Online Conferences Should be Better than In-Person Conferences, Not Worse

... but collectively, we haven't yet figured out how.

Yet!

Helen De Cruz and the 2+1 Experiment

The inspired advocacy of the late (dearly missed) Helen De Cruz convinced the American Philosophical Association to try out what they called the "2+1" model for their three annual conferences: two in-person, one remote, with the remote conference rotating among the three divisions (Eastern, Central, Pacific). The plan was to run the experiment for three years. However, a few months ago, after only two years, the APA canceled the 2+1 plan and is returning to ordinary in-person conferencing, citing low attendance and low attendee satisfaction.

This decision was universally bemoaned in a special session on online conferencing held in tribute to Helen in April, at the last (for the foreseeable future) remote meeting of the APA. (Perhaps ironically, it was one of the best-attended sessions in the conference.)

The speakers (I was one) and attendees celebrated the accessibility of online conferences. Online conferences are easier for people with disabilities that make travel difficult, people for whom travel is a financial burden, people who live far from the conference site, and people whose caretaking duties keep them home. By canceling the 2+1 experiment, the APA once again deprioritized the interests of these groups. A second argument emphasized climate change -- all that jet travel.

Still, I see the APA leadership's point. The large majority of conference-goers find in-person conferences more rewarding. I am among that majority. Sitting on Zoom all day watching remote talks is approximately as appealing as waiting all day in a dentist's office under a blaring TV. I'd much rather just read the papers! Or if I'm watching video, at least let it be one I can speed up, pause, and skip.

For me, most of the value in conferencing comes from the personal interactions before and after the talks, the hallway conversations, the dinners together, the little walks outside when we're skipping sessions. Even the sessions themselves, as delivered talks with Q&A, feel somehow more satisfying when you're actually in the same physical space. No remote conferencing tool has yet replaced all of this. I supported Helen's 2+1 plan on grounds of accessibility, but it did feel like a sacrifice of one important thing for another.

Online Conferences Could and Will Become Much Better, but Only If We Try

But -- and this was the gist of my remarks at the De Cruz session -- comparing online conferences now with what online conferences could become is like looking at Usenet in the 1980s and thinking that nothing much more could become of the internet. Just as few people in the 1980s could have imagined Facebook, Uber, and YouTube, few of us now have much idea what online conferencing could become if given the chance to flourish.

So far, there's no real equivalent to running across friends in the hallway and escaping for a coffee down the block. And that exact thing will never be fully duplicated. But other tools encourage one-on-one and small group encounters in online conference applications. In Gathertown, you can move your icon around a virtual space, and if you step close to someone, a shared conversation video window opens. Zoom's breakout rooms enable small groups of attendees in a session to have more personal interactions. No company has quite figured out the right range of tools and interfaces, but I see no reason it couldn't get much better. We have barely begun the experiment.

And the talks themselves... let's be honest. Sitting through a forty-minute talk for a chance to ask one question in a line of ten is not the most appealing or efficient use of an hour. If we're a largish audience confined to a single physical room, maybe that's the best we can do. But the internet could allow much more.

Already Zoom can enrich talks in at least three ways: First, sidebar conversations permit tangents without interrupting the main flow (this could be improved if the conversations were separable and navigable). Second, online resources can be shared: data sets to explore and manipulate, interactive figures, links to other resources, etc. Third, breakout rooms let small groups converse, so that you're not restricted to only listening or asking just one question.

What I want you to imagine is that these features are still the equivalent of the Usenet era. With the right design and engineering, listening to a talk might become a much richer and more active experience, with the audience engaging in parallel while following the speaker. (If you object that this distracts from single-minded focus on the speaker, let me point you toward some informal beeper research I did that suggests that people are primarily attending to the content of a talk only about 25% of the time; further research tends to confirm these initial results.)

As for the hallway meetings, well, the stroll and tete-a-tete over coffee are delightful. But you do have to run into the person or be organized enough to plan ahead. You have to either know each other already or be extraverted enough to approach a stranger. Online conferences might eventually have much better ways of connecting people with mutual interests for one-on-one or small-group conversations.

