[FRIAM] Personified/anthropomorphized software (was Re: New ways of understanding the world)

[glen ep ropella]

It's not about people's belief they understand the software. And I can't speak to Dave's motivation for believing it's the Best Way. But I can describe ways that this style of design produces better software than other styles.

We've talked on list quite a bit about agency, hallmarks of living systems, complexity buzzwords like attractors, and far-from-equilibrium, etc. By treating software components as Kantian ends, rather than means, helps ensure *distribution* of computational effort/cost. Wrapping each component in its own ball of responsibility/duty/self-interest helps the designer play the game, on a long-term basis, of "logic, logic, where is the logic".

The traditional systems engineering approach attempts to distribute logic according to a modernist kind of planning the whole thing out, a waterfall process where you spend lots of upstream time planning, get a blueprint, parcel out effort to subcontractors, verify, test, deploy, maintain. This works, but not for long, and not for massive heterogeneous systems.

The newer approaches like "agile", "continuous delivery", "devops", "code as data", etc. are evolutionary steps from waterfall in the right direction. But the limit point is to eventually have every unit of computation carry with it, its own context, its own "closure". Such "personification" is an effective heuristic for doing (and remembering to do) that.

On 12/1/20 12:31 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>  
> If you are saying that the more AI acts like a person, the more People will believe they understand it, I totally agree. Whether they believe truthfully is a whole ‘nother that matter.  If ever there were a cradle for manipulation, AI is it. 
>
> On 12/1/20 12:01 PM, Prof David West wrote:
>> 
>> Everything I do in software is grounded in personification / anthropomorphization of objects - small bits of software. I would contend that this is the best way to understand and design such software. So I see no reason to avoid personification of AI software and would, in fact, argue that current approaches to designing an AI will fail precisely because they do not take that perspective.

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glen ep ropella 971-599-3737