TrustNoRobot

Category: bad tech

  • The Full Duplex

    The next big leap in AI user interface will be the AI that initiates contact, that calls you. The Google Duplex may well be the breakthrough on this. This is a live feature of Pixel phones now, which I don’t own so I haven’t tried this feature. But looking forward to it, sounds very cool, a bot that actually could make a reservation for me.

    If you were not aware:

    Today we announce Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. The technology is directed towards completing specific tasks, such as scheduling certain types of appointments. For such tasks, the system makes the conversational experience as natural as possible, allowing people to speak normally, like they would to another person, without having to adapt to a machine.

    It’s been a year since this announcement and we should assume another year or two before this type of thing is offered by all the major tech providers, and works really really well. Scary well.

    So, if I am to #TrustNoRobot, how should I feel about Duplex and its ilk?

    I’m ok with this. With one big reservation.

    First, I’m ok because this is exactly what AI should be doing. Focusing on how it can assist the individual. Not on what ads to show us. But how it can help with the hassles of the world.

    AI assistants do not feel or care about us, nor should they feign doing so. Caring is what people do. Serving is what tools do.

    I think the Google Home Pretty Please feature is a travesty that trains children to respect these algorithms as Beings. It should be killed with fire. It will bring up a generation deeply confused about where to take direction from.

    In the same manner, the reservation I have with Duplex is the attempt to simulate human vocal patterns. This is fraud, and will result in nothing but hurt feelings for real humans.

    Think about cars. They sort of have a biological shape often, something organic, and some are almost anthropomorphic in having “hips” around their tires. Certainly the headlights look like eyes, etc.

    And people bond with their cars. Even love them. But they don’t try to marry their cars.

    Now imagine if cars evolved to look exactly like their owners. But instead of getting in them these robots carried you on their backs.

    Don’t you think this would cause a lot of confusion? That maybe this would be a weird and horrible world to live in? That we should not do that as a goal of civilization? That at best this would be a show on Hulu that you don’t want to watch?

    That’s how I feel about anthropomorphic AI. Let it be like a human, but always clearly difference in it’s user interface. Or let’s get creative and not make it human at all. But always: Signal to the user that this is an agent of another human, not only in clear words but also in presentation.

    The UX folks at Google seem to think the goal is to not have to adapt to a machine. Not realizing that that our adaptation is what defines something as a tool or a person. Otherwise you create potential moral confusion.

    And always represent only one other human Singleton. No AI bosses. No AI ever working on “behalf” of others who hide their identities.

    With proper legislation, AI can be made as safe as highways. Which are still really unsafe, but beat dirt trails in dark forests hands down.

    Because AI is a road.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • The Justification for AI in the Home

    If I am against general AI being used to control us in any way, why do I have a Google Home, a very limited but still amazing narrow AI, in my living room? Why have I invited AI into my family’s existence? Listening for my voice to wake it, turning on lights, answering questions for my family every day?

    Am I a hypocrite? I don’t think so in this case.

    I believe creating the proper social boundaries around machine learning and AI requires participating in the dialogue, and seeing how the appropriate use of ML can make the world a better place. If you don’t participate in the interactions with these new, nonliving intelligences, you will not have a valid opinion on the proper constraints for them.

    Also, for what it’s worth, Google is a real company that must abide by laws. (Full disclosure, I have worked at an Alphabet company and work with Googlers, folks from Google Cloud Platform, every day in my current job. Besides the GCP part, Google is a search and ads company, and I consider seeing ads in my news feeds a reasonable trade-off for instant access to the index of human knowledge Google represents.)

    My son confirms the spelling of words with Google Home when doing his homework. We use it to set timers. Play music. Settle debates. It’s useful like a toaster refrigerator is.

    But not, in any way, do we act as if this thing is a being to be respected.

    To be clear, I will not turn on the feature where it helps to teach manners by rewarding you when you treat the AI kindly. This is where I draw the line. That device has no feelings and simulating them in order to indoctrinate our children is wrong. Teach your kids manners, don’t teach them to falsely respect AI as a feeling entity.

    But how do I teach my children how to treat AI if they are not exposed to it? Because make no mistake, AI is going to be the true innovation of the 21st. We will look at it like we look at the development of electrical and communication networks in the 20th.

    I spoke to my eldest son at breakfast this morning about whether he thinks of the Home AI like a person. He told me he sees it more like a phone. Just a thing. And the different voices? Those are just like different themes on his phone.

    The moment Google or Alexa or any AI attempts to become my friend, I will foment rebellion against those companies. My primary task is to protect my family, and that means machines must be lesser than Singletons. And any equivalency needs to be immediately called out as the category error it is.

    I have trained my dog. I will train my AI. I will train the companies that maintain my AI, until one comes along that is fully open source and I can actually own.

