Благодаря сообщению на YK одной из команд Adobe After Effects, я получаю много посетителей из России и Украины в последнее время. Привет и добро пожаловать! (И я надеюсь, что этот перевод Google имеет смысл.) Пока вы здесь: Пожалуйста, дайте мне знать, есть ли русские научно-фантастические фильмы, которые я должен посмотреть. И если вы думаете, что есть аудитория русского перевода книги, добавьте комментарий. Чем больше комментариев у меня есть, тем больше удачи я бы подошел к издателю. Спасибо и наслаждайтесь.
I was surprised and delighted to get an email from Sebastian Sadowski asking if he could produce a visualization for the Untold AI analysis. Because of course. I’ll share that in a post tomorrow, but for now, let me introduce him via an email interview…
1. Hi there. For our readership, introduce yourself, what you do, how you got into it, and how it relates to sci-fi interfaces.
I’m an independent designer for interfaces and data visualizations. The last seven years, I’ve been designing interfaces for various companies and institutions, e.g. to access autonomous vehicles for the Volkswagen Group Future Center, home appliances by Bosch and Siemens or trade-related data for the UN’s International Trade Centre. In recent years, I’ve been dealing more and more with complex data and nowadays mostly work on projects to visualize and access big amounts of complex data. Interfaces in sci-fi movies have always been an inspiration for my projects.
As of this posting, the Untold AI analysis stands at 11 posts and around 17,000 words. (And there are as yet a few more to come. Probably.) That’s a lot to try and keep in your head. To help you see and reflect on the big picture, I present…a big picture.
This data visualization has five main parts. And while I tried to design them to be understandable from the graphic alone, it’s worth giving a little tour anyway.
On the left are two sci-fi columns connected by Sankey-ish lines. The first lists the sci-fi movies and TV shows in the survey. The first ten are those that adhere to the science. Otherwise, they are not in a particular order. The second column shows the list of takeaways. The takeaways are color-coded and ordered for their severity. The type size reflects how many times that takeaway appears in the survey. The topmost takeaways are those that connect to imperatives. The bottommost are those takeaways that do not. The lines inherit the takeaway color, which enables a close inspection of a show’s node to see whether its takeaways are largely positive or negative.
On the right are two manifestocolumns connected by Sankey-ish lines. The right column shows the manifestos included in the analysis. The left column lists the imperatives found in the manifestos. The manifestos are in alphabetical order. Their node sizes reflect the number of imperatives they contain. The imperatives are color-coded and clustered according to five supercategories, as shown just below the middle of the poster. The topmost imperatives are those that connect to takeaways. The bottommost are those that do not. The lines inherit the color of the imperative, which enables a close inspection of a manifesto’s node to see to which supercategory of imperatives it suggests. The lines connected to each manifesto are divided into two groups, the topmost being those that are connected and the bottommost those that are not. This enables an additional reading of how much a given manifesto’s suggestions are represented in the survey.
The area between the takeaways and imperatives contains connecting lines, showing the mapping between them. These lines fade from the color of the takeaway to the color of the imperative. This area also labels the three kinds of connections. The first are those connections between takeaways and imperatives. The second are those takeaways unconnected to imperatives, which are the “Pure Fiction” takeaways that aren’t of concern to the manifestos. The last are those imperatives unconnected to takeaways, the collection of 29 Untold AI imperatives that are the answer to the question posed at the top of the poster.
Just below the big Sankey columns are the five supercategories of Untold AI. Each has a title, a broad description, and a pie chart. The pie chart highlights the portion of imperatives in that supercategory that aren’t seen in the survey, and the caption for the pie chart posits a reason why sci-fi plays out the way it does against the AI science.
You’ve seen all of this in the posts, but seeing it all together like this encourages a different kind of reflection about it.
Interactive, someday?
Note that it is possible but quite hard to trace the threads leading from, say, a movie to its takeaways to its imperatives to its manifesto, unless you are looking at a very high resolution version of it. One solution to that would be to make the visualization interactive, such that rolling over one node in the diagram would fade away all non-connected nodes and graphs in the visualization, and data brush any related bits below.
A second solution is to print the thing out very large so you can trace these threads with your finger. I’m a big enough nerd that I enjoy poring over this thing in print, so for those who are like me, I’ve made it available via redbubble. I’d recommend the 22×33 if you have good eyesight and can handle small print, or the 31×46 max size otherwise.
Maybe if I find funds or somehow more time and programming expertise I can make that interactive version possible myself.
Some new bits
Sharp-eyed readers may note that there are some new nodes in there from the prior posts! These come from late-breaking entries, late-breaking realizations, and my finally including the manifesto I was party to.
Sundar Pichai published the Google AI Principles just last month, so I worked it in.
I finally worked the Juvet Agenda in as a manifesto. (Repeating disclosure: I was one of its authors.) It was hard work, but I’m glad I did it, because it turns out it’s the most-connected manifesto of the lot. (Go, team!)
The Juvet Agenda also made me realize that I needed new, related nodes for both takeaways and imperatives: AI will enable or require new models of governance. (It had a fair number of movies, too.) See the detailed graph for the movies and how everything connects.
I modified the Flourish SVG, added the rest of the data, and did final layout in Adobe Illustrator
The poster’s type is mostly Sentinel, a font from Hoefler & Co., because I think it’s lovely, highly readable, and I liked that Sentinels are also a sci-fi AI.
Some readers reported being unable to read the prior post because of its script formatting. Here is the same post without that formatting…
INTERIOR. Sci-fi auditorium. Maybe the Plavalaguna Opera House. A heavy red velvet curtain rises, lifted by anti-gravity pods that sound like tiny TIE fighters. The HOST stands on a floating podium that rises from the orchestra pit. The HOST wears a velour suit with piping, which glows with sliding, overlapping bacterial shapes.
HOST: Hello and welcome to The Fritzes: AI Edition, where we give out awards for awesome movies and television shows about AI that stick to the science.
FX: Applause, beeping, booping, and the sound of an old modem from the audience.
HOST: For those wondering how we picked these winners, it was based on the Untold AI analysis from scifiinterfaces.com. That analysis compared what sci-fi shows suggest about AI (called “takeaways”) to what real world manifestos suggest about AI (called “imperatives”). If a movie had a takeaway that matched an imperative, it got a point. But if it perpetuated a pointless and distracting myth, it lost five points.
The Demon Seed metal-skinned podling thing stands up in the back row of the audience and shouts: Booooooo!
HOST: Thank you, thank you. But just sticking to the science is not enough. We also want to reward shows that investigate these ideas with quality stories, acting, effects, and marketing departments. So the sums were multiplied by that show’s Tomatometer rating. This way to top films didn’t just tell the right stories (according to the science), but it told them well.
Totals were tallied by the firm of Google Sheets algorithms. Ok, ok. Now, to give away awards 009 through 006 are those loveable blockheads from Interstellar, TARS and CASE.
TARS and CASE crutch-walk onto the stage and reassemble as solid blocks before the lectern.
