be distorted by their borrowing terms and expressions from a language that may fit psychological and behavioral phenomena, but is inadequate to represent brain assemblies and patterns. He argues that if scientists want to overcome their current inability to explain how mental states emerge from brain patterns, then the latter need to be described through a language that does justice to their unique properties. To demonstrate this point, he explores a variety of cases where the tendency to attribute psychological properties to brain events can generate misleading conclusions.

Taken as a whole, Kagan’s narrative is both engaging and carefully crafted for a broad spectrum of readers who are interested in the progress of the complex field of cognitive neuroscience. Not only can Kagan’s advice and guidance promote the advancement of the field, but his narrative can serve as a call for action. When expertise and imagination meet intellectual humility, the path to progress can be envisioned. Kagan has artfully plowed it.

References

Berntson, G. G., & Cacioppo, J. T. (Eds.). (2009). Handbook of neuroscience for the behavioral sciences.(Vol. 2). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Francis, G. (2012). Publication bias and the failure of replication in experimental psychology. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19(6), 975-991.

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716.

Tulving, E., & Craik, F. I. (Eds.). (2000). The Oxford handbook of memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed into law an array of gun limits that included raising the minimum age to purchase a firearm to 21 and extending the waiting period to three days. It was the most aggressive action on gun control taken in the state in decades and the first time Mr. Scott, who had an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association, had broken so significantly from the group.

Florida legislators passed the bill, SB 7026, earlier this week, three weeks after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida. Scott had expressed hesitancy over whether he would sign the bill. He initially opposed the measure that would allow staff members with training to carry guns, breaking with President Donald Trump’s position.

SB 7026 contains a number of gun-related reforms, including a three-day wait period on gun sales, raising the age requirement for all firearms sales to 21, some regulation of bump stocks, and allocating $69 million to the state’s Department of Education for mental health programs.

Along with these measures, the bill would allow county sheriff’s offices to establish the Coach Aaron Feis Guardian Program, an initiative that would arm select school staff members. The program’s language specifically excludes most teachers, except in the case of Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps educators and teachers in the military or law enforcement.  

Flanked by family members of the Parkland shooting victims during the signing ceremony Friday, Scott affirmed that the “historic legislation” would help insure that “every student in Florida has the right to learn in a safe environment.”

But he again expressed some reservations about arming school staff.

The Florida Education Association, the state’s teachers union, had urged Scott to strike down the bill’s provision that would establish the Feis Guardian program arming school staff, which was named after an assistant football coach at Stoneman Douglas who was killed while shielding students from the shooter.

“The provision that would arm school employees will do more harm than good,” the union’s president wrote in a letter to Scott. “Our teachers and other school employees are ready to fiercely defend our students, but none of them should ever have to choose between shepherding students to safety or confronting an armed assailant where they are sure to draw fire toward the very students they are trying to protect.”

The National Rifle Association advocated against the bill and filed a lawsuit countering SB 7026 on the grounds that it was unconstitutional based on the 2^nd Amendment’s “right to bear arms” as well as the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection.”   

This is one small step but a step nonetheless.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Conservative energy mogul and billionaire “dark money” contributor Charles Koch yesterday complained about the unfair influence of corporations and the “privileged few” in political decisions.

“Our lawmakers must act on behalf of all Americans — not just the privileged few,” Koch wrote in a startling statement in The Washington Post.

“When large companies can pressure politicians to force everyday Americans to fork over unearned millions we should all question the fairness of the system,” Koch concludes. 

He also wrote: “Our entire economy is rife with cronyism.” 

Talk about chutzpah!

Koch, along with his brother, David, and Koch Industries have contributed millions of dollars to political campaigns and issue battles to get their hard-line libertarian, corporate-friendly laws passed. 

The Koch brothers, worth an estimated $100 billion together, have become the gorillas of dark money contributions distorting American democracy since the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which opened the door to unlimited campaign contributions from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals to outside groups. 

The Koch brothers spent tens of millions of dollars to get the tax law passed and continue to build support for it. The changes are expected to save the brothers and their company more than $1 billion a year in taxes. Charles Koch, his wife and Koch Industries gave Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his political action committee $500,000 in campaign contributions just days after the House passed its version of the tax bill. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) slammed Koch’s donation to Ryan for getting a “massive tax cut at working families’ expense.”  

Koch has no shame whatsoever!

Below is the entire op-ed.

Tony

============================

The Washington Post

Corporate leaders must reject Trump’s tariffs

By Charles Koch 

March 7

Charles Koch is chairman of the board and chief executive of Koch Industries.

By many measures, America’s economy is strong. Unemployment is down, the stock market is up and consumer confidence is rising. Although far too many barriers still keep a large portion of our population from fully participating in these benefits, we are making real progress.

