Hermione Laake's Blog: Thoughts - Posts Tagged "artificial-intelligence"
A Writer's Life: Perception
I've been thinking about perception. I'm not sure where this thread came from exactly; several thoughts colliding, as they do when you travel, and allow the mind to wander...
I was dwelling on perception, when listening to a radio 4 programme, in which a speaker was discussing the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence. Her leaning was towards it for this reason (at this point, I should apologise for not taking down her name - I was on holiday - my time was not entirely my own... I promise to look into it - if there is time later - and edit this post); her point was a good one; it is that, to paraphrase, we put on a face to the world which is not real either, depending on the situation, so what would be wrong with interacting with robots which are not real? I thought this was an excellent idea and intelligent to connect these two parallel situations. I started to think about other ways in which we might develop unreal interactions with things, such as our pets, or our garden gnomes; people do, although I admit, I cannot understand this. I have though, I admit, had a similar relationship with my cuddly bear, which I wrote about in Woedy Bear, my debut children's book.
Another thing that is interesting about perception is that it is tied to projection. A person reads or doesn't read about you on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Wordpress/Goodreads... and forms an opinion of you based on that. This is not real, because it is only a representation of one facet of your personality.
Recently, I began updating my status to Facebook. I did this because someone had commented to me that they thought I didn't have a life. I thought this was funny, and that they had been spending too much time on Facebook. Facebook doesn't rule my life and I do have a private Twitter account, which represents another facet of my personality. However, I do not advertise this to friends, as this is for those like-minded writers and singers, and creatives, and not all of my friends fall into that category or would be even remotely interested in my Twitter account. Still, I decided, as an experiment, to update my status (I have been remiss and missed several outings off, I admit, as I am a private person), however, I was reasonably diligent, in the mornings at least. I noticed that I got a different reaction from people, and they thought I was active or visiting lots of places. the truth is that I have always been like this, but I don't advertise this usually. Conversation is a good way of finding out what people do and are interested in. I find that people often are not adept at conversation. They like to talk about themselves and forget to ask particular questions of people, or to mention something they have read and are interested in; they might find themselves surprised by the depth of the friend or stranger standing in front of them if they did, and enhance their relationship. But relationships take time. Of course superficial relationships do not. But it is important to know which kind of relationship you are in, otherwise you cannot be qualified to judge a person, or comment on them; you have to really know them first, and that takes time, and focus, and probably you will never really know them completely unless you have the kind of friendship I had with my old friend Julie, where we finished one another's sentences and turned up in places and met up just because we were thinking about one another.
Of course time too alters perception, which is why Gandhi did not want to write The Story of My Experiments with Truth, because he thought he might change his mind, he said. This is a deep and meaningful comment on life. The truth is that apart from time unravelling, as it does, in the moment, time has the ability to change perception. We may look back on an event and remember it differently from the way we once viewed it; this is because we have lived, we have experienced things, and they have changed our minds. Gandhi knew this and it is an important thought to bear in mind when we are thinking about perception.
A friend kept asking me whether I was happy and in love, and I could only ask her a question in return: "What is love?" and tell her that we are only fleetingly happy in the moment. This is not new. Others have written about it. But I think that happiness and love share something, and that is an understanding of the flawed nature of perception in the moment, and that is where I will leave this blog for today.
I was dwelling on perception, when listening to a radio 4 programme, in which a speaker was discussing the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence. Her leaning was towards it for this reason (at this point, I should apologise for not taking down her name - I was on holiday - my time was not entirely my own... I promise to look into it - if there is time later - and edit this post); her point was a good one; it is that, to paraphrase, we put on a face to the world which is not real either, depending on the situation, so what would be wrong with interacting with robots which are not real? I thought this was an excellent idea and intelligent to connect these two parallel situations. I started to think about other ways in which we might develop unreal interactions with things, such as our pets, or our garden gnomes; people do, although I admit, I cannot understand this. I have though, I admit, had a similar relationship with my cuddly bear, which I wrote about in Woedy Bear, my debut children's book.
Another thing that is interesting about perception is that it is tied to projection. A person reads or doesn't read about you on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Wordpress/Goodreads... and forms an opinion of you based on that. This is not real, because it is only a representation of one facet of your personality.
Recently, I began updating my status to Facebook. I did this because someone had commented to me that they thought I didn't have a life. I thought this was funny, and that they had been spending too much time on Facebook. Facebook doesn't rule my life and I do have a private Twitter account, which represents another facet of my personality. However, I do not advertise this to friends, as this is for those like-minded writers and singers, and creatives, and not all of my friends fall into that category or would be even remotely interested in my Twitter account. Still, I decided, as an experiment, to update my status (I have been remiss and missed several outings off, I admit, as I am a private person), however, I was reasonably diligent, in the mornings at least. I noticed that I got a different reaction from people, and they thought I was active or visiting lots of places. the truth is that I have always been like this, but I don't advertise this usually. Conversation is a good way of finding out what people do and are interested in. I find that people often are not adept at conversation. They like to talk about themselves and forget to ask particular questions of people, or to mention something they have read and are interested in; they might find themselves surprised by the depth of the friend or stranger standing in front of them if they did, and enhance their relationship. But relationships take time. Of course superficial relationships do not. But it is important to know which kind of relationship you are in, otherwise you cannot be qualified to judge a person, or comment on them; you have to really know them first, and that takes time, and focus, and probably you will never really know them completely unless you have the kind of friendship I had with my old friend Julie, where we finished one another's sentences and turned up in places and met up just because we were thinking about one another.
Of course time too alters perception, which is why Gandhi did not want to write The Story of My Experiments with Truth, because he thought he might change his mind, he said. This is a deep and meaningful comment on life. The truth is that apart from time unravelling, as it does, in the moment, time has the ability to change perception. We may look back on an event and remember it differently from the way we once viewed it; this is because we have lived, we have experienced things, and they have changed our minds. Gandhi knew this and it is an important thought to bear in mind when we are thinking about perception.
A friend kept asking me whether I was happy and in love, and I could only ask her a question in return: "What is love?" and tell her that we are only fleetingly happy in the moment. This is not new. Others have written about it. But I think that happiness and love share something, and that is an understanding of the flawed nature of perception in the moment, and that is where I will leave this blog for today.
Thoughts
This revolution in writing that is taking place is interesting. There are so many people writing, or at least maybe there always were, only now we have the opportunity to read more authors. This is in
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