Hanna’s Homework

Dear Felienne, “What is your favorite flower?” — You asked me this question at the beginning of our podcast episode on Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s book “Objectivity” (2021)1, and we then discussed science, objectivity, and truth. Your opening question reminded me of something the physicist Richard Feynman said in a BBC interview2. In this interview, Feynman mentions a disagreement he had with an artist friend. The artist believes that Feynman is unable to appreciate the beauty of a flower because science takes it apart, thereby transforming it into something dull. But Feynman disagrees! He points out the “beauty of the smaller dimension, the inner structure” and argues that he can appreciate even more about the flower, such as “the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty”.3 ...

Dear Felienne! I need to start with a confession: I have a secret history of breaking things at work. My destructive streak started early, at primary school, when I destroyed the blackboard just after turning seven. Ok, maybe “destroyed” is a bit of an overstatement, but somehow I thought it would be funny to coat the entire blackboard with a layer of hand soap so the teacher’s chalk would no longer write on it. (I spent the entire weekend cleaning the board with the help of my mother; but yes, the other kids had fun.) Also later, while doing my first internships and when finally working ‘for real’, I quickly became known as the one who causes software to crash, drops her phone repeatedly, and ruins her new laptop on day one. ...

Dear Felienne! I have written, deleted, and rewritten the start of this homework at least twenty times. I am on vacation; part of my brain is switched off, and today I just don’t have it in me to come up with a good, catchy opener that will draw our readers in. So let me just cut right to the chase… Modeling How People Think In our last episode of Computer Science Off Course, we discussed Sherry Turkle’s book “The Second Self”.1 I have now read chapter 7, “The New Philosophers of Artificial Intelligence”, and there is this one section that stuck out to me and got me thinking. This section describes an approach to modeling human thinking, developed by early AI scientists Herbert Simon and Allen Newell. They had this idea that to arrive at a computer model of people’s thinking, one could observe people as they solve a particular problem. For instance, they observed people solving cryptarithmetic puzzles, in which digits are replaced by letters in a math equation. People were asked to talk while they solved such problems, and the researchers recorded what the participants did, what they said, and their eye movements. Subsequently, they analyzed these rich data. From these data, the different procedures and strategies people used to solve the puzzles in question could be distilled and turned into programs that simulate them. Since not all people solve problems in the same way, different programs would be developed for each type of problem. However, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell held the idea that all these different individual programs would still ”have the same general form” (p. 225) and that this general form characterizes ”how people think” (p. 225). ...

HOW DO YOU DO. PLEASE TELL ME YOUR PROBLEM? Thanks for asking! The truth is: It’s not going great. Usually, I would talk to my colleague and friend Felienne. But this time, I believe it is better to share my thoughts with you, ELIZA, the original chatbot. I know you have officially retired, and that your nephews Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini have taken over your duties of chatting with people about their well-being and mental health. But dear ELIZA, I really need your help! ...

Dear Felienne! Oh, the irony! Last week, I complained about researchers using AI to do their work and called them imposters, and this week, I made the mistake of using AI to finish my own homework! After completing my notes, I asked Gemini for feedback, and ultimately ended up using an idea it gave me. I felt weird about it ever since. Both like a hypocrite and, indeed, like an imposter. I have considered re-recording the homework for the podcast and removing the AI’s suggestion from this text, thus pretending it has never happened. But maybe there is some value in publicly admitting this. ...

What a wonderful conversation we had about Hubert Dreyfus’ book “What Computers Still Can’t Do”. I loved every second of it. My highlight was when you wanted to get a tattoo with a John Searle quote about …

Dear Felienne! You won’t believe it. This time, I actually did the homework you assigned instead of going off course. I am a bit scared to comment on this Turing test paper, though! First, because I don’t want to repeat Alan Turing’s mistakes and say all kinds of things without sufficiently engaging with other domains. And second, because I make my points with a story about Alice and Bob having great sex. I am not sure the Computer Science community (who probably only knows Alice and Bob from cryptography lessons where they send each other rather innocent encrypted text messages!) is ready for that. But ok, here we go… ...

Dear Felienne! I had promised you a shorter homework for this week, and I think I did it: it’s a tiny little bit shorter (based on my own estimate). But also, it isn’t really exactly the homework you suggested. I did something else instead. I guess I went off course… but in some way, I hope that’s the point. So what did I do? What the Stair Climber, Slack, Ellipticals, and Emails Have in Common As a first step, I reflected on how I see the computer. In our episode, we discussed that Brenda Laurel sees it as a theatre. I see it more as a gym. That’s because I find working with the computer super exhausting. But there are a few more parallels I want to draw. For instance, think about all these emails that come in and that need to be answered. This is really like the stair climber in the fitness centre, where the stairs just keep coming and coming… an endless flow of stairs, similar to the endless flow of emails. There is no destination we will reach, but they keep us feeling busy and productive. ...

Dear Felienne! It has been some time since we recorded the Peter Naur episode, but I finally did the homework. Or at least, what I remembered about the homework. Well, actually, I changed the homework a little to better fit my life and (lack of programming) skills. In any case, here are my notes. Please take my notes with a grain of salt. As you know, I am not entirely sure who I am — but I am definitely not an experienced programmer, I am also not an educational scientist, and I have not studied computer science even though I ended up in the CS department. And, of course, I have not looked into scientific articles to see how well my thoughts hold up against those of experts. Also, I overdid it a bit. Future homeworks will be shorter, I promise!!! ...