Reflections on Interfacing the Future 2023: Blurring the Divide

I'd simply forgotten how valuable events are for stimulating #innovative conversations and absorbing content from in-person, well crafted presentations. Clearly, I need to get out more!

However, the event hosted by the company Conjure combined the environment of an inspiring space, London's Barbican Centre , and gathered over 150 people to debate a set of thought provoking talks, all connected to the theme of the ever increasing blurred boundaries between #reallife to #digitallife .

Speakers and topics

Tom Mason from Stability AI gave us a high octane rollercoaster ride through their work, their community led ethos and the power of open source AI to solve creative challenges like creating images from text. Creating animated videos from text is also on the way. Interestingly, a dedicated search platform has been created by their 100k member community, to bridge the gap and help us mortals ask the image AI with the right text! He rattled through all the available tools for image, text, medical bio faster than I could write down. For instance, I'll be taking a further look at e.g. DreamStudio , Lensa , DreamBooth and for democratising scientific research OpenBioML ...

Dr Roushanak Rahmat spoke about using AI in cancer treatment and shared the complexity of the radiography equipment being designed at Elekta . Existing imaging technology can locate a tumour in static 2D but oncologists are having to 'zap' a tumour in a body where organs are moving.

Sameer Shirgaonkar brought us back down to earth with a wonderful reminder that good user experiences are the combination of front and back offices working together. Sameer regrounded us with simple messages about thoughtful design and collaboration, highlighting silos in organisation, cultural barriers and a recognition that the majority of humanity may still be digital laggards is still our greatest challenge to successful projects!

James Norris concluded the day with a highly thought provoking talk about 'Interfacing to Death'. He is campaigning and delivering on changing the way we manage our digital demise. His talk tackled what we can do in life to prepare and protect and support our loved ones from our digital legacy when we die. He set the whole auditorium self-reflection 'homework'...

My AI reflection: How do we make AI broad enough to truly reflect society?

If the recurring criticism of AI is that it is a mirror into our society, and like a magnifying glass in the sun, has the power to burn a narrow intense spot, what can, and should we be doing about it?

I ran a small, completely non-scientific test on Lexica. It's the Australian Open at the moment, and tennis is my long term hobby, so I queried 'tennis':

Wondering about the narrowness of the results, I decided to search for 'wheelchair tennis':

Steven Hawking is presumably, the most common person in a wheelchair on the internet and the tennis aspect has been super imposed by the generative AI. If that's how it works, do we need a lot more variety?

Just for comparison, I searched Google for wheelchair tennis:

Alfie Hewitt, the wheelchair tennis player, is a legend in my opinion and I encourage anyone to watch wheelchair tennis being played. It's incredibly fast and unbelievably skillful...

I think this exercise with Generative AI helped me understand how generative AI could work but the result was certainly not what I expected and the impact of the results troubles me.

Joining the dots

Reflecting on the different talks from the day, generating images and videos from text can clearly making game production faster. But do we need more video games, with more narrow biases? What if we joined the dots of the ability to generated graphical images at speed and with accuracy (and presumably lower cost?) with the impact of 'showing' people what is happening inside their body? Watching the BBC programme, Your body uncovered with Kate Gallaway used health imaging from the patients own body and then computer generated models and shown through virtual and augmented reality to help change the patient's mind on adopting a healthier lifestyle or having surgery. Is that the direction of travel for some of this technology?

Conclusions

Part of my current day job, as a member of the Atos Scientific Community, is to research #humanflourishing . This event was most definitely a flourishing experience for me. It generated #curiousity , demonstrated what happens when #creativity is at breakneck speed and most importantly, included an element of much missed real #humanconnection .

Dan H Pink in his book The Power of Regret, simplifies our behaviour into the following:

"We act to survive. We think to act. And how we feel, affects how we think. "

I feel inspired and will now act on much of what I've discovered today plus a couple of things I may have been avoiding, which if I act, might help survival... or not...

Culturally, we avoid the topic of death, and so 50% of the UK population who should have a will, don't have a will. But as Benjamin Franklin said, 'only two things in life are certain, death and taxes'. It's January, and I've paid my taxes... so I'm off to write my Bucket List on the MyWishes website.