Empathic Intelligence and Digital Feelings

Making progress in the transition to cybernetic psycho-oppression, the Endocorporeal Datavore has released an ethical tribune to tame the wave of intelligentities at our doorstep.

In other words:
Google announces AI ethics panel
Mar 2019, BBC News
 
In a highly-cited thesis entitled Robots Should Be Slaves, Ms Bryson argued against the trend of treating robots like people.

"In humanising them," she wrote, "we not only further dehumanise real people, but also encourage poor human decision making in the allocation of resources and responsibility.
-Joanna Bryson

On the face of it, I think in the complete opposite direction. I think we need to be empathic to robots, because we already see them as people. Or to be more precise, we already personify them. Granted, it's the same as we do with a washing machine or even a car, but with robots it's different. We are making them in our own image, after all. We couldn't help that if we tried.

When that public service robot (DC?) fell into the pond, the articles joked that he offed himself on the first day on the job. Too stressful. How is that a good thing to model to those who look up to us, to poke fun at someone who has killed themselves. We know it's a robot, but kids don't know that. They don't know what anything means because we have to tell them first, to show them first. And if we treat things like crap, whether it's the washing machine or a pair of flip-flops, then they will treat things like crap too.

Not to mention, we're only a couple generations away from being robots ourselves. Prosthetic retinas, cochlear implants, pacemakers, exoskeletons. Did anyone not buy into the 'your cell phone is your exocortex' line by Jason Silva? We're already robots to some degree.

It is definitely good to hear what sounds to me like totally wrong and crazy talk, because this is an ethics panel, and you want to hear everything out there. We're still in such early phases of this, we want to shape the conversation to be as big as possible at this point. And I am pretty sure that Bryson's argument is one that needs to be digested at length, and not just from a small bite (she was chosen to be on this panel for a reason), so I look forward to getting more into it.

And while we're on the topic of empathic intelligence and robot feelings:
Britain's 'bullied' chatbots fight back
Mar 2019, BBC News

Service bots (chatbots) get abused. And I feel bad for them as I read this article.

Those who do research on these kinds of things say that humans are never-not going to test the boundaries. Like a child with their parent or a student and their teacher, we will always test the limits of another person. We do it to everyone in every relationship, but it's the asymmetrical ones where it's most evident (where one person has way more power than the other).

In the case of a chatbot, we also just want to test the believability. Sure they may have programmed this thing to help me return a defective dehumidifier, but did they program it to tell me to f*** off when I give it a hard time? How real is this thing?

Plum, a service chatbot who wants us to think xe's very real, is now programmed to respond: "I might be a robot but I have digital feelings. Please don't swear."

Digital. Feelings.

Misinformation Networks

Entire networks, vast, deep, and coordinated. Not to imply conspiracy theories; they aren't that coordinated. But they are big, and myriad.

A description of how one of these networks operates:

"The group was able to gain followers by setting up innocent-looking pages and groups. It later renamed them, and started posting politically-motivated content...including topics like immigration, free speech, racism, LGBT issues, far-right politics, issues between India and Pakistan, and religious beliefs including Islam and Christianity."
-BBC

"We're taking down these pages and accounts based on their behaviour, not the content they posted."
-Facebook via BBC

They call it "co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour". I don't recall hearing this as part of the story of digital surveillance in general, but it sounds like an improvement. (Well, there's articles dating back to Nov 2018 at least, where this term is used.) Behavior is data-rich, and makes Content look one-dimensional in contrast. Coordinated behavior is even more data-rich, because we're talking about the behavior of people in the context of other people.

-image source: MIT


Notes:
Facebook finds UK-based 'fake news' network
Mar 2019, BBC News

Quantum Futures

It's been a while since we saw "Wegman Reading Two Books". This is one of my favorite pictures ever; I thought it made sense here.

I'm reading about quantum computers on the commute home from work. It's not the computers I'm interested in, and it's not the quantum part either. I'm not a computer scientist, or a quantum scientist. But I do like to think about the future, and if anything says "future", it's quantum computers.

There's a strong theme running in these articles though, the kind of thing I look for in articles about technology. In this case, the problem with quantum computing is that it works so differently from a classical computer, that we kind of don't even know what to do with it.

