final- DeapMeaning

Here is a tale told by Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu around the 4th century BC:

As Tzu-Gung was traveling through the region north of the river Han, he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into a well, fetch up a vessel of water in his arms and pour it out into the ditch. While his efforts were tremendous the results appeared to be very meager.

Tzu-Gung said. "There is a way whereby you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with little effort. Would you not like to hear of it?"

Then the gardener stood up, looked at him and said, "And what would that be?"

Tzu-Gung replied, "You take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw- well."

Then anger rose up in the old man's face and he said, "I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things, I am ashamed to use them."

Interestingly, despite of drastic difference among cultural, time and specialty background, this story was cited by Werner Heisenberg, a German theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, when talking about that technical change alters not only habits of life, but patterns of thought and valuation.

The age we are living is overwhelmed by digital technologies. Information is decomposed as combinations of binary electrical impulse, sent in the speed of light regardless of geographical barrier and finally reaches the destination displayed in form of red, green and blue pixels. What did these technologies do to us? What impact they have on us independent of the content that being transferred? Can we keep aware of the difference when perceiving a blooming flower in nature and the replication generated by 0s and 1s?

Now we already obtained the ability to remodel how our neural system functions with computer algorithms. Concern regarding whether we are going to be over powered by machines was reignited when Google released the artificial intelligence that beat the best human mind in a board game. However, just as we are busy training computers to “think” like us, we are also modifying ourselves with their “thinking processes” simultaneously in order to use them. Compared with the robots massacre in scientific fictions, isn’t it more terrifying that our “machine hearts” take over and transform us into one?

Refusal and avoidance may not be the best solution to the indulgence of technologies. The ability of stepping aside and contemplating the effects is in need.

Back in the times when typography was just brought into manufacture, content had to be scrutinised in order to be printed out. Now for the prevalence of social media everyone has access to put words into public. Together with the on-going accelerating speed of transmission, a tremendous amount of information flood into our cognitive system to keep us “busy” every single moments. An opinion must be generated before one could even take the happening into account thoroughly under somewhat pressure. It is interesting to see that under this almost unavoidable information bombardment more and more people start to pay attention to certain eastern practices, like yoga and meditation, which are originated in a relatively less “mechanicalized” cultural context that emphasizes more on self-awareness and power of nature.

In this project, I was experimenting with a text-generating artificial neural network with a nostalgia for writing, a rather primitive technology for information to be transferred more effectively. This recurrent neural network can “write” in a style that is consistent with the training material. I fed the neural network over 250 lecture scripts that “cover the wide spectrum of our human journey, from our struggles with self-doubt, self-hatred and fear of inadequacy to the barriers we put up to relating with others”, which are already quite incomprehensible, in order to train it talk like a life-guidance. Then a latest tweet with keyword “future” is extracted as an inspiration for the neural network to carry on. Here is an example of the output:

So still the same old question: if a computer has the ability to recognise, process and respond in the same language we are using, does this mean that it actually understands what it is talking about? Or a rather urgent one: with the development in the realm of artificial intelligence, can we still keep conscious of what machines are doing to us?