Unlocking the Age of AI: The Critical Role of Context
In the rapidly-evolving world of technology, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changing force with the power to connect every aspect of our lives.
"Context matters; but, rarely is it defined." What was the missing piece that is helping us bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds, providing a "digital-organic" interaction? The answer lies in context - the critical component that helps us make sense of the world we live in and provides meaning and significance to our experiences. In this essay, we explore the transformative power of context in unlocking the age of AI and its potential to shape our understanding and perception of the world around us.
Cinema & Immersion
The creation of immersive and vivid worlds is a shared passion of acclaimed directors Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve. Nolan, for instance, incorporated real-life airplane collision in his film Tenet, collaborated with physicist Kip Thorne to infuse genuine science into the stunning imagery of Interstellar, and even recreated a nuclear bomb explosion in Oppenheimer. Similarly, Villeneuve prioritizes realism in his films by employing practical sets and filming in real locations, such as the desert landscapes in Dune. In an interview, the French director revealed his preference for working with genuine environments, as it allows the actors to fully immerse themselves in the scenery, resulting in more intimate and authentic performances.
These approaches are crucial in creating stories that are both "very intimate with a lot of scope," as exemplified in Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 neo-noir classic. In a notable scene that delves into the nature of perception and memory, a memory designer is creating a recollection of a birthday party to implant in a Replicant, a humanoid artificial intelligence. When asked why her memories seem so authentic, she explains that the main component of her product is "provide context for unavoidable affect," as memories are not about the details and "anything real should be a mess." 2049 is not too far removed from our current times. Our interactions with AI-powered applications are becoming more integrated, personalized, powerful, and seamless than ever before. Tools such as chatbots, voice assistants, and recommendation algorithms are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives. It is no longer a prediction that an AI bot will direct a film - it has already happened.
In a catalysis where we try to understand scenarios that will "completely change our world in ways that it will not be recognizable", as noted by Mo Gawdat, former business director of Google X, our brains are responsible for interpreting these chaotic inputs, working as a "prediction machine" through comparisons that help us make sense of the world around us. But what happens if one of these comparisons is intangible, lacking a historical fact to support it? And if the question is not 'what', but 'how' to understand these changes, then the 'why' is already defined: AI has an elusive power over humans - it can create or recreate an essential element for establishing connections and formulating a gestalt interpretation: context.
The need for a meta-suspension of disbelief
"Unknown unknowns" play a crucial role in our past, present, and future. In his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Israeli historian and professor Yuval Noah Harari describes science fiction as "perhaps the most important artistic genre" when discussing uncertainty. It is these films, such as Interstellar and Blade Runner, that serve as metaphorical bridges to introduce complex scientific concepts to a wider audience. In the era of post-truth, this is also a matter of influence and concern with the potential for bias and misinformation, as these contents are shaping culture and determining what we consider true based on imagery scenes. Social media platforms are aware that our eyes are naturally drawn to this format of content and use algorithms to provide users with a plethora of new images, exploiting our innate attraction to novelty and the desire for new experiences and information. As noted by Bruce Mau, CEO and co-founder of Massive Change Network, "things that stay the same become invisible to a nervous system tuned to change." While we may not be able to predict all the effects of these changes, we can be certain that our contexts will eventually shift. Once again, the question becomes: how do we perceive these changes? The answer is simple: visually.
The Gestalt theory suggests that perception is based on seeing things as a unified whole, rather than as separate components. Its principles have been influential in various fields, including design and advertising, where it is commonly used to encourage viewers' minds to complete images by leaving blank spaces or incomplete shapes, a technique based on the Principle of Closure. Similarly, storytellers create anticipation and curiosity by instigating similar brain circuits in viewers to fill in the gaps and complete the stories. This deep engagement promotes a sense of immersion and suspension of disbelief, allowing viewers to be fully absorbed in the story. As a result, the audience is able to better understand and relate to the themes and messages of the story, leading to a more meaningful and impactful experience.
Being fully immersed in a digital world requires an even greater level of suspension of disbelief than that required for reading a book or watching a movie, and although the concept of a metaverse promises to be the ultimate form of immersion, building a fully immersive digital world is still in its early stages and remains a Herculean task. We must believe that our digital representations, or avatars, truly represent us and that the virtual world we inhabit is real. This can be difficult to accept, especially when technology limitations prevent us from fully experiencing these environments, creating a dichotomy. "We live in two worlds now: the natural one where we have bodies that obey the laws of gravity and space/time, and the virtual one where there is no gravity or distance (though there is time). In other words, we are now digital as well as physical beings, and this is a new experience for humanity," observes American journalist Doc Searls in his blog.
Context is the key
Our brains are accustomed to perceiving and interacting with the physical world, which has its own limitations in terms of what we can do and how we can do it. Although we can adapt to some extent to the virtual world, our minds still struggle to fully accept it as real, especially as we integrate our digital and physical worlds in new and unprecedented ways. To advance this integration, we need a component that can support us and provide confidence to connect all the INUS - insufficient, but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient - conditions. In a phygital world, we need something to help bridge the gap between the physical and digital, we need a tool to concatenate the decentralized interactions we have. As science fiction is our reference for tangibilizing the unknown, this component has a name: Context.
Let's dive into one example! In 2017, people at Google introduced the concept of Transformers, a computer program that could understand and translate languages. This new architecture attempted to address the limitations (slow computation and limited parallelization) of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) models commonly used to process sequential data, such as text or speech. Transformers were faster because they could understand how all the words were related. In other words, they could contextualize all the pieces together. It was like trying to read a book by looking at each letter separately versus being able to look at whole words and sentences at once.
These contextualized experiences are an innate desire of our brains for a sequence of events to flow smoothly and without friction, following the Principle of Continuity. We perceive objects, or shapes, arranged in a continuous manner and as a single entity, following a path of least resistance until encountering another object or element. This proposition is not limited to our perception of the physical world, but extends to the digital world as well. Continuity is crucial in creating an uninterrupted customer journey, guiding the customer towards the desired outcome. In recent months, we have seen the development of AI-powered tools that rely on continuity and maintain context to fabricate human-machine interactions that seem organic, while providing the artificial experience of conversing with a human. As AI advances and becomes ubiquitous, these technologies, such as ChatGPT, will use machine learning frameworks and other fields of AI to provide increasingly context-connected responses to their users, enhancing immersion for a natural experience.
Formalizing a vision of a future context and how we will make sense of the "AI-Human world" is an effusive task where we often look to comparisons with past technological revolutions. "The future does not exist, but futures insist, these are the futures of the past, retro-futures," as pointed out by Alain Bublex and Elie During. As companies race to offer the most personalized and engaging platforms, tools, and resources, the power of AI in providing context cannot be underestimated. By shaping our understanding and perception of a world where we may not have enough context to find any reference, AI has the potential to expand our horizons and create a future that is innovative and accessible. In this new and unexplored sea of digital and physical integration, the right level of context will be crucial for us to immerse ourselves, reducing the increasingly tenuous line between these environments.
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