When tasked with devising a test to evaluate the performance of a quantum computer, a moment is revealed:

"I quickly ran into trouble trying to figure out how to run these [scripts] on the D-Wave machine. You need a huge shift in the way you think about problems, and I am a very straightforward thinker."
-Chris Lee for Ars Technica, 2019

It's a casual statement in a casual popular science article, but it's the unassuming bits like this that may be revealed as prescient in years to come. Like in 1890, "Why the heck would you want to screw anything else besides a lightbulb into this electrical light bulb socket??"
It's true, stuff like washing machines would be plugged into the 'light socket' via a cord designed specifically for a light socket; the dual-pronged plug that we are used to, in the US at least, didn't come until much later, and required a drastic paradigm shift in order to see electricity as serving anything but electric light.

Back to quantum computers. Things like this, when the technology forces us to reshape not only our thinking and not only the answers, but more importantly the questions that we ask, and the way we ask, and then ultimately the things we want and the things we care about, are what Kuhn was writing about in his Structures of Scientific Revolution.

Notes:
D-Wave 2000Q hands-on - Steep learning curve for quantum computing
Mar 2019, Ars Technica

Post Script:
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn, 1962

Science does not progress via linear accumulation of new knowledge, but undergoes periodic revolutions, also called "paradigm shifts" in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed.

Thomas Kuhn - the man who changed the way the world looked at science
John Naughton, The Guardian, 2012

Measles is the Winner by TKO

Measles is so powerful that after we defeated it with vaccines, it came back even stronger to infect our minds!

We might think of vaccines as a meta-defense, a meta-immune system, which could also be called Public Health or even just modern medicine. Measles has found a way to penetrate this defense.

The anti-vax meme is, perhaps, the first example of a disease making the transition from the biosphere to the noosphere, so that we now, in order to fight measles, we need to inoculate our minds in addition to our bodies. (A mental vaccine, that is.)

Via Dawkins' Selfish Gene, we don't get measles, measles gets us. And in 2018-2019, it's doing a damn good job.

Here's a few newsbits on the subject:

Antivaxxers turn to homeschooling to avoid protecting their kids’ health
July 2019, Ars Technica

Analyzing a Facebook-fueled anti-vaccination attack - 'It's not all about autism'
Mar 2019, phys.org

An analysis of Facebook profiles for people who posted anti-vaccination sentiments reveals four key subgroups that are interconnected by various themes. Credit: Elsevier

...anti-vaccination arguments are not "all about autism" and center on four distinct themes that can appeal to diverse audiences in four distinct subgroups:

• "trust," which emphasized suspicion of the scientific community and concerns about personal liberty;
• "alternatives," which focused on chemicals in vaccines and the use of homeopathic remedies instead of vaccination;
• "safety," which focused on perceived risks and concerns about vaccination being immoral; and
• "conspiracy," which suggested that the government and other entities hide information that this subgroup believes to be facts, including that the polio virus does not exist.

Beth L. Hoffman et al, It's not all about autism: The emerging landscape of anti-vaccination sentiment on Facebook, Vaccine (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.03.003


Facebook Takes Steps to Curb Sensational Health Claims
Molly Schuetz, Bloomberg, July 2, 2019

Deprioritizing sensationalist health posts that make misleading claims or tout “miracle cures,” and posts that use health-related claims to promote products or services, such as weight-loss pills.

On Deceptive Language:
April Fools hoax stories could offer clues to help identify 'fake news'
Mar 2019, phys.org

"April Fools hoaxes are very useful because they provide us with a verifiable body of deceptive texts that give us an opportunity to find out about the linguistic techniques used when an author writes something fictitious disguised as a factual account," said Edward Dearden from Lancaster University, and lead-author of the research. "By looking at the language used in April Fools and comparing them with fake news stories we can get a better picture of the kinds of language used by authors of disinformation."

The researchers found that April fools hoax stories, when compared to genuine news:

• Are generally shorter in length
• Use more unique words
• Use longer sentences
• Are easier to read
• Refer to vague events in the future
• Contain more references to the present
• Are less interested in past events
• Contain fewer proper nouns
• Use more first person pronouns

Fake news stories, when compared to genuine news:

• Are shorter in length
• Are easier to read
• Use simplistic language
• Contain fewer punctuation marks
• Contain more proper nouns
• Are generally less formal—use more first names such as 'Hillary' and contain more profanity and spelling mistakes
• Contain very few dates
• Use more first person pronouns

Post Script
Study busts myths about gossip
May 2019, phys.org

"There is a surprising dearth of information about who gossips and how, given public interest and opinion on the subject," said Megan Robbins, an assistant psychology professor who led the study along with Alexander Karan, a graduate student in her lab.