Several recent policies have contributed to this improvement. They include federal tax reform (which is far from perfect, but is a step in the right direction), the administration’s regulatory reforms and many improvements by state governments. To ensure that this prosperity is shared by everyone, even more policy improvements are necessary.

Widespread and lasting progress requires the free exchange of ideas, goods and services. It is no coincidence that our quality of life has improved over the years as the average U.S. tariff on imported goods has fallen — from nearly 20 percent in 1932 to less than 4 percent in 2016.

A society that embraces free and open exchange not only provides the greatest abundance, it enables the growth of knowledge and life-enhancing innovations that uplift everyone. Just as the United States benefits from the ideas and skills that opportunity-seeking immigrants bring with them, free trade has been essential to our society’s prosperity and to people improving their lives.

The same has been true throughout history. Countries with the freest trade have tended to not only be the wealthiest but also the most tolerant. Conversely, the restriction of trade — whether through tariffs, quotas or other means — has hurt the economy and pitted people against each other. Tariffs increase prices, limit choices, reduce competition and inhibit innovation. Equally troubling, research shows that they fail to increase the number of jobs overall. Consider the devastation of cities such as Detroit, where trade barriers to aid the auto industry did nothing to halt its decline.

The administration’s recent decision to impose major steel and aluminum tariffs — on top of higher tariffs on washing machines and solar panels — will have the same harmful effect. Without a doubt, those who can least afford it will be harmed the most. Having just helped consumers keep more of their money by passing tax reform, it makes little sense to take it away via higher costs.

One might assume that, as the head of Koch Industries — a large company involved in many industries, including steel — I would applaud such import tariffs because they would be to our immediate and financial benefit. But corporate leaders must reject this type of short-term thinking, and we have. If we are to have a system in which businesses can succeed long term, policies must benefit everyone, not just the few.

Unfortunately, tariffs are not the only problem. Our entire economy is rife with cronyism, resulting in regulations and subsidies that are destroying competition, opportunity and innovation. Koch Industries benefits from many of these, as do many established companies, but we consistently work to eliminate them. We only support policies that are based on equality under the law and that help people improve their lives. This is why we successfully lobbied to end direct ethanol subsidies, despite being one of the largest ethanol producers in the United States. It is why we fought against the inclusion of a border adjustment tax in the tax-reform package, even though it would have greatly increased our profits by increasing costs to consumers.

History is filled with examples of administrations that have implemented trade restrictions with devastating results. At the dawn of the Great Depression, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Actraised U.S. tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods, which accelerated our decline instead of correcting it. More recently, President George W. Bush’s 30 percent steel tariffled to increased consumer costs and higher unemployment. And President Barack Obama’s 2009 decision to raise tariffs on Chinese tires ultimately burdened consumers with $1.1 billion in higher prices. The cost per job saved was nearly $1 million , not considering all the lost jobs that went unmeasured.

Tariffs will not add thousands of American jobs. Instead, the research shows that, while they preserve some jobs that would otherwise disappear, they reduce many other higher productivity jobs. The net effect will be not more jobs, but lower overall productivity. They also reduce choice, competition, innovation and opportunity. Predictably, after the announcement of the tariff on washing-machine imports, South Korean manufacturer LG Electronics told retailers that it would increase its prices. Tariffs will only perpetuate the rigged system that threatens the very core of our society. When large companies can pressure politicians to force everyday Americans to fork over unearned millions, we should all question the fairness of the system.

Given all of this, it is easy to see why a recent Gallup survey found that nearly two out of three Americans don’t trust our institutions. It’s hard to blame them. To include millions more of our people in true economic progress, our lawmakers must act on behalf of all Americans — not just the privileged few. If they do, I am confident we can regain our citizens’ trust and ensure that America’s best days are yet to come.

Dear Commons Community,

We were clobbered by another Nor’Easter yesterday especially in New Jersey and Westchester County.  Where I am we had about twelve inches of snow although there were drifts as high as two feet.  Luckily, there was not as much wind as there was with last week’s storm but there are trees down and people without electricity.  One report had more than 400,000 customers without power in the New York City Metropolitan Area.  There already were tens of thousands of people without electricity since last week when the first storm hit. 

Tough weather!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fei-Fei Li, professor of computer science at Stanford University and chief scientist for A.I. Research at Google Cloud, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times making the case for developing human-centered artificial intelligence applications. Entitled How to Make A.I. Human Friendly, she identifies three goals that can help guide the development of intelligent machines.  Here is an excerpt.

“A.I. has gone from an academic niche to the leading differentiator in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, health care, transportation and retail.  I worry, however, that enthusiasm for A.I. is preventing us from reckoning with its looming effects on society. Despite its name, there is nothing “artificial” about this technology — it is made by humans, intended to behave like humans and affects humans. So if we want it to play a positive role in tomorrow’s world, it must be guided by human concerns.  I call this approach “human-centered A.I.” It consists of three goals that can help responsibly guide the development of intelligent machines.

