See-Do-Imagine: A Ladder for the Users to Understand AI

Seeing - Doing - Imagining.

Hiero, the king of Syracuse, tasked his goldsmith with creating a golden crown, but he suspected that the goldsmith was trying to cheat him by using a mixture of gold and silver.

For months, he pondered over the problem, trying to come up with a solution, but to no avail. He consulted with the greatest minds of his time, but none could offer a solution. He tasked Archimedes, one of the most brilliant minds with the task.

He was pondering for days, weeks, months.

One day, as Archimedes was taking a relaxing dip in the bath, he noticed that the water level rose as he lowered himself into the tub. This got him thinking: what if he could measure the amount of water displaced by his body when he submerged himself completely?

He jumped out of the bath, ran down the street stark naked, shouting "Eureka!" (which, in Greek, means "I have found it!").

He realized that the amount of water displaced by his body when he submerged himself completely was equal to the volume of his body. And from this, he formulated the concept of density, which revolutionized the fields of physics and engineering.

Archimedes used his knowledge of density to devise a clever experiment. He filled a bathtub with water, then put a piece of pure gold in it and measured the amount of water displaced. He then repeated the experiment with the gold and silver mixture and found that the amount of water displaced was greater. This meant that the gold and silver mixture was less dense than pure gold and, therefore, the goldsmith was cheating the king.

1. The Seeing Stage: We're scratching our heads, thinking, hmm, how can we make sense of this mess? How are these things connected anyway?As Archimedes lowered his body into the bathtub, the water level rose. This got him thinking, "How are my body and the water related?" He started to visualize the results and the inputs. He wasn't trying to see all the variables, just the important ones. And from that simple observation, he was able to develop a theory of how the water displacement could be used to calculate the density of different materials.Let your users see the relationship between different variables, and show them how they relate.

2. The Doing Stage: This is where things get interesting. We're like, hold up, what's the deal with these variables? We are the kid playing with the radio, smashing buttons, and turning the knobs. "What happens if I do this?" and "How can I make this happen?" It's like a scientist's playground.Archimedes thought to use the density of gold to test the crown. He first needed to figure out how to measure density. So, he did what any curious scientist would do: he tried different metals with different densities and observed how they replaced the water.Like Archmides, we let our users manipulate certain variables to explore new ways of doing things. Show your users how the output would react to different values in a variable. Let them get a feel for the model.

3. The Intervening Stage: We go back and reflect on the two prior stages “Was it X that caused Y?”, “What if X had not occurred?”, or “What if I had acted differently?”Archimedes took it one step further and intervened with the observations themselves. He took a crown and questioned how much water it would displace if it was made of pure gold. By contrasting that with the amount of water it actually displaced, he was able to answer the question of whether the crown was made of pure gold or not.Let your users pair and contrast different observations and different values for certain variables, so they can observe their effects directly.

Sources

J. Pearl - The Book of Why