Outrunning the Herd

No surprise here - children are more susceptible than adults to influence by robots, even if they're obviously not people.

I'll paraphrase - a bunch of kids were put in a room with a bunch of robots and asked to do dumb sh** that they wouldn't or shouldn't be doing. They could be influenced to do said things as long as the robots made it seem ok.

We used to call this peer pressure. Now we refer to a well-known scientific experiemnt called the Asch paradigm, and it is a standard for measuring conformity. If enough people believe something to be true, it starts to become "true," whether it's true or not. This is how society works. So this idea of succumbing to peer pressure isn't new or unknown, but the effect on kids vs adults, and that it's instigated by a  humanoid, is new, or at least a reminder of how susceptible we are to the influence of others, especially at a young age.

Our allegiance to non-humans shouldn't be too crazy to consider. In case you don't remember your childhood, or don't have kids of your own, let me remind you that for an entire decade in America, a 6-ft tall, purple fuzzy dinosaur told kids what to do. And before that, I do recall letting 16-bit video games take control of my life  for a good 5 years. Kids are not too picky about who they take authority from. If they did, puppet shows might not exist. Lacking a mature brain to generate their own purpose in life, they put a premium on the opinions, beliefs and especially the commands of others. The Bicameral Mind work of Julian Jaynes might also have something to add to this.

Next, I'm not sure how much this is related in the study-authors' work, but I have to bring up Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions, because one of these dimensions (individualism vs collectivism) measures the degree of conformity to be found in a particular population. Some cultures value conformity more than others, for example by forcing everyone to have the same haircut, and so this peer pressure effect may be even more pronounced in other parts of the world. This kid-influencing robot study was conducted in the UK, where there is a wider variety of haircuts.

Let's also take a look back at how Neal Stephenson was playing with this idea more than 20 years ago in a novel about an artificially intelligent book that was designed to teach children, and obviously to influence their worldview and hence their behavior.

And while we're at it, let's remember what has already taken place in America in regards to advertising to children. (I don't know enough about this to link something relevant; but I'm pretty sure there are at least some rules on how, when, and what can be advertised to kids, and it has something to do with McDonald's and breakfast cereal.)

Finally, the inverse of this study says that adults are not swayed so easily as children by a group of robots, and that we should take this as  a cool warning about such dangers in the future. But we can't deny that today, adults are already manipulated by robots*.

I can't say it better than the tech guru Jaron Lanier - social media is a behavior modification platform. We may not obey robots with the servitude of a child, but most of us tend to be influenced by our friends, and even friends of our friends, and so on.

*When I say "robots" in this context of social media, I'm talking about algorithms embodied by avatars that pretend to be actual human people, or the many shades of intelligentities that lie in between. 

Image source: Someone help me cite this X-ray Kermit picture? circa 2010


Notes:
Children 'at risk of robot influence'
Aug 2018, BBC News

Asch Test of Conformity - a test to measure the extent to which we are all suckers for social pressure.

Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions - offers a way to measure and compare some salient characteristics of culture

The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Neal Stephenson, 1995.


Post Script:
What happens when you combine the Asch Paradigm and the Turing Test?


Post Post Script:
Would you look at that, just as we talk about how kids are in danger of being manipulated by robots, we get the first hints of how that might not be such a bad idea for adults. When you have an a**hole robot staring you down while you do your job, you do a better job. Go figure. I think we knew this already, with the whole cardboard cut-out cop reducing store thefts.

It doesn't matter if a thing is a robot or a can opener. We can't tell the difference. Forget the Uncanny Valley, if we assign agency to washing machines and our own mobile phones, what makes you think a crappy-looking robot isn't good enough to trick us? We are social creatures, our brain a social tool, and as such, everything is a person, and every act a social interaction. The way you handle your toothbrush has a wisp of sociality to it. Now make your toothbrush talk and have eyes, and try not to let it influence you. We can't.

Presence of 'mean' robot found to improve human concentration
Aug 2018, phys.org

Architrays

Architecture inspired concrete desk accessories - The Islam. 

The artist/teacher/architect/art historian in me is really excited about this project that recently debuted - Architrays are an art history lesson in the form of indulgent decoration. These concrete trays are designed and fabricated by 7thFl, an industrial design duo (from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, same place I spent a good 5 years of my life learning about sustainable design). Each tray they make represents a historical period of architecture, from Gothic to Roman to the Islam tray pictured above. When it comes to geometric design, Islam knows what's up.

Here you see an example of how this kind of design is developed from a very simple algorithm, genius in its simplicity. You start with a circle, then you draw another circle so that its center lies anywhere on the first circle. Then you draw a third circle, again so that its center lies on the first circle, BUT so that the center of all three circles now make an equilateral triangle with 60 degree angles.

