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.

Post Script

Max Ernst and the rest of the Surrealists experimented with 'automatic generation' a hundred years ago.

I'm reading an article here about how we're now using 'robot-generated script' to make things funny. Because, you know, robots are stupid, and we like to laugh at stupid things.

You give a script-writing robot a thousand Seinfeld episodes and ask it to make a Seinfeld episode. And when it messes up, we laugh.

I'm saying all this half tongue-in-cheek. Don't get me wrong, a lot of this stuff is funny. Maybe these smarty pants experimenting with neural  nets can give you plenty of examples of what I'm talking about.

It's funny when a computer screws up. It's funny when anyone screws up. I had a classmate in third grade who wore yellow-tinted stonewash jeans, and I remember making fun of him and getting in trouble for it. The stonewash was right on for that time in the world of fashion, but the yellow not so much. Things have to be messed up to be funny, but not too messed up.

There's a good formula for funny (and a good graph too) which says the level of funniness in a joke is a function of the probability of the punchline vs your expectations. Researchers exploring 'creative AI' look at the novelty vs the quality, because to be creative we have to be new, novel, unexpected, but not completely out of the ballpark.

My friend in 3rd grade got the stonewash right, but not the yellow dye. A trained neural net (I call them all robots for short) gets most of the material right, but once in a while it throws in there something crazy (something wrong) and we laugh.

The part where things get tricky is when we stop to consider what  we're laughing at - is it the abstracted novelty of the output, or is it that we've assigned agency to the network and are now making fun of it for messing up.

I'm just saying, we might not want to get into the habit of poking fun at these things - not because they will one day retaliate and destroy us, but because they are a reflection of ourselves.


image source: Max Ernst 1937 L'Ange du Foyer - Engel des Kamins

Was That Script Written By A Human Or An AI? Here’s How To Spot The Difference
Jun 2018, Futurism

Anatomy of a Joke
2012, Network Address

Botnik is a community of writers, artists and developers using machines to create things on and off the internet.

Mirror Body and Virtual Self

This image is for the wifi article below

Brain-robot training triggers improvement in paralysis
BBC, Aug 2016

"In virtually every one of these patients, the brain had erased the notion of having legs. You're paralysed, you're not moving, the legs are not providing feedback signals.

"By using a brain-machine interface in a virtual environment, we were able to see this concept gradually re-emerging into the brain."

The team intended to use that re-awakened control to drive the robotic legs - but within 12 months they saw such improvement in basic clinical scores that four of the eight patients were upgraded to a diagnosis of only partial paraplegia.

"When I saw this, I couldn't believe it," said Prof Nicolelis.

[and don't forget]
'Brain wi-fi' reverses leg paralysis in primate first
BBC, Nov 2016

And then, let's also not forget that in the remote controlled monkey brain experiments, the wifi-controlled monkey across the world gets its remote signal faster via wifi than our own nervous system. In other words, it takes longer to go from your brain to your legs than it does to go from NY to Shanghai.