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Justice and critical thinking

As a student you are encouraged to critically engage with your sources, never taking anything at face value. It is one of the benefits of a university education, especially humanities courses where you are exposed to a wide degree of sources. In an age where we are bombarded with sources every minute of every day, mentally we short cut this process and have to make spot decisions as to the veracity of a source, often taking friends/peers/colleagues opinions as ballast in helping decide. Given the churn of information this is understandable, but at the same time leaves us all vulnarable to mis-information and mis-direction.

Much has been written already about the impact of social media and ready access to this churn of information on our lives. One of the less covered areas is this idea of critical engagement, for while being caught up in our own bubbles is very much under the microscope, the art of engagement is cautiously left to the side. This matters because each of us is considered responsible for our own worldviews, the perspectives we accept, and the outflow of ideas we produce. However, no-one is an island of ideas, we are all the sums of our influences, some more subtle than others. It is easy to pin-point where we got some ideas from, yet often the most profound influences on our lives come from subtle, discrete sources that seep into our ways of thinking. The constant stream disengages and discourages us from analysing our own modes of thinking, actively scurrying us from one post to the next, laying out a worldview that is easy for us to consume.

So where does justice sit in this? Justice is ephemeral, for it is both the obvious legal justice meted out by courts and the police, and the hidden sort that society weilds to keep dissenters inline. Social media is very good for whipping up social justice, manufacturing outrage and demanding action. Often this is the zeitgeist for all of society, May/June 2020 being a case in point, but under all of that is a complex web of ideas and philosophies, agendas and ground axes. No source is unbiased, no agenda truly neutral. I firmly believe that there are hills to take stands on, ideals to plant your flag in, yet it is very easy for those hills to crumble and turn in to prisons of the mind unless we actively engage in why we take those stands. By enaging our critical thinking faculties we are able to better appreciate and enact justice, to see that justice is not just about the end result, but about the collective effect just actions have across all of society.

So why should you care? Why should you take the time to analyse the sources you come across? Becuase it is not just about the other person, not just about any collective ideas. While it is simple to say that morality is fixed and we as a society have a cogent idea of rights and liberties, those same morals, rights, and liberties shift and morph as society’s mood shifts and wefts into a new form. By simply accepting an idea you are drawn along with this shifting and metamorphing of society, a raft on the river without a paddle to help steer you in the direction you may want to go in. This is not to say that you should spend all your energy fighting against the flow; rather have a conscious understanding of why you believe in an idea, and most importantly what ideas you personally would stand on that hill and die on. Justice, both legal and social, depends on us all having an awareness and critiquing of what morals, laws, and ideas are being expounded. Without critique abuse, injustice, and inequality sit comfortably. With critique a light is cast on iniquity, and justice can be served.

I appreciate that this short hand for a far more complex set of moral and ethical questions, especially the very notion of moral relativism and what justice actually is. However, all I ask is that you critically enage with sources, question what agendas they are trying to promote, and look for ways to build your own map of the world that promotes a more just and equitable world.

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AI and structural inequality

There is a moment in time between the creation of a technology, its adoption, and the point where it becomes so ubiquitous as to fade into the background. Printed books revolutionised 16th Century Europe to the point that wildfire ideas accelerated human development, upset the traditional order, and the aftershocks took three centuries to shake out. AI scholorship emerged, arguably, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in that she critques the idea of man creating a being in his own image. Playing god with electricty. The artificial man turned on by the real monster its creator, and the mob rising up to attack something which outwardly appeared hideous, but inwardly was confused and misunderstood.

Around the same time as Shelley wrote her polemic, the Luddite movement in Britain was fighting a loosing battle against the rise of mechanisation and the loss of jobs flowing from cottage weavers into the growing towns and cities. Their anxiety, pain, and empoverishment were brought about by the progress of efficiency and economic concentration, their lives changed by forces far beyond their control. It took two world wars and the disestablishment of the British Emprire to bring about anywhere near the rise in living standards that brought those city dwellers into ease and comfort. And still their lives were wrapped up in the industrial grind even with a realitve social security blanket of the NHS, pensions, and the welfare state. Those gains were hardfought, battle won, and relied on a society that both had work for the workers, and taxes that flowed into government coffers. In turn the State were from a punitive legal code at the start of the industrial era to one where access to justice and education were accessible to most people. The caviat being that systemic biases and inbuild prejudice carried through and was never tackled at the highest levels.

