scholarly journals AI Bugs and Failures: How and Why to Render AI-Algorithms More Human?

2021 ◽  
pp. 161-179
Author(s):  
Alkim Almila Akdag Salah

AI systems such as self-driving cars, or autonomous lethal weapons are expected to work in a framework called ‘explainable AI’, under meaningful human control, in a fail-proof way. In this chapter, the author discusses case studies where the opposite framework will prove more beneficial: i.e. in certain contexts, such as cultural and artistic production or social robotics, AI systems might be considered humanlike if they deliberately take on human traits: to bluff, to joke, to hesitate, to be whimsical, unreliable, unpredictable, and above all to be creative. In order to uncover why we need ‘humanlike’ traits -especially bugs & failures, the chapter considers representations of intelligent machines in the imagination of popular culture, and the deeply ingrained fear of the machine as the ‘other’.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tetsuya Tanioka ◽  
Feni Betriana ◽  
Tomoya Yokotani ◽  
Kyoko Osaka ◽  
Rozzano C. Locsin ◽  
...  

Background: Caring expressions between humans and nonhuman intelligent machines are futuristic prototypes with healthcare robots as major advocates. Objective: To examine the experience of older persons with mental health conditions, particularly patients with schizophrenia and with dementia in the interaction with healthcare robots and intermediaries in a transactive relational engagement.Methods: Two qualitative case studies were conducted using sophisticated audio-video technologies to record the conversation and activities that were carefully documented. Following the procedure for qualitative descriptive analysis, a framework based on the Transactive Relationship Theory of Nursing was employed to analyze and interpret the data. Results: Three themes were revealed, including feelings for the other, inspiring meaningful responses, and demonstrating expressions of joy. The description of the experience of older persons involved in the conversation with humanoid robots was feeling for the other while inspiring meaningful responses in demonstrating expressions of joy. Conclusion: This study provided initial evidence that the transactive engagements of robots with older persons with schizophrenia and dementia and nurse intermediaries in psychiatric and mental health settings can result in occasions of ‘joy’ for the patients. These findings suggest that transactive engagements with robots facilitate expressions of joy among older persons with schizophrenia and dementia. However, these findings are not intended to prescribe nursing care actions but to describe the experience of older persons who are in transactive engagements with intelligent machines, indicating the importance and value of healthcare robots in nursing older persons with schizophrenia and with dementia. Funding:  This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP17H01609.



Author(s):  
Evan Renfro ◽  
Jayme Neiman Renfro

Since before the founding of the United States through slavery, the extermination of the native populace, war after war, regime overthrow, and more wars, popular media have been used to stir resentments and produce violent fantasies in the general citizenry that often allow for policies of actual violence to be applied against “the other.” This chapter will analyze the affective coordinates of this system in the post-9/11 context, focusing especially on how nationalist-jingoism has now triumphed in the age of the Trump Administration. Crucial interrogations addressed in this chapter include: Why are white southern/rural males particularly susceptible to popular culture induced affective violence? What are the mechanics of profit and neoliberal imperatives of this structure? What is new about the linkage of these phenomena with the first Twitter-President? In pursuing these questions, the authors will use case studies involving the popular media vectors of television, film, and music.



Author(s):  
Jane Caputi

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (a.k.a. Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene is the responsibility of Man, the Western- and masculine-identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slave masters to name their mothers’ rapist/owners. Man’s strategic motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man’s goal to become the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker has a flip side, further revealing the Anthropocene as it signifies an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that “Mutha’ ”—one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man, and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship; ecofeminism; ecowomanism; green activism; femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies; literature and arts; Afrofuturism; and popular culture, Call Your “Mutha’ ” contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man’s supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the “Mutha’ ” by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns, and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth.



Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Faris ◽  
Hal Roberts

This chapter presents a model of the interaction of media outlets, politicians, and the public with an emphasis on the tension between truth-seeking and narratives that confirm partisan identities. This model is used to describe the emergence and mechanics of an insular media ecosystem and how two fundamentally different media ecosystems can coexist. In one, false narratives that reinforce partisan identity not only flourish, but crowd-out true narratives even when these are presented by leading insiders. In the other, false narratives are tested, confronted, and contained by diverse outlets and actors operating in a truth-oriented norms dynamic. Two case studies are analyzed: the first focuses on false reporting on a selection of television networks; the second looks at parallel but politically divergent false rumors—an allegation that Donald Trump raped a 13-yearold and allegations tying Hillary Clinton to pedophilia—and tracks the amplification and resistance these stories faced.