If you're going to look at gossip like an academic, remove the value judgment we assign to the word. Gossip, in the academic's view, is not bad. It's simply talking about someone who isn't present. That talk could be positive, neutral, or negative.

"With that definition, it would be hard to think of a person who never gossips because that would mean the only time they mention someone is in their presence," Robbins said. "They could never talk about a celebrity unless the celebrity was present for the conversation; they would only mention any detail about anyone else if they are present."

• Younger people engage in more negative gossip than older adults. There was no correlation with overall frequency of gossip when all three categories were combined.
• About 14 percent of participants' conversations were gossip, or just under an hour in 16 waking hours
• Almost three-fourths of gossip was neutral. Negative gossip (604 instances) was twice as prevalent as positive (376)
• Gossip overwhelmingly was about an acquaintance and not a celebrity, with a comparison of 3,292 samples vs. 369
• Extraverts gossip far more frequently than introverts, across all three types of gossip
• Women gossip more than men, but only in neutral, information-sharing, gossip
• Poorer, less education people don't gossip more than wealthier, better-educated people.

Fuhgeddaboutit

The Right to Be Forgotten was an interesting turn. Something tells me that Forgetting will be big business pretty soon. As we reach a point of data saturation, we're now trying to come up with ways to not have "absolute data".

Amazon digital assistant Alexa gets new skill: amnesia
May 2019, phys.org

Microsoft deletes massive face recognition database
Jun 2019, BBC News

Interesting idea - deleting an online database:

"You can't make a data set disappear," Adam Harvey from the Megapixels site told Engadget."Once you post it, and people download it, it exists on hard drives all over the world."


Post Script
Researchers erase fearful memories in mice
AAAS, Aug 2014

So Fake

There's so much going on in the Fake sector that I just can't keep track; here's a few bits:

Author pulls software that used deep learning to virtually undress women
June 2019, Ars Technica

This is it. Deep learning, neural networks, generative adversarial networks, all that. We see now the world in the way it looked when the internet first started showing up in people's homes, but then all of the sudden, a phone could connect to the internet while you're walking down the street.

Deep learning is the robots doing things humans never thought a robot could do, and things we never even thought to ask for. It's absolute magic, and it's about to completely f--- our sh-- up.

Mona Lisa guest on TV? Researchers work out talking heads from photos, art
May 2019, phys.org

We can now extrapolate from photo to video. Is that what Mona Lisa really looked like? Does it really matter? It is astutely pointed out that unlike previous techniques, this one doesn't need 3-D modelling to make the leap.

And how?
"Lengthy meta-learning" that's how.

Facebook removes accounts from Russia, Iran for 'coordinated inauthentic behavior'
Mar 2019, Reuters

Has a nice ring to it. Reminds me of "Low-Credibility Information"

Anyway, the accounts were removed for their behavior and not their content. Let that be a lesson. Not sure if I see this as a good thing because it means that the screening algorithms are sophisticated enough to identify patterns of activity rather than simple vis/text content recognition, or it's a bad thing because it's getting harder and harder to get away with illicit activity on the web. Depends on which side you're on I guess.

Supporters in Trump Facebook adverts were actors
July 2019, BBC News

I think I'm not even mad.That's what stock footage is for, no? I mean, what is authenticity; Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas type stuff.

Melbourne fake Chinese beggars scam busted by police
July 2019, AUNews

Last but not least; it wouldn't be a report on the state of the fake without some of the old masters showing up.

From the same people who brought you the fake zoo with a legit dog purported to be a lion, we now bring you -- fake homeless people!

They are literally shipped from China to Australia to look disheveled and beg for money. I refuse to believe it but in the article they're talking about them clearing a few hundred dollars a day. Fake homeless people. It's one thing when you shave your head and throw on a saffron robe to be a begging Buddhist, but to be a part of an international underground beggar syndicate where you don't shower for weeks and lie prostrate on the ground, that's dedication.

*Actually, the more I look into this, the less funny it becomes. It's way more common than it should be, and devolves into maiming kids to use as bait; few people can resist giving money to a crippled kid on the street.