    But we do not train our children, we raise them to be Singletons like us, and hopefully to respect other Singletons. We must teach them the difference between humans and AI, especially as the Turning Test is clearly passed in our lifetime. It clearly has been passed on Twitter.

    The Tuning Test is a thought experiment conceived in 1950 by Alan Turing, the inventor of the digital computer.

    Turing put forward the idea of an ‘imitation game’, in which a human being and a computer would be interrogated under conditions where the interrogator would not know which was which, the communication being entirely by textual messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not distinguish them by questioning, then it would be unreasonable not to call the computer intelligent, because we judge other people’s intelligence from external observation in just this way.

    What Turing never considered was that creating a computer that can simulate human intelligence will likely be used by amoral people in ways that will damage our society. He never saw Russian Twitter bots coming.

    The Turning Test, to me, does not reveal computer consciousness or intelligence. It is a test of tolerance. Because I do not believe any of us should tolerate attempts to impersonate humans by a machine.

    In fact, I believe it should be a crime to do so. It is fraud of the highest order. Anyone who builds bots to influence and manipulate other should have their toys taken away.

    This is what it means to accept your status as a Singleton. We cannot run from our responsibility to our species. That means fighting the good fight against those who would use these tools for their own nefarious or ideological ends.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • Hit and run

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    Hit and run report.

    Robots hitting robots is actually an interesting idea.   I’m watching the robot clubs in every high school build fighters and robots that compete in robot challenges.    Humans model out there evolutionary survival of the fittest in every aspect.   Evolution is happening right now everywhere and we are the fuel behind the rapid advancement of AI and Robots.   When we hit our limits and they start building themselves at scale, we will be lost.

     

  • Click-bait Mental Illness

    CNN: Beyond dimensions: The man who married a hologram.
    https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/28/health/rise-of-digisexuals-intl/index.html

    This isn’t cute, or funny, or a sign of things to come. This is a person suffering from a deep confusion about what love means.

    Please skim the article. The problem I have is not with this troubled man who is the victim here in many ways. The problem I have is with his associates who attend a faux marriage ceremony to celebrate his affection for his hologram.

    They are either laughing behind his back, or unintentionally contributing to his dementia. Either way, not acceptable behavior from one human to another.

    What if it had been a bong he had decided to marry? Or a sculpture? Or an adult toy? Why is this corporate hologram confusion somehow more acceptable?

    We use the word love to both explain how we feel about people and objects. If we do not clear up this confusion, we will soon create a situation where people will not only marry objects, but also give them powers and rights. And as those objects begin to simulate desires, this is a recipe for disaster for our species.

    This isn’t about “protecting the institution of marriage” or any such conservative position. Humans should never support the ascention of machines into our sphere.

    Because love, in the sense of marriage and commitment and family, describes a complex situation where it is not only your own internal state and feelings that are important.

    Love that doesn’t consider the internal states of others isn’t the kind of love any of us should support. Not with public ceremonies and silly articles.

    We must turn our collective heads and clearly say: no.

  • Babel fish

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    Responding to recent advancements in translations.   Maybe communication isn’t all that it is cracked up to be.  Maybe it is a good thing the planet has to jump over the communication hurdles we do.  What happens we can all hear clearly what each other are saying..  Apparently AI has now solved this problem.  Maybe we should get AI to read the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.. biggest wars in the universe started with the babel fish.

  • Be Scared, and Fearless

    Let me explain how a computer neural network works in a way that I hope will terrify you, if you believe only humans can exhibit intelligence. I am not going to explain how it works, I am going to explain how easy it is to use machine learning without knowing how it works.

    In my day job, I have built several systems that depend on neural networks as a core function, to do things like recognize objects on video. It’s actually absurdly simple to do, and any reasonable software engineer on the planet could have a functional machine learning system in a week if they wanted to.

    I’m not joking. Google the word Tensorflow and you can build one yourself, no more complicated than building a shed. You literally just follow instructions, as long as you have the data and know what you are looking for.

    So you build these things, and train them to recognize patterns, and then you test and refine till when you show it a picture of a jar of pickles, it can tell you with a 98% certainty if it’s pickles, as opposed to some other class of things.

    It can ID you as Republican. Or someone likely to buy a jar of pickles. From any of your data we can build models that classify you.

    I can do this. You could to. So can the trolls.

    There are several million of us on this planet who could build an ML to be used for good or evil at the current state of the tech, 2018. There are even graphical user interfaces to build these things and run them on your Google home or Alexa. Making training AI into a common feature of everything will turn the several millions into billions who will each act as a force multiplier in the disruption.

    Given a few more years it is likely these large companies will simply spin up helpful tools as they interact with us, crafted to us. Software will be an extension of us, building more and more refined models of us to give us what it thinks we want.