First, A.I. needs to reflect more of the depth that characterizes our own intelligence. Consider the richness of human visual perception….

… the second goal of human-centered A.I.[is]enhancing us, not replacing us….

… the third goal of human-centered A.I. [is] ensuring that the development of this technology is guided, at each step, by concern for its effect on humans.”

Dr. Li makes a valid argument for A.I. and its development and it would be fine if everybody in the world would support her recommendations.  However, as Joseph Auon, the president of Northeastern University and author of Robot Proof, Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, observes (see page 46)

“If technology can replace human beings on the job, it will. Preventing business owners from adopting a labor-saving technology would require modifying the basic incentives built into the market economy.”

His point is that some of us can take a humanistic approach as Dr.Li suggests, but it is impossible to monitor and control what will go on in international free-market enterprise systems.  

Below is Dr. Li’s full op-ed.

Tony

====================

New York Times

How to Make A.I. Human-Friendly

Fei-Fei Li

 March 7, 2018

For a field that was not well known outside of academia a decade ago, artificial intelligence has grown dizzyingly fast. Tech companies from Silicon Valley to Beijing are betting everything on it, venture capitalists are pouring billions into research and development, and start-ups are being created on what seems like a daily basis. If our era is the next Industrial Revolution, as many claim, A.I. is surely one of its driving forces.

It is an especially exciting time for a researcher like me. When I was a graduate student in computer science in the early 2000s, computers were barely able to detect sharp edges in photographs, let alone recognize something as loosely defined as a human face. But thanks to the growth of big data, advances in algorithms like neural networks and an abundance of powerful computer hardware, something momentous has occurred: A.I. has gone from an academic niche to the leading differentiator in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, health care, transportation and retail.

I worry, however, that enthusiasm for A.I. is preventing us from reckoning with its looming effects on society. Despite its name, there is nothing “artificial” about this technology — it is made by humans, intended to behave like humans and affects humans. So if we want it to play a positive role in tomorrow’s world, it must be guided by human concerns.

I call this approach “human-centered A.I.” It consists of three goals that can help responsibly guide the development of intelligent machines.

First, A.I. needs to reflect more of the depth that characterizes our own intelligence. Consider the richness of human visual perception. It’s complex and deeply contextual, and naturally balances our awareness of the obvious with a sensitivity to nuance. By comparison, machine perception remains strikingly narrow.

Sometimes this difference is trivial. For instance, in my lab, an image-captioning algorithm once fairly summarized a photo as “a man riding a horse” but failed to note the fact that both were bronze sculptures. Other times, the difference is more profound, as when the same algorithm described an image of zebras grazing on a savanna beneath a rainbow. While the summary was technically correct, it was entirely devoid of aesthetic awareness, failing to detect any of the vibrancy or depth a human would naturally appreciate.

That may seem like a subjective or inconsequential critique, but it points to a major aspect of human perception beyond the grasp of our algorithms. How can we expect machines to anticipate our needs — much less contribute to our well-being — without insight into these “fuzzier” dimensions of our experience?

Making A.I. more sensitive to the full scope of human thought is no simple task. The solutions are likely to require insights derived from fields beyond computer science, which means programmers will have to learn to  

Such collaboration would represent a return to the roots of our field, not a departure from it. Younger A.I. enthusiasts may be surprised to learn that the principles of today’s deep-learning algorithms stretch back more than 60 years to the neuroscientific researchers David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who discovered how the hierarchy of neurons in a cat’s visual cortex responds to stimuli.

Likewise, ImageNet, a data set of millions of training photographs that helped to advance computer vision, is based on a project called WordNet, created in 1995 by the cognitive scientist and linguist George Miller. WordNet was intended to organize the semantic concepts of English.

Reconnecting A.I. with fields like cognitive science, psychology and even sociology will give us a far richer foundation on which to base the development of machine intelligence. And we can expect the resulting technology to collaborate and communicate more naturally, which will help us approach the second goal of human-centered A.I.: enhancing us, not replacing us.

Imagine the role that A.I. might play during surgery. The goal need not be to automate the process entirely. Instead, a combination of smart software and specialized hardware could help surgeons focus on their strengths — traits like dexterity and adaptability — while keeping tabs on more mundane tasks and protecting against human error, fatigue and distraction.

Or consider senior care. Robots may never be the ideal custodians of the elderly, but intelligent sensors are already showing promise in helping human caretakers focus more on their relationships with those they provide care for by automatically monitoring drug dosages and going through safety checklists.

These are examples of a trend toward automating those elements of jobs that are repetitive, error-prone and even dangerous. What’s left are the creative, intellectual and emotional roles for which humans are still best suited.

