Towards the Habermas Machine

Google DeepMind has just announced a large language model, which claims to generate a consensus position from a collection of individual views. The name of the model is a reference to Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action.

An internet search for Habermas machine throws up two previous initiatives under the same name. Firstly an art project by Kristopher Holland.

The Habermas Machine (2006–2012) is a conceptual art experience that both examines and promotes an experiential relation to Jürgen Habermas’ grand theory for understanding human interaction. The central claim is that The Theory of Communicative Action can be experienced, reflected upon and practised when encountered within arts-based research. Habermas’ description of how our everyday lives are founded by intersubjective experience, and caught up in certain normative, objective and subjective contexts is transformed through the method of conceptual art into a process of collaborative designing, enacting and articulating. This artistic reframing makes it possible to experience the communicative structure of knowledge and the ontological structure of intersubjectivity in a practice of non-discursive ‘philosophy without text’. Feiten Holland Chemero

And secondly, an approach to Dialogue Mapping described as a device that all participants can climb into and converse with complete communicative rationality, contained in a book by @paulculmsee and Jailash Awati, and mentioned in this Reddit post Why is Dialogue Mapping not wide spread? Dialogue Mapping was developed by Jeff Conklin and others as an approach to addressing wicked problems. See also Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS).

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Update

Christopher Summerfield, one of the authors of the DeepMind paper, spoke at the Royal Society on October 29th 2024. https://www.youtube.com/live/cW1Wq7_8v1Y?si=oqo8Lw7479x4QqKt&t=18890

All the examples shown in his talk were policy matters that could be reduced to Yes/No questions. Such questions would traditionally be surveyed by asking people to place themselves on a scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree, and it is easy to see how a language-based method such as the Habermas Machine offers some advantages over a numerical scale. But not clear how this works for more provocative questions, let alone wicked problems.

Someone in the audience asked if this method would work in what he called a compromised democracy, and Summerfield acknowledged that the method assumes what he called a good faith scaffold. Obviously all democracies in the real world are imperfect, and he didn't go into the question as to how sensitive or vulnerable the method might be to such imperfections, but the method might conceivably help to overcome some of these imperfections under some conditions: for example, Summerfield referred specifically to the tyranny of the majority.

While the performance of the Habermas machine in their study compared favourably with the performance of human mediators, Summerfield suggested that we should move away from thinking about AI in these terms. The point is not to create AI-based agents that can behave like intelligent people but to build intelligent institutions - tools for creating social order and fostering cooperation. As my regular readers will know, orgintelligence has long been an important theme for this blog. See for example my post On Organizations and Machines (January 2022).

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Jeffrey Conklin, Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems (Wiley 2006). See also CogNexus website.

Paul Culmsee and Jailash Awati, The Heretic's Guide to Best Practice (2013)

Nicola Davis, AI mediation tool may help reduce culture war rifts, say researchers (Guardian, 17 October 2024)

Tim Elmo Feiten, Kristopher Holland and Anthony Chemero, Doing philosophy with a water-lance: art and the future of embodied cognition (Adaptive Behavior 2021) 

Michael Tessler et al, AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation (Science, 18 October 2024)

Beyond the symbols vs signals debate (The Royal Society, 28-29 October 2024)

Wikipedia: Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS), Wicked Problem

See also Influencing the Habermas Machine (November 2024)

Creative Tension in Downing Street

Earlier posts on this blog have explored Creative Tension in the White House - from FDR to the Donald - and analysed them in terms of my OrgIntelligence framework. In this post, I want to look at the UK experience, drawing on a recent report in the Guardian.

Those who worked closely with him say Johnson encourages rows and tensions over policies as he considers all sides of the argument and figures out what he will do next. Some argue that it generates a creative energy in which he thrives and is the process by which he arrives at a final decision. Ask others, and they say he cannot make up his mind until options have been whittled down by time and after those he relies on to walk out in exasperation. Syal

The article quotes several people talking about the Prime Minister's leadership style, based on various ideas about decision-making, risk and diversity. There are also some remarks about the ethical implications.

