Author: dpembert

In week three, we focused on developing prototypes, clarifying our mission statement, and constructing a transformational framework.

We begun the week with a look at some prototypes our designers devised.

The first prototype was designed by Lotus. It is a simulation of life as an AI research scientist. The gameplay consists of simple abstractions of AI development. The players play as a scientist researching AI, presenting their findings, and dreaming of a better future for humanity.

The second prototype was designed by Lai. In this game, players take on the role of NOAH, an AI that works to save animal species, as well as humans. The gameplay resembles a strategy game, where players must follow the programming designed by their human inventors and execute orders.

The third prototype was designed by Shitong. In the year 2050, you have been appointed as the special investigator on AI ethics by the US congress. You are tasked to examine a series of landmark cases involving AI and to make your recommendation on Congress’s future policies. A series of short, episodic interactive scenario, each depicting a different aspect of how AI has impacted humanity. By reliving the life of the protagonist in each scenario, the guest can gain new perspective on the pros and cons of AI.

We also, designed our logo and began laying out our production materials. Faculty members Shirley Yee and John Dessler, stopped by to give to review our designs and give us critiques and ideas on how to improve them. Here’s a peek at our logo:

We encountered a hitch in our schedule this week when a polar vortex and snow storm hit Pittsburgh. The vortex was severe enough that Carnegie Mellon cancelled all classes on Wednesday and Thursday. We worked hard to make up for lost time over the weekend.

On Friday we attended a workshop run by Sabrina Culyba based on her book, The Transformational Framework. The Transformational Framework is a process tool for the development of transformational games. The workshop consisted of short presentations on the cornerstones of the framework followed by short amounts of time for teams to discuss and construct their own framework. This workshop was immensely helpful and we all unanimously decided to go through the framework again and more in depth over the weekend. As a result, we now have a more solid foundation on which to begin the design plan next week and feel way more prepared for quarters.

Another result of completing our transformational framework is a revision of our mission statement. It is now….

Demystify AI to help the public foster a more informed view towards AI’s potential impacts.

We believe this better states what we aim to do with our project this semester.

We finished the week with preparations for ¼ walkarounds on Monday. The rest of the week will consist of playtesting and iteration of our prototypes in the beginning of the week followed by picking one prototype and completing a design plan by Friday. Friday will consist of ¼ sitdowns and planning for our first production sprint in week 5.

In week 2, we focused on continuing our research and narrowing our focus.

The beginning was mostly comprised of research and brainstorming. As a team, we watched Her (2013, dir Spike Jonze) and individuals viewed Blade Runner (1982 dir. Ridley Scott) and Ex Machina (2014, dir. Alex Garland). A trend we immediately noticed was that most science fiction depicts AI as a force that will have a negative effect on humanity, and sometimes ending human existence itself. Some however, have more bittersweet endings, like Her and Blade Runner.

While we conducted research we began to visualize our brainstorming. Pictured below are a composition box, mind map, and initial ideas.

Mid way through the week we met with our adviser, Heather Kelley, to talk about our brainstorming and initial ideas. We also presented our Mission Statement and edited it with Heather’s assistance. Our Mission Statement is as follows:

Make an interactive experience that challenges misconceptions of Artificial Intelligence.

We came to this conclusion after considering that Pamela has committed her life and work to spread the truth of AI. We are committed to making an experience that shows the same fairness to AI and presents a more realistic vision of the near future. We wish to show the positive partnership that could form between AI and humans, but make sure to show the negative side as well. From this point Heather recommended we shift into researching applications of AI and devise experiences that could be made using the applications as inspiration.

We spent the second half of the week researching applications of AI.We found that AI will have a monumental impact on the human experience. From this we brainstormed a list of potential experiences that can be seen in the picture below.

Overall, we spent the week narrowing our focus down to a list of potential experiences:

1. Transportation AI
2. Robot Assisted Surgery
3. Financial Simulation
4. Environmental AI

Moving in to next week. We plan to prototype these experiences on paper and playtest. From here, we can pick the most interesting idea and move into production.

Hello and welcome to the development blog for Artificial Intelligentsia! We are a team comprised of five students at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). Our members include:

Zhiguo Lai

Lotus Li

Derrick Pemberton Jr

Shitong Shen

Jue Wang

Project Advisor: Heather Kelley

And our client: Pamela McCorduck

Our project description is:

Pamela McCorduck has written several books on the significance of AI, and is currently writing her memoir on her life and times with the artificial intelligentsia. The ETC team is challenged to develop an interactive experience (could be a game, VR/AR, etc.) that helps people explore the historical, cultural, artistic and philosophical topics around her work. For example, the same program, facial recognition, is widely used by the Chinese government, but used sparingly and in some places strongly resisted, by Americans. Or, artificial intelligence was scorned as impossible, even by many in the scientific community, until the 1990s. Now a new article appears almost daily worrying about the pervasiveness of AI (jobs, invasion of privacy, large scale tracking, autonomous vehicles, fast decision making without explanation, new kinds of art). Further possibilities abound. Copies of the memoir will be available to read.  The final deliverable will be determined in collaboration with Pamela.

With this description in hand, we began our week with a short team meeting for introductions, role distribution, general thoughts on our subject matter, and speculated on what our project could be. After this we dove head first into research. We obtained copies of several of Pamela’s books, including Machines Who Think and Aaron’s Code. In addition, Pamela sent us an outline of her forthcoming book: This Could Be Important. Outside of Pamela’s work, we also came up with a list of artistic and narrative references that deal with AI and humanity’s relationship with it. This list included: Blade Runner, Her, Ghost in the Shell, Ex Machina, and a few others.

After a few days of research, we had our first meeting with our project advisor, Heather Kelley. In this meeting Heather asked us several questions for us to ponder as we move forward with research and brainstorming like “Is this about the history of AI? The present? The future?” Heather also provided some inspirations and references for us to look in to like Noah Harari’s Homo Deus.

This week we also had our first team dinner! Here’s a pic:

We ended the week with our first conference call with Pamela In this discussion, we introduced ourselves and got a basic overview of what Pamela expects out of this project. For the most part, Pamela said she will remain hands off, leaving the vision and scope of the project up to us. Pamela also gave us a few dramatic point from her book that could be exciting to explore in an interactive experience:

• The transition of the definition of intelligence from reasoning based to knowledge based.
• The achievement of real deep learning in AI
• AI being a bridge between the Two Cultures: Humanities and Sciences
• The historical antagonism against AI stemming from the fear that humans will become slaves to the machines. This is a definite possibility but the media tends to sensationalize this point.

We also asked Pamela to speculate on the future of AI. Being a self-proclaimed “lifelong optimist”, she responded with a more positive vision of the future, where AI and humans form a partnership and the emotional fallibility of humans will be supplemented with a rationalism from AI. Overall, it was an extremely enlightening conversation–Pamela has a wealth of knowledge and will prove to be an invaluable resource.

To summarize, Week 1 saw us getting settled into our project thematically, organizationally, and interpersonally. We spent a lot of time wrapping our head around the seemingly limitless directions available to us. In the next week, it is our priority to narrow down our focus and tailor our research to match.