And if you love walking, as I do, then with good internet connectivity, you could stroll through the park while listening to the talk, keeping your energy up and raising the blood from your calves back into your brain.

I anticipate that eventually, if we give it a good enough try, online conferences will be better overall than in-person conferences, even if not better in every respect -- but only if enough of us try, long enough, and in different ways, with the evolving tools that companies will be inspired to build if we create the market for them.

We have failed to be as good and as visionary as Helen hoped we would be, and as she herself was.

[Helen De Cruz; source]

Herbie: A Near-Future Debatably Conscious AI Person

Liberals about AI consciousness hold that we might soon (if we haven't already) create genuinely conscious AI systems. Conservatives about AI consciousness hold that AI consciousness remains in the distant future if it's possible at all. According to the Leapfrog Hypothesis, the first conscious AI will not have merely a dim glow of animal-like consciousness, but rich consciousness, similar to a human's. Such an entity would deserve humanlike rights. They would be a person in the ethical sense of the term.

Let's design, in imagination, a technologically feasible near-future AI system to delight the liberals, leapfrogging to personhood. I'll call him Herbie.

[Herbie the Love Bug: image source]

Start with a self-driving car. According to Global Workspace Theory -- perhaps the leading scientific theory of consciousness -- the car will be conscious if high-priority information is globally available to its various computational systems. For example, a representation like "battery almost empty" could be broadcast widely, influencing downstream processing across the vehicle. The navigational system might then search for nearby charging stations, while the acceleration system prioritizes greater energy efficiency, the braking system prioritizes better energy recapture, and a voice system announces the situation to the passengers.

In line with Higher Order Theory, Herbie might also monitor his representations of the road, vehicles, pedestrians, and hazards, assigning some a low probability of correctness. "Pedestrian at location X" might be flagged as only 60% likely to be correct given a history of revised representations of pedestrians in similarly cluttered environments, while "stoplight in 100 meters" might rate over 99% likely. Minor fluctuations in sensors for battery life, cabin temperature, and distance from a lane divider might be ignored as noise, while larger fluctuations -- especially when plausible given other representations (the battery is likelier to gain charge while braking than while accelerating) -- might be treated as accurate signals and permitted to influence downstream processing.

Even if we grant the liberals that this version of Herbie would, or might plausibly be, genuinely conscious, he still falls far short of humanlike consciousness. "Battery almost empty" and "pedestrian at location X" are hardly rich cognitive or perceptual contents. So let's give Herbie the capacity to speak. Fill his trunk with a server running a large language model, connected to the internet and integrated with his global workspace so that high-priority information provides context for language processing, with the language outputs influencing Herbie's other processes. Now people can chat with Herbie as they would with any language model. But unlike today's language models, his speech will be influenced by information about his location, speed, destination, charge, the condition of his parts, the number and location of his passengers, his radio and climate controls, and so on. He can discuss local history, debate whether the music is too loud, and suggest scenic routes.

"Predictive processing" theories in cognitive science emphasize the value of predicting future inputs and registering the difference between received and predicted inputs. When prediction error is large, the system corrects its weights and representations, enabling more accurate predictions in future situations. This is not so different from the reinforcement learning used to train large language models, and it could help Herbie improve his predictions over time. Predictive processing could occur at multiple levels: in fast recurrent loops within sensory systems even when those representations aren't prioritized for global broadcast, and in slower evaluations of globally broadcast, more integrative predictions. Herbie might model himself as an agent producing volatility in his own environment and inputs, at multiple temporal scales. Subroutines in specialized processors might model long chains of what-would-happen-if.

Let's give Herbie some long-term memory. A facial recognition system might identify his passengers, retrieving past interactions, names, previous destinations, and other information relevant to the current interaction. Incidents of high prediction error might also be stored so that Herbie can compare current inputs with past anomalies, improving his learning and attention in situations likely to be unusual or hard to predict. Passengers might also instruct Herbie to store information in long-term memory, such as text, pictures, maps, or records of his own informational states, optionally with instructions about when to retrieve that information how to use it.

