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A shot of self-esteem for humans in the age of the algorithm

2022-05-09T08:35:42.494Z


We have a superpower with respect to machines: the ability to contextualize. It is our differentiating value, we must cultivate it


Stop running tasks.

stop.

Do not react to that notification.

Breathe and resist.

Don't give up ground and do just the opposite of what the computer expects: you are not data, nor do you want to be..., you are the one who interprets the data, who thinks, connects the dots and decides.

Get off autopilot, hesitate, use your superpowers to close Excel, and put that answer off.

Stop feeding the beast.

Do not be infected by the voracity of the algorithm.

You are not an algorithm either.

Impose your rules and reaffirm yourself as what you are, a contradictory human being, with lateral thinking, given to imagining parallel realities, and that is how you must continue to be if you want to dominate the machine.

Do not try to look like him and run away in the opposite direction.

Cultivate that virtue that has been denied to the algorithm: improvise and skip the script.

In that we are second to none.

More than a few observers of our modern lives warn that we are heading in the wrong direction: instead of training to be multitasking bees, learning Excel and obeying Google's calendar, companies should pay us to wander and train cognitive freedom, do what we have always been good at: interpreting the information we have and creating alternative scenarios to move forward.

His theory is that if the cry of "The algorithms are here!"

we try to compete, we have the war lost.

If instead we do what they can't do, say go off script and experiment, we humans will still be in charge.

Faced with so much unbridled content and subject to unpredictable algorithms, we have to train the only superpower that distinguishes us.

Some call it contextualizing, some framing and others framing.

It is the art of separating the grain from the chaff, concentrating on the essentials, turning on the high beams and guiding effort and intention towards a goal.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an expert in the new information economy, says that framing is "the most important skill that humans possess and their only differentiating value in the new economy."

The also professor at the University of Oxford warns via

e-mail:

"We will never calculate faster than a machine, but, if we try, we can imagine much further than the reality in front of us, and that makes us very valuable, we only have to practice it more”.

To achieve this we have to take control and stop being reactive.

Lucía Velasco, an economist and technologist, believes that we must clean our minds and cultivate lateral thinking, intuition, flexibility and the ability to improvise.

“We brought everything as standard, but it has been numb.

We are hyper-impacted with alerts, notifications,

newsletters,

audios, content, stimuli that force us to constantly change focus […] we must recover the capacity for abstraction, calm and concentration to be able to connect points and relate things […] ] what a machine is going to do well is precisely to follow the script […] we have to get out of it,” says Velasco, who also directs the National Observatory of Technology and Society (ONTSI).

“Remembering, calculating, transforming bits into sounds […] are all activities that manipulate information that already exists.

Computers are very good at doing that, but they don't know how to create a framework to imagine an alternative reality and make decisions that bring them closer to it... Unlike humans, computers can't dream because that requires imagination, and what machines do is manipulate existing information”, observes Mayer-Schönberger.

“Understanding the world is, above all, understanding the framework in which we are”, says the philosopher Innerarity

The philosopher Daniel Innerarity.

This expert is the author, together with Kenneth Cukier, editor-in-chief of The Economist, and Francis de Véricourt,

machine learning researcher,

of the book

Framers

(Turner, 2021).

Between the three of them they try to convince us to train what they say will be our greatest virtue in the age of automation: creating mental frameworks.

“They work as cognitive templates, magnifying certain elements and minimizing others […], our minds use them to focus on the most important aspects and ignore everything else.

Thanks to mental models, the world is more manageable and, therefore, we can act on it.

In a certain sense they help us to simplify reality”, they explain.

It is understandable that in a context of hyper-production of content, the minds that frame, put order and establish a hierarchy will be increasingly valued.

The good news is that we are all framers.

When circumstances change, we are quick to assess the new situation and look for ways out, ditching extraneous details to reduce cognitive load and focus on what's important.

The authors of

Framers

say that to be good framers you have to train three things: causal thinking, the ability to create alternative scenarios, and the ability to limit and shape our imagination towards a particular goal.

None of that can be done by an algorithm.

"The machines are going to perpetuate what is established, they have no instinct, they are not going to create anything new," recalls Lucía Velasco, who is also the author of the book Is an algorithm going to replace you?

The future of work in Spain (Turner, 2021).

Velasco has confirmed that in Spain we are "very scared" with artificial intelligence, and she cites a CIS survey in which half of Spaniards state "that it will cause problems."

Philosopher Daniel Innerarity has been wondering for some time whether artificial intelligence is both very smart and very stupid.

"His stupidity of him would be," he says via

email,

"that when he makes an intelligent decision he has no way of knowing."

In his opinion, in human knowledge there is a capacity to distinguish what is relevant that artificial devices are not capable of reproducing.

“The understanding of the world is, above all, the understanding of the context or framework in which we find ourselves, and implies an ability to judge the relevance of situations”.

The philosopher calls for the praise of ambiguity and inaccuracy, two circumstances in which we humans move with grace and ease.

“Under the term inaccuracy I like to bring together a set of properties of our intelligence.

We are continually thinking about approximations, we are not intelligent because we faithfully apply established rules, but because we have a special ability to attend to the singular and the exception, which inclines us, by the way, to make other types of errors, which also distinguish us from others. the machines".

Instead, artificial intelligence reduces the world to binary and calculable categories that can be deduced from computational rules and models.

“They work with a logic 0/1.

Everything that is fuzzy, indefinite or imprecise has a difficult treatment in binary logic”.

This article is intended to be a shot of self-esteem for humans in the age of the algorithm.

A tribute to our most chaotic attributes, to ambiguity, doubt and imprecision.

Everything we must cultivate and protect from automatisms.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-05-09

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