Author(s):  
Christopher M. Driscoll

This chapter explores the relationship between humanism and music, giving attention to important theoretical and historical developments, before focusing on four brief case studies rooted in popular culture. The first turns to rock band Modest Mouse as an example of music as a space of humanist expression. Next, the chapter explores Austin-based Rock band Quiet Company and Westcoast rapper Ras Kass and their use of music to critique religion. Last, the chapter discusses contemporary popular music created by artificial intelligence and considers what non-human production of music suggests about the category of the human and, resultantly, humanism. These case studies give attention to the historical and theoretical relationship between humanism and music, and they offer examples of that relationship as it plays out in contemporary music.



2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-338
Author(s):  
Victor Lieberman

AbstractInsisting on a radical divide between post-1750 ideologies in Europe and earlier political thought in both Europe and Asia, modernist scholars of nationalism have called attention, quite justifiably, to European nationalisms’ unique focus on popular sovereignty, legal equality, territorial fixity, and the primacy of secular over universal religious loyalties. Yet this essay argues that nationalism also shared basic developmental and expressive features with political thought in pre-1750 Europe as well as in rimland—that is to say outlying—sectors of Asia. Polities in Western Europe and rimland Asia were all protected against Inner Asian occupation, all enjoyed relatively cohesive local geographies, and all experienced economic and social pressures to integration that were not only sustained but surprisingly synchronized throughout the second millennium. In Western Europe and rimland Asia each major state came to identify with a named ethnicity, specific artifacts became badges of inclusion, and central ethnicity expanded and grew more standardized. Using Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain as case studies, this essay reconstructs these centuries-long similarities in process and form between “political ethnicity,” on the one hand, and modern nationalism, on the other. Finally, however, this essay explores cultural and material answers to the obvious question: if political ethnicities in Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain were indeed comparable, why did the latter realm alone generate recognizable expressions of nationalism? As such, this essay both strengthens and weakens claims for European exceptionalism.



Author(s):  
Martin Lundsteen ◽  
Miquel Fernández González

AbstractRecent studies have argued for more nuanced understandings of zero tolerance (ZT) policing, rendering it essential to analyze the significance and actual workings of the policies in practice, including the context in which they are introduced. This article aims to accomplish this through a comparison of two case studies in Catalonia: one in the neighborhood of Raval in Barcelona and one in Salt—a municipality in the comarca (or county) of Girona. We identify a transformation in the use of ZT policies in Catalonia and a contradiction between their social effects and proclaimed objectives. This article attempts to address how specific sociocultural groups gain power and privilege from these policies. The main argument is that a set of commonsensical ideas have become hegemonic, which allows and naturalizes certain sociocultural practices in urban space, while persecuting others, fundamentally pitting two categories against each other: the desired civil citizen and the undesirable and uncivil stranger.



Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1021-1038 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrika Dahl

This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.



2010 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui-Min Chung ◽  
Kristina Jackson Behan

Authentic assessment exercises are similar to real-world tasks that would be expected by a professional. An authentic assessment in combination with an inquiry-based learning activity enhances students' learning and rehearses them for their future roles, whether as scientists or as informed citizens. Over a period of 2 years, we experimented with two inquiry-based projects; one had traditional scientific inquiry characteristics, and the other used popular culture as the medium of inquiry. We found that activities that incorporated group learning motivated students and sharpened their abilities to apply and communicate their knowledge of science. We also discovered that incorporating popular culture provided ““Millennial”” students with a refreshing view of science learning and increased their appetites to explore and elaborate on science.



2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-195
Author(s):  
Julia Rubanovich

Abstract The Tale of Yusof and Zoleykhā appears as part of a religious epic poem, the Bereshit-nāma (Book of Genesis), by the fourteenth-century Judæo-Persian poet Shāhin. Composed in 1358–59, in classical Persian with an admixture of Hebraisms and written in Hebrew characters, this tale was enormously popular within Persian-speaking Jewish communities and was frequently copied on its own. The paper focuses on two episodes from this story: Yusof’s marriages to Zoleykhā and to Osnat (Asenath). Shāhin was active in the late Il-khanid and early post-Mongol periods, when new forms of patronage of literary and artistic production emerged seeking to blend different cultural worlds. The poet indeed fashioned unique amalgams of Jewish and Perso-Islamic traditions, both in form and content. The two episodes constitute small case studies for exploring Shāhin’s diverse array of sources and for determining the thematic and structural ramifications of this fusion. The paper pinpoints how Shāhin accommodated and adapted Jewish and Islamic materials and demonstrates that, though Jewish, the poet firmly ensconces himself in a Persianate cultural sphere.



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