No amount of ingenuity, however, will fully eliminate the threat of job displacement. Addressing this concern is the third goal of human-centered A.I.: ensuring that the development of this technology is guided, at each step, by concern for its effect on humans.

Today’s anxieties over labor are just the start. Additional pitfalls include bias against underrepresented communities in machine learning, the tension between A.I.’s appetite for data and the privacy rights of individuals and the geopolitical implications of a global intelligence race.

Adequately facing these challenges will require commitments from many of our largest institutions. Universities are uniquely positioned to foster connections between computer science and traditionally unrelated departments like the social sciences and even humanities, through interdisciplinary projects, courses and seminars. Governments can make a greater effort to encourage computer science education, especially among young girls, racial minorities and other groups whose perspectives have been underrepresented in A.I. And corporations should combine their aggressive investment in intelligent algorithms with ethical A.I. policies that temper ambition with responsibility.

No technology is more reflective of its creators than A.I. It has been said that there are no “machine” values at all, in fact; machine values are human values. A human-centered approach to A.I. means these machines don’t have to be our competitors, but partners in securing our well-being. However autonomous our technology becomes, its impact on the world — for better or worse — will always be our responsibility.

Dear Commons Community,

The statewide teachers’ strike that shuttered West Virginia schools for almost two weeks appeared all but over yeterday when Gov. James C. Justice signed a bill to give teachers and other state employees a 5 percent pay raise.   A crowd of teachers wearing the red T-shirts that have come to symbolize their strike cheered as Mr. Justice, a Republican, signed the pay raise bill in a theater on the Capitol grounds. The bill had been passed unanimously earlier in the day by both houses of the Republican-controlled Legislature.  As reported by the New York Times:

“We’re going to school tomorrow,” said Heather Acord, an elementary schoolteacher from Wayne County, with relief obvious on her face. “We got everything we asked for.”

Unlike a previous proposed raise that was backed by Mr. Justice and the State House of Representatives, the deal reached on Tuesday had the support of Mitch Carmichael, the president of the more conservative State Senate…

…The strike ground the state’s public schools to a halt for nine days, a remarkable show of defiance by the teachers in a state where the power of organized labor, once led by strong mining unions, has greatly diminished. Along the way, the teachers disregarded union leaders’ advice to return to work when the governor first promised them the raise last week, deciding in meetings at malls and union halls and in Facebook groups that they would stay out until their raise was enacted in law.

“Maybe our voices are being heard, finally,” said Danielle Harris, a third-grade teacher from Fayette County, whose eyes filled with tears after Mr. Justice announced the deal on Tuesday. “These strikes aren’t for nothing.”

Congratulations to these teachers, other state workers and their unions.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Gary D. Cohn, President Trump’s top economic adviser, said yesterday that he would resign, becoming the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the Trump administration.  As reported by the New York Times:

“White House officials insisted that there was no single factor behind the departure of Mr. Cohn, who heads the National Economic Council. But his decision to leave came as he seemed poised to lose an internal struggle over Mr. Trump’s plan to impose large tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Mr. Cohn had warned last week that he might resign if Mr. Trump followed through with the tariffs, which Mr. Cohn had lobbied against internally.

“Gary has been my chief economic adviser and did a superb job in driving our agenda, helping to deliver historic tax cuts and reforms and unleashing the American economy once again,” Mr. Trump said in a statement to The New York Times. “He is a rare talent, and I thank him for his dedicated service to the American people.”

Mr. Cohn is expected to leave in the coming weeks. He will join a string of recent departures by senior White House officials, including Mr. Trump’s communications director and a powerful staff secretary.

Yet the departure of Mr. Cohn, a free-trade-oriented Democrat who fended off a number of nationalist-minded policies during his year in the Trump administration, could have a ripple effect on the president’s economic decisions and on the financial industry.

It leaves Mr. Trump surrounded primarily by advisers with strong protectionist views who advocate the types of aggressive trade measures, like tariffs, that Mr. Trump campaigned on but that Mr. Cohn fought inside the White House. Mr. Cohn was viewed by Republican lawmakers as the steady hand who could prevent Mr. Trump from engaging in activities that could trigger a trade war.

In a statement, Mr. Cohn said he had been pleased to work on “pro-growth economic policies to benefit the American people, in particular the passage of historic tax reform.” White House officials said that Mr. Cohn was leaving on cordial terms with the president and that they planned to discuss policy even after his departure.

Mr. Cohn’s departure comes as the White House has been buffeted by turnover, uncertainty and internal divisions and as the president lashes out at the special counsel investigation that seems to be bearing down on his team.”

This is serious development as the Times article alludes.  Cohn was a Democrat with a good deal of respect from Republicans.  His departure surely will move Trump’s economic policies more to protectionism.  There has also been speculation that Cohn might return to work in the Trump administration at a later date in some other capacity.

Tony