Fast-forward through Thatcher’s root and branch hacking down of industry, New Labour’s rising of living standards but failure to address structural inequalities, and then post-2010 a systemic failure by the UK government to address those structural failures with austerity, Brexit, and the embedding of the private sector within the British state. Why does this matter to AI and legal ethics? Because structural inequality gets inbuild into the systems governments and private companies develop and promote to the general public. Conscious and unconscious biases are hard coded, from the obvious ones of facial regonition systems more likely to plack people of colour as criminals, to the more subtle AI coding on Youtube that targets content to users. Every programmer and producer has bias, and that flows through through all the code they produce.

In addtition to the code, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and the plethora of other social networks offer their services for free, or at a low cost, because data is their currency. Ease of access for the price of personal data is the accepted price most people pay for use of these systems, with all the inherent biases and marketing that comes with it. If these services charged for their platfoms how many would use them? In the early days of the internet many models were tried to monertise, and the current one drive by data and advertising proved to be the most successful because most people do not consider the cost of access too high. Much like McDonalds and Coca-Cola market their products as easy and accessible, Facebook and Youtube do the same. Ease of access for both users and marketers means that fast content is churned through at the flick of a thumb, easily digested, easily related to, and ever so bite sized. All served up through AI controlled systems that no lay person will ever see, and few non-technical citizens will understand the base code.

Social platforms in al their shapes and sizes embed structural inequality through ring fencing people into their own walled gardens, the consumer only ever seeing content pleasing to the eyes and ears. There is little critique, users can block and ignore content that projects them out of their comfort zone, and the AI spoon feeds and amplifies the bubble that each person creates for themselves. When books and pamphlets were first utilised to spread ideas, the biggest hurdle to consumption was illiteracy. This held back the vox populi from engaging in debates, and it was the education of the masses that turned the printed word into a weapon of social change. In the AI era all our senses are engaged, with videos, memes, podcasts, blogs, and other bitesized content flowing through AI driven channels to sate our inner need to belong and participate in the wider conversation. Revolutions have started because one person set themselves on fire in a market in Algeria, with the hot embers of that fire still raging in Lybia and Syria. That video was virally shared around the world in  matter of hours, with commentary and opinion flying from all corners of the political spectrum. In the 10 years since those algorithms have evolved and developed to the point that the death of an innocent person of colour in Minniapolis ignites protests and condemnation the world over, yet at the same time AIs deliver protest related content from across the poltical spectrum to respective audiences, further driving apart communities and citizens.

AIs, for all their vaunted machine learning, are still tools of their respective masters. At present there is no sapient, let alone sentient, AI, and as such the content we are served serves those who sit behind the tools. The messages we receive, the perspectives we are shown, are all reliant on an AI understanding who we are as people on the freely given data we choose to give. Each data point you provide tells the system your tastes, your fears, your desires, your hopes, your hates. It tunes itself to you, serves you up what you want to see to better sell you products and ideas. To encapsulate you within your bubble to better make you want to stay and scroll. It embeds messages that you may be conscious of, and at the same time serve you up messages that are subtle and reinforce your world view. All the time it embeds within your perspective the structural inequalities of the world around you, without challanging you to gain fresh perspective. And we let it because it suits us to use these platforms for free.

So what is the flipside of this? What if there was a platform that charged you and stripped out the marketing? Who would engage? There are plenty of media outlets that serve content for a price, from Netflix to the Wall Street Journal, each with their own AIs and their own biases. The paywall itself is a closed gardner only for the few who wish to pay to enter, excluding those who choose not to pay, and more pertinently cannot afford to pay. Poverty of information is just as compelling as food poverty, with ill nurishment of the mind having a socially corrosive effect on people’s lives as nutrition deficient food. This is not an argument of liberal v conservative, popular entertainment v high brow. No, this is a defecit in engagement, a deficit in opportunity. If you are shut out from engagement, from stimulating your imagination and your interlectual curiosity then your ability to challenge ideas and engage with them becomes deminished. Much as a £2.00 burger once in a while is a treat, but everyday could clog your arteries, the same goes for the content that is served to you. A cat meme or Donald Trump tweet in and of itself has no impact, but the context within your life gives it impact. Every time you consume media you add to your persona context, you intepret it and it adds to your tapesty. AIs attune themselves to this, and the more you consume through them the more the serve you up to fit your context.