If you repeat this pattern all around the first circle, you get a hexagon. Look at the points of the image in the upper left, and see that they can make equilateral triangles and a hexagon. This is the starting point for the most complex, most beautiful of patterns.  And this is the theme cast into concrete by 7thFl for their Islamic Architray. In other words, these 'architrays' are a beautiful reminder of a rich history of art, design, and architecture. Check it out

High-Stakes Testing as the Inverse of Morality

On this day, as

Newark teachers union approves landmark contract offering merit pay bonuses,

and

3 Newark charter school officials investigated for cheating breached test security…

I think a lot about cheating in school, and have very strong opinions about it, usually falling into the category of ‘I don’t care if people cheat, because everyone is cheating at something’. I have been thinking also of things quantum-mechanical in nature, about self-fulfilling prophecy and the like. One day I read the article below. The next day I woke up with a thought in my head that read as such:

High-Stakes Testing is the Inverse of Morality

Most assertions that come from unconsciousness are not befitting of explanation and theoretical underpinning. Once I woke up with the maxim: “The active chemical in Listerine can be found between the lips of two people kissing.” Once else, however: “Bombs don’t scare people; people scare people.” Needless to say, in light of the way things seem to be working around here (i.e. American Politics and its utter disregard for truth in favor of a simply constructed story), I really don’t feel the need to explain why this is true, just that it is. And so, once again, the third time really is the charm, according to the basic tenets of advertising, at least:

High-Stakes Testing is the Inverse of Morality

After all, truth is only a thing that has been repeated many times.

links:

Stuyvesant Students Describe the How and the Why of Cheating

Vivian Yee, September 25, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/education/stuyvesant-high-school-students-describe-rationale-for-cheating.html

Newark teachers union approves landmark contract offering merit pay bonuses

Jeanette Rundquist/The Star-Ledger, November 14, 2012

http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2012/11/newark_school_merit_pay_contra.html

3 Newark charter school officials investigated for cheating breached test security

Jessica Calefati/The Star-Ledger, November 13, 2012

http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2012/11/3_newark_charter_school_offici.html

Quantum Pedagogical Theory

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/11/quantum-pedagogical-theory.html

Quantum Pedagogical Theory

WE BEGIN with a glimpse at the future of education:

The Global Arbitrage of Online Work

Quentin Hardy, OCTOBER 10, 2012

Recently two of the biggest online staffing companies, oDesk and Elance, have released surveys concerning the companies that hire workers over the Internet to do things like write software, and the mindset of online workers themselves.

[...]

 Education alone probably won’t help you get hired. Only 6 percent of the survey respondents rated schooling as a “very important” reason to hire someone. It was the lowest-rated reason to hire someone. Work experience was first, followed by how other people rated the contractor, pay, portfolio of work, references, and scores on skills tests that oDesk offers online.

In the future, having a degree may be helpful, but having a reputation will be even better.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/10/the-global-arbitrage-of-online-work/

NOW for the real subject at hand:

It’s Not Me, It’s You [aka "conditional stupidity"]

Annie Murphy Paul, October 6, 2012

Experiments show that when people report feeling comfortable with a conversational partner, they are judged by those partners and by observers as actually being more witty.

It’s just one example of the powerful influence that social factors can have on intelligence. As parents, teachers and students settle into the school year, this work should prompt us to think about intelligence not as a “lump of something that’s in our heads,” as the psychologist Joshua Aronson puts it, but as “a transaction among people.”

-truth, people, social dynamics, reality, the construction of reality, ‘quantum’

-truth becomes irrelevant. you tell them they are smart, and they become smart

-ignore the truth, make shit up, and watch it become reality

"Mr. Aronson, an associate professor at New York University, has been a leader in investigating the effects of social forces on academic achievement. Along with the psychologist Claude Steele, he identified the phenomenon known as “stereotype threat.” Members of groups believed to be academically inferior — African-American and Latino students enrolled in college, or female students in math and science courses — score much lower on tests when reminded beforehand of their race or gender."

-if you believe you are inferior, you will score lower on tests.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/intelligence-and-the-stereotype-threat.html?_r=0

please follow to the next logical extension:

High-Stakes Testing as the Inverse of Morality

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/11/high-stakes-testing-as-inverse-of.html

Ethiopian Kids Hack PLPCS in 5 Months with Zero Instruction

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn’t a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn’t going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English. Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don’t even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.

via: Surrogate Self

via: DVICE

Evan Ackerman, Oct 30, 2012

source: MIT

A bold experiment by the One Laptop Per Child organization has shown “encouraging” results.

By David Talbot on October 29, 2012

Wealth-Neutrality and Education

“Those holding wealth-neutral schemes for evaluating themselves and others feel less driven to succeed financially…People who measure their merit in terms of knowledge often make excellent students, but the best students less often become the wealthiest adults – despite education’s image as a route to economic success.”

(p23)

Thought Contagion: How belief spreads through society (the new science of memes)

Aaron Lynch, 1996