Previous articles about Mr Johnson's leadership discuss his management style with cabinet colleagues and advisers (Simpson), and his style when addressing the nation (Moss). Whatever he may think in private about the challenges of Brexit or COVID-19, and whatever difficulties he gets into when discussing solutions with his colleagues and advisers, the Prime Minister's instinct apparently leads him to present them to the public in extremely simple and confident terms.

Post-heroic leadership seems to be the order of the day. Stokes and Stern talk about the need to adopt a less gung-ho style when presenting the government's approach to wicked problems. They quote from a paper by Keith Grint advocating several supposedly anti-heroic behaviours: curiosity and sense-making ("asking questions"), bricolage ("clumsy solutions"), and ranking collective intelligence above individual genius.

The UK government's approach to the COVID-19 pandemic has sometimes seemed erratic and inconsistent. But given the complexity of the problem, and the volatile and ambiguous data on which decisions and policies were supposedly based, a more consistent and single-minded approach might not have turned out any better. 

In Greek myth, the Gordian knot stands for wicked problems, and Alexander's simple yet imaginative solution quickly resolves the problem. To the supporters of Brexit, this represents the only possible escape from European satrapy. Nothing post-heroic about Alexander. 

So what does that tell us about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson?

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Keith Grint, Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions: The Role of Leadership (Clinical Leader 1/2, December 2008)

Gloria Moss, Is Boris Johnson's leadership style inclusive? (HR Magazine, 23 August 2019)

Per Morten Schiefloe, The Corona crisis: a wicked problem (Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 2021; 49: 5–8)

Paul Simpson, What is Boris Johnson's leadership style? (Management Today, 11 October 2019)

Jon Stokes and Stefan Stern, Boris Johnson needs to show a ‘post-heroic’ style of leadership now (The Conversation, 27 April 2020)

Rajeev Syal, Does Boris Johnson stir up team conflict to help make up his mind? (The Guardian, 1 March 2021)

Related posts: Creative Tension in the White House (April 2017)

The Price of Fish

Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris have written a wide-ranging survey of economics, choice theory (game theory, psychology and ethics), systems theory, chaos theory, global warming and evolution. So what's all that got to do with the price of fish?

One of the themes running through the book is that the price of fish bears no relation to the value of fish, especially if we are concerned about long-term value and the sustainability of fish stocks.

Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This definition has also been applied to accountants and economists. Michael and Ian are leaders of the Long Finance initiative, a movement within the City of London that aims to overcome this kind of short-term financial cynicism.

Michael and Ian describe the price of fish as a wicked problem - a problem that lacks easy definition as well as easy answers.  "Sustaining the supply of edible fish is a wicked problem that presents global risks." (p 301) And yet they suggest that the system might possibly sort itself out. "As fish run out and have to be sustainably fished, the historic underpricing of fish ceases." (293)

But this is no time for naive optimism, and the system will undoubtedly need some intervention. "When the price is the same as the value, there are opportunities for sustainable financing. So far, price has not equaled value for fish. This is the biggest, wicked decision-making problem of all: knowing how to set a price that equals the value." (p 295)

In other words, the problem is not just the alarming dwindling of fish stocks but the collective cynicism that not only led to this problem but also amplifies it and resists dealing with it effectively. The key word in the problem statement is the word "set" - even if a few clever people can agree what the right price of fish should be, the real challenge is to set this price into global trading and consumption systems.



While the survey is light on the sociopolitical elements of the problem, the authors complain that governments have often made things worse, by inappropriate regulations and subsidies. Thus lazy or short-term thinking on the part of government is another manifestation of cynicism.

The Wikipedia article What's that got to do with the ...? derives the phrase from the alleged tendency of economists to connect everything with everything else. The authors go much further in this respect than most economists. But one trouble with systems thinking is this: once you start it's difficult to know where to stop. (In systems thinking circles, this is known as the warning of the doorknob.) Although the authors have covered a great deal of material, it's not hard to think of other stuff they could have mentioned.