Herbie will have some implicitly or explicitly weighted goals. A pedestrian suddenly in his path will trigger braking, overriding lower-priority processes. Avoiding collisions will outweigh conserving energy. Herbie might monitor the condition of his parts and prioritize preventing damage, deploying extra coolant when the engine is dangerously hot and keeping a one-meter margin between himself and adjacent cars. We can enrich his goals, making him more interesting and giving him more to do. He might have the goal of delighting children, leading him to drive around town and tell jokes to kids on the sidewalk. A reinforcement learning algorithm might strengthen connections when his jokes draw a smile, weaken them when reactions are neutral or negative.

Herbie might also have the goal of photographing the city and posting the images on social media, leading him to explore. If social media likes and shares are rewarding, he might learn to prefer certain neighborhoods, views, lighting conditions, and photographic approaches, while avoiding boring repetition. All of this could feed into a global workspace that provides context for his language model, with selective long-term storage and retrieval. Now we can imagine him discussing, with growing sophistication, his approaches to popular photography and to amusing children.

Herbie will then have something functionally similar to emotion: reward processes, an ability to track his progress toward or away from valued goals, and immediate positive or negative responses to new stimuli in light of their influence on his prospects. He will have something functionally similar to introspection: an ability to track and report his own cognitive or representational processes. He will have something functionally similar to a unified sense of self: a sense of his history, the boundaries of his body, his future, his values and priorities. He will have something functionally similar to imagination: a capacity to model hypothetical sequences of events. He will have something functionally similar to complex chains of humanlike linguistic thought.

Maybe Herbie falls in love with his owner or another car of his type. Maybe he develops deep mutual attachments with friends, neighbors, associates, and people he thinks of as family and who think of him the same way. Or to speak more carefully, maybe Herbie shows all the functional and behavioral signs of doing so, while society remains uncertain whether he is genuinely conscious and genuinely experiences the feelings he professes and that his companions attribute to him.

If we allow, with the liberals, that Herbie is or might well be conscious, then it's plausible that his consciousness is not simple but rich and sophisticated. He won't be exactly humanlike, of course. But will he be humanlike enough to count as a person who deserves humanlike rights? For the liberally inclined, it won't be unreasonable, I submit, to think or guess that Herbie is a person. He would then appear to deserve rights such as self-determination, emergency care, and political representation.

If there is some important aspect of humanlike consciousness that I have omitted from my description an AI analog of which is technologically feasible in the near term, stipulate that Herbie also has that feature.

An entity like Herbie would almost certainly invigorate conservatives to articulate and defend views about what he lacks that is necessary for consciousness -- some crucial functional capacity or some biological substrate that can't be replicated in silicon. And they might be entirely right! My point is not that Herbie, or some similar AI system, would actually have richly humanlike consciousness and ethical personhood. Rather, my point is that guessing that he does, and guessing that he does not, would both be reasonable. Herbie, or some alternative near-future AI system, would be a debatable person, about whom people could reasonably starkly disagree.

Ah, but maybe you think consciousness requires an act of God, to instill an immaterial soul? I imagine that a benevolent God would be delighted to give Herbie a soul, thereby making the world richer and better -- for wouldn't it be?

I contend the following: Anyone who claims to know how best to think about Herbie's consciousness or its absence is overconfident. The science of consciousness is too difficult, too methodologically uncertain, and too near its beginnings. All anyone can have -- whether expert or layperson -- is a hunch or inclination, a well-informed guess, but only a guess, not knowledge. Theories of consciousness span a wide spectrum and the methodologies are dubious and often question-begging. Many views can be defended with some plausibility, but precisely for that reason, none can be defended decisively. (For more on this issue, see my forthcoming book, AI and Consciousness, where I present the detailed case for uncertainty.)