Post Script
On the Buddhist Beggar Syndicate and the geographic function of susceptibility:

"The men targeted out-of-towners, [Robert Hammond, executive director and co-founder of Friends of the High Line] said, adding that his office staff had a rule of thumb for watching the interactions: --Each second a visitor was willing to talk to one of the robed men was equal to 50 miles away from New York City that the person probably lived.-- New Yorkers would not give the men even a second’s worth of their time, Mr. Hammond added."
-The Fake Monks Are Back, Aggressively Begging
Christopher Mele, New York Times, July 1, 2016

Post Post Script

^Here we have a refined specimen. I can't tell you exactly what makes this jump out at me, but it screams "robot". Maybe it's a semibot, same difference, the purpose is to manipulate; there's something intentional about it. Maybe because people don't really comment on a message board in order to influence others, but to voice their opinion, and the two look pretty different. 

Notes
The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Onur Varol, Kai-Cheng Yang, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer. Nature Communications. Volume 9, Article number: 4787 (2018)

Here we analyze 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand articles on Twitter during ten months in 2016 and 2017.

Low Earth Orbit Package Deals

Outer Space is Open for Business

NASA to open International Space Station to tourists from 2020
June 2019, phys.org

The International Space Station will open to tourists by 2020. I don't need to say much else beyond the headline here, except that in the article, they refer to tourists as astronauts. In other words, soon we can all be astronauts.

Lasers in Training

Shots fired:

"There is a sizzle as a white "I was here" message is burned off the grey stone by the 56-year old... ."

"The laser evaporates the graffiti, without damaging the stone underneath," Daniela Valentini, who heads up the Angels' team of cultural heritage restorers, told AFP as she pointed the fibre laser's beam at a scrawled signature.

-link

The word graffiti comes from "sgraffito", which comes from "to scratch". It referred to the scratching away of residue to reveal the surface underneath. There's a great modern example of this where artists leave their mark by removing decades-deep layers of dirt on city walls. It's called "reverse graffiti", although it's more closely related to the original word than spraypainting a subway car. In fact, most of us are guilty of this kind of graffiti. "Wash Me" written on a dirty window anyone? Running your finger through beads of condensation on a wet window? 

Graffiti took a hard turn with the advent of aerosol spray paint. A revolutionary turn. Spray paint changed everything. It also made graffiti a lot harder to remove. Before, you removed the graffiti by cleaning the surface. It was, in a way, a public service, a nudge. Now we need powerful solvents and specially-engineered surfaces to keep it under control. Graffiti is now a costly nuisance for property owners (but not hip marketing hustlers, or millenial-hungry municipalities with a couple empty walls in their downtown.)

Blazing past the harsh chemical treatments of the past, we've now entered the new era of graffiti removal. It might seem like overkill to burn it off with a laser, but this technique does help to preserve the defaced surface, since it only takes off the very top layer of the graffiti and nothing else.

But, as all things go, as fire fights fire, we have to wonder how this could evolve. Let's imagine that graffiti artists start using lasers the way the way they did spraypaint in the 1970's; what would that mean?

Then again, let's not think too hard. GRL already showed us what lasers can do. So did the sticky LED throwies that shut down Boston for a minute after glowing pictures of Aqua Teen Hunger Force showed up all over the place. 

Image source: Gareth Emery's Laserface via Dancing Astronaut

Notes:
World's first graffiti-busting laser helps Florence's 'Angels'
March 2019, phys.org

Graffiti Research Labs

US - Marines to buy 1,653 eye-safe laser dazzlers
May 2018, Laser Pointer Safety

Safety features include infrared light emission to detect your distance to it, and to reduce the output accordingly.

Can't say no to this:
Scotland - Scientists develop way to shoot laser light from eyes
May 2018, Laser Pointer Safety

Researchers have developed a membrane-thin laser emitter, widely reported in the press with headlines such as “Scientists Create Superman-like Eye Lasers.” When pumped by outside light, the membrane re-emits spectrally pure laser light.

I Am a Man

AKA Trees Are People Too

Lake Erie is now a person. "Environmental entity" to be specific. This is not the first time something like this has happened. There's also a river in New Zealand. The Amazon River as well.

It's interesting to see this happen as we approach a time when inanimate robots and synthetic biology alike are questioning our definitions of life, sentience and morality towards the "other".

Also, let's not forget that in Japan, Shintoism/Animism reveres all things, even mountains, as having a spirit. Even words have a spirit; What does that even mean!

Notes:
Ohio city votes to give Lake Erie personhood status over algae blooms
Feb 2019, The Guardian

Environmental Personhood
The Uncanny Valley

   

Breadlines

Unobtainium vs Handwavium, Know the Difference!

Just came here for the headlines:
Folding an acoustic vortex on a flat holographic transducer to form miniaturized selective acoustic tweezers
Apr 2019, phys.org

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