The Intersubjective Mind - Embracing the Unknown

We live in a world that overwhelms. We struggle with balance, to find a purpose, to feel understood and valued. How do we focus our thoughts and by extension our interactions with other people in a forward direction? The discipline of Information Architecture strives at its core to derive understanding. As the world inverses the acronym of IA towards the machine, how do we ensure that we always work first and foremost from the desire to understand one another?

Drawing inspiration from over 15 years in the discipline of Information Architecture as well as thought leaders outside the discipline including: Mustafa Suleyman, Alan Watts, Martin Ruef, David Hume, Oliver Sacks, Shunryu Suzuki, and Jon Ronsom, Kina’ole’s Jeff Parks, one of the founders of World IA Day, will tie together the past with the present to suggest a way to balance the objective reasoning of the machine age with the subjective drives of the individual.

Transcript

1. The Intersubjective Mind Towards An Understanding for Good By Jeff Parks World IA Day Ottawa 2018
2. #IA for Good “If what I say now seems to you very reasonable, then I’ll have failed completely.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke, speaking in the year 1964, attempting to explain what the world might like in the year 2000
3. Intersubjective Entities “Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of other human beings.” - Yuval Noah Harari
4. # The Current Intersubjective Impacting Humanity
5. Knowing Is Not Understanding Understanding is ‘swimming the English Channel’ of intellectualism. Knowing is splashing around noisily in the shallow end. #Metaphor
6. Objective Knowing Knowing = Empirical Data x Mathematics
7. Subjective Knowing Knowing = Experiences x Sensitivity
8. The Technologist’s Dilemma Mustafa Suleyman @DeepMindAI
9. Solving the Technologist’s Dilemma Jeff Parks @jeffparks
10. Klosterman’s Razor Representation Asymmetry between people who develop technologies and the communities who use their products (gender, race, class)
11. But What if We’re Wrong? “My goal is not to contradict conventional answer ‘X’ by replacing it with unconventional answer ‘Y’. My goal is to think about the present in the same way we think about the past wholly aware that such mass consideration can’t happen until we reach a future that no longer includes us… Because this is - or should be - why we invest time into thinking about anything that isn’t essential or practical or imperative.” ~ Chuck Klosterman
12. Reductio Ad Absurdum Motivation Asymmetry of information about how technology works and how it impacts society.
13. #AI and Society “If the business model of a company is not benevolent, then AI has the potential to make that company truly dangerous. Likewise, if an organization aims at improving the human condition, then AI might make that organization more efficient in realizing its benevolent potential. The motivation of our AI’s will stem from the existing building blocks of our society; every society will get the AI it deserves.” ~ Joscha Bach (Cognitive Scientist, MIT Media Lab, Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics)
14. Understand What To Ignore Power Asymmetry of market-based incentives and the societal goals we aspire to.
15. The Organized Mind “In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message [received] is competing for resources in your brain…” ~ Daniel J. Levitin
16. Towards Understanding Imagining How To Design for Humanity
17. Troubles vs. Issues Gen Xers are Slackers! :(
18. Questions Matter “Don’t ask kids what they want to be when they grow up but what problems do they want to solve. This changes the conversation from who do I want to work for, to what do I need to learn to be able to do that.” ~ Jaime Casap
19. The Chinese Farmer Alan Watts
20. IA for Good or Bad? “The whole process of nature is a process of immense complexity. It is really impossible to tell that what happens in it is good or bad. Because you never know what will be the consequence of a misfortune - or - you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.” ~ Alan Watts
21. Look to Your Grandchildren Where we should be focusing our attention?
22. Thank You! Jeff Parks @jeffparks Kina’ole http://www.kinaole.ca