I don't think the authors are in any hurry to write a sequel, but if they did it might be about the Price of a Bee. While fish are undervalued, bees (apart from those involved in honey production) have no direct economic value at all; but when the bee population is threatened, global agriculture as a whole is in serious jeopardy. The indirect value of bees is vastly greater than the market for honey. Under the right conditions, with appropriate political and financial systems, people and communities may be able to make long-term ethical investments in sustainable fisheries, with a reasonable prospect of a long-term financial return: the Long Finance initiative is trying to stimulate the kind of system change that will create these conditions.  But how on earth do we get communities to invest in the world bee population, without creating a market for bees? And would we really want that? Systems thinking tells us to be careful what we wish for. (Mary Catherine Bateson calls this The Revenge of the Good Fairy.)

Systems thinking also tells us that management (both public sector and private sector) has a tendency to over-intervene, to meddle and micromanage and ultimately make things worse. On the other hand, doing nothing doesn't feel like a good option either. (See Owen Barder on Good Global Citizenship, January 2013.) But there may be some kind of leverage or nudge that might just help a complex system to avoid catastrophe. It is always difficult to steer a path between naive optimism and pessimistic fatalism, but the battle against cynicism requires that we try.

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Price of Fish website
Long Finance website
Wikipedia What's that got to do with the ...?

For the warning of the doorknob, see my post We Ought to Know the Difference (April 2013)

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Matt McGrath, Dispute means mackerel is no longer catch of the day (BBC News 22 January 2013)

Timothy Taylor, Do markets work for bees? (10 July 2014)

Related post: The Price of Everything (May 2017)


10 July 2014

Redesigning Sex

This post is about lenscraft - applying multiple lenses to a complex problem.

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Following my piece Sex and Design on the complicated behaviour and evolutionary purpose of the human sex organs, Anders Jangbrand challenged me to a redesign project.

Would be interesting to re-design that system. Not the organs-but the full "sex" system. How would re-design proc look like?

Interesting yes: the thought of redesigning sex raises a number of interesting and important questions about redesigning things generally. 

Firstly what would drive such a project? Who or what would be the beneficiaries of this redesign? What altered outcomes would be relevant? Are the current arrangements problematic, and if so for whom? 

Secondly scope. The system of interest is far more complex than the shape and function of a couple of body organs and their fluid interactions; it produces various biological and social and aesthetic and spiritual outcomes. 

Thirdly worldview or weltanschauung. Do we (whoever "we" is) want sex to be more rational? Or does the magic of sex and the richness of its literature come from its complete lack of rationality? Is sex even necessary? Some ants have abandoned sex altogether (BBC News, 15 April 2009).  

Fourthly variety. The biological variations of sexual practices among other species (see James Meek's piece in the London Review of Books, Sex is Best when you lose your head) must be more than matched by the social and psychological variation of human sexual behaviour. (Whether that variety is a good thing depends on your worldview - see above.) 

Radical design. It may not be enough to design one part of the system, leaving the rest of the system unchanged. If you leave the female parts unchanged, your scope for improving the male parts are quite limited and unoriginal and (if you believe all those junk emails) pretty well catered for already. 

Trust. The very absurdity and embarrassment and vulnerability of sex means that there is a trust gradient involved. One of the effects of sex is the release of oxytocin, which reinforces trust. So there is a trust subsystem, and this helps to explain a lot of the emotional issues associated with sex.

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There's a number of issues there. Is there a lens that would enable us to focus on all these issues? Probably not. 

Checkland's CATWOE covers a decent few (e.g. Selfish Gene as Customer, Sex Organ as Actor, Fertilization as Transformation, Rationality versus Passion as Worldview, Human Race as Owner, Society as Environment) 

Green & Bate's VPEC-T covers a few more (e.g. Passion as Value, Sexual Etiquette as Policy, Pleasure as Event, Fertilization as Content, Sexual Relationship as Trust) 

In each case, I've identified one possible way of applying the lens to the task. Each lens can be used to view the task in many different ways. And it would be interesting to explore how each lens, each alternative view through each lens, would lead to a different redesign strategy.

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If sex were a problem, it would be a wicked problem. But sex isn't a wicked problem - it is a wicked solution. And I mean wicked.

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and here's xkcd's take on the subject ...

See also Redesigning the Banana (July 2009)