Poverty comes in many forms, one being the time, or lack of, to engage with ideas and concepts. If you have to work 12 hours a day to make rent and put food on the table you are unlikely to be able to spend hours reading or critically thinking about the world. AI driven content fills that space because it is easy to consume, and no hassle to digest. You get that bite size moment of catharsis, or rage, and you are stimulated. Yet, in the long run it embeds whatever biases the coders and marketers want you to see. Intrinsically, whatever platform you use projects those biases onto you, and if you do not have the time or inclination to critically engage with it then you are unconsciously absorbing those biases. This is where education, reduced work hours/higher salaries, and an ability to critically engage with friends and colleagues can lift people out of this desert of ideas.

Ultimately an AI is only as effective a tool as the person who wields it. We as a society have gotten so used to those platforms that to think of a world without them is almost inconceivable. 30 years the internet commons was between elite universities sharing information, with AIs experiments in a lab. Today we inhabit a hyper connected world that few foresaw, with powerful machines in our pockets that given instant access to all of recorded digitised time. We freely give our data to access this information, allowing AIs to shape our personal narratives, and embedding their biases into our own. Is there a solution? Can we just cut ourselves off and exist without it? Yes, you can, but the price is that loss of access to knowledge, connections, friends, and the wider world. Is education the solution? We teach healthy eating and living, promoting nutritional consumption that cares for our bodies, yet allowing fast food. There is already much out there warning of the pitfalls of social media platforms, of additiction and the negative impacts of our polticial views, yet there is little education on economic underpinnings of this, that without our data currency the internet as we know it would be unsustainable. 

In conclusion, It is a paradox that the very thing that we now depend on for growth and connectivity is destabilising and distorting our world. In the hundred years after moveable type revolutionised Europe wars and political upheaval convulsed the continent, eventually leading many to flee to North America and bring radical ideas with them. AIs have had less than 30 years to impact our lives, and their impact has been far more intense and concentrated. By embedding biases and information poverty they have driven communities even further apart, yet also brought online communities closer together. Like drawn to like through the algorithm. A critical way to fight the ingrained biases is to engage, dabate, discuss, and critique everything you consume, while at the same time understanding that while there is no monatary cost to your participation, the personal cost is one you must account for. Inequality starts in people, and we must address this in ourselves, our own content, and in turn shape the AIs to fight back against whatever biases they have been programmed with. We as a society, as individuals, have the power to reshape them, it is up to us to choose to do so.

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Quantifying experience

I am working on my dissertation, and in particular I am interested in trying to quantify experience within games by bringing together player, developer, and publisher to create a unified approach.

Video game research is a nascent field with 20 to 30 years of academic writing, and as such research into experience is usually quantified in terms of the end user experience of the gamer through psychological and ludological  research. Rarely is experience research carried out by academics with a holistic understanding of developing  games, marketing, and  psychology.  As such, my research is grounded in the desire to progress the understanding of experience from a singular player driven pursuit to one that considers player, developer, and publisher. This will allow for a holistic view of games as more than just a player only experience and treat games in a similar vein as other mass media such as film and literature.  

Roland Barthes posed the question of the death of the author, and  while the concept of the auteur has only vicariously taken root in video games with designers such as Neil Druckmann and  Todd  Howard, the  impact  of developers as a holistic  concept  is  only  measured  in  the  abstract  or the instructive when experience is considered. Indeed, developers utilise user experience  (UX) to make better games along the lines of Levit’s (2004) exhortations to have a sharper eye on business. Due to this, academic  research focuses on the result of the development process, taking Barthes’ message to heart that the only true way to evaluate experience within games is to measure purely what the player plays and to ignore developer  intent. In  hand with this is the idea that marketing/paratexts are divorced or only tangentially related to the overall player experience. Publishers desire to sell and market their product is the  realm of  business research, something best kept outside the realm of academic game UX/experience study. 

I would go a far to say that it is reasonable to say that a game released in 2019 is an experience  based  upon  the  interaction  of player, developer, and publisher.  As  such,  a  player’s holistic experience is dictated by their interaction with not just the game, but also with the development team and the publisher͛s  marketing  team/paratexts created around a game.

With all of this in mind, I am looking to interview developers and publishers, so if you are interested please contacts me at  rachel.saunders2016@my.ntu.ac.uk