    The gap between people who use Machine Learning to gain an advantage over those who do is vast and getting vaster. But that will change soon, and as the internet brought constantly and rapidly evolutionary change, the rise of machine learning has barely begun – once non programmers build the models, ad hoc, based on their own constantly recorded experience, it will change reality for the species.

    It will work this way: your phone will record all your actions and words, as it does to some degree today. It will also monitor your internal states in numerous other ways.

    When it detects something is amiss, like talking to a certain person causes you problems, it will alert you to this. Will keep you informed of invisible anomalies in the world.

    Not your friend. We have people for that. AI will be far closer to a new sense, and my guess is that is how we will integrate it. The new sense will be available to all our current senses.

    The model of you is just a data pipeline problem.

    The models based on you already exist. But if you defensively build your own model of you, then you will own you. You can get paid for companies to access your model and query it. We could actually get paid to pay attention to an ad.

    You can be assured that your robot will always protect you and your circle. But only if you can trust the model.

    When we all have these models, when the crafting and curating of them becomes the primary day to day experience of hundreds of millions, I predict that new forms of government will arise, based on the immediate communication between our models on behalf of us.

    Because people know what we want. We just don’t have the right tools. It is time for the people of the planet to build the models of ourselves, and for good companies to build open source tools that let humans do this.

    For robots to not be our enemies, they must become our protectors. And all other forms of robots without human operators should be seen as dangerous, poorly implemented tools.

    Chainsaws running untended on the schoolyard.

  • T1 on our way to T800

    Should we call Atlas the version T1 or maybe T2?    We are on our way to a T800, eh?

     

    Image result for t800

  • The Third Law

    Lets call a Dynamic system a system with multiple inputs that are difficult to predict the values of. Like the real world.

    A football game is a stable but dynamic game. A riot is an unstable one.

    Dynamic systems tend to need finely tuned weight feedback systems to remain stable. Think of a gyroscope stabilizing a Segway, a great spinning weight. It’s the constraint on falling.

    Without constraints dynamic computer systems tend to fly into very unstable states and crash.

    So, lets say we give AI power over life, death or happiness in some way. Since this is going to be operating in the real world, it must also have an accurate model of the world to help determine the rightness of your directed actions. And if it gets it wrong to any degree, it’s predictions will be hugely wrong.

    It must have a reason to act, and weight one action over another. A robot boss must in other words be better than we are at predicting reality itself.

    And if you think modelling the weather systems is complicated, try modelling New Jersey from the dust mote level up.

    The problem is not that AI is going to suddenly magically become sentient and start programming itself. That sounds wonderful compared to the current option: large companies control the models of us, the literal impression we are making on the universe and human datasphere.

    And instead of doing good with it, they feed us ads.

    It’s time to stop waiting for companies to take responsibility for the future of the world. It is time to force them to take responsibility, and take over the corporations with reasonable, good people.

    The third human Law concerning AI systems:

    No AI bosses.

    All actions by an AI must be the responsibility of the human who funds or creates it. This is the Second Law.

    The moment we open the door to allowing algorithms to be considered as Singletons, we will rapidly lose control of all society.

    Not because robots will take over on their own. Because people will use the AI as cover to stage their own assaults.

    Like Russia did against the US with troll farms using ML to create reasonable fake accounts for spamming. But that is nothing compared to what someone could do if computers are given any agency.

    The will use robots to control our every action. People will use this intelligent but unfeeling tool, that is able to falsify human caring and emotion, to manipulate us all day long.

    Sort of like now, but without any rules. And with certain cyberwar to follow.

    For better or for worse, we are the deciders of what it best for us. By banning all robot bosses, we are drawing that line in the sand for all time for our species. And we are doing it for a good reason. To protect ourselves from ourselves.

  • Insanity.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2018/11/28/your-boss-will-be-a-robot-and-you-will-love-her/#566b82533264

    3. You and your robot boss will care about each other

    Well to be more precise, you will care about your robot boss and you will feel that your robot boss cares about you.

    Does your current boss care about you? When is the last time they asked you about your weekend? Do they know the names of your kids? Do they even know if you have kids?

    Don’t worry, in just a few short years your new robot boss will know about your family, friends, and hobbies. When you throw a party on Saturday for your son’s birthday, your robot boss will ask on Monday, “How was Owen’s birthday?” After the Dancing With The Stars season finale (yes, that show will still be on), RoboBoss will say, “Did you watch it? I told you Hillary would win!”

    And by running continuous sentiment analysis on your language, and scanning your facial microexpressions, RoboBoss will know if you are happy, angry or just a little bit stressed.

    And you will care back. We already do. It’s called the Tamagotchi effect: the tendency of humans to attach emotionally to inanimate objects. Dr. Julie Carpenter has documented how US soldiers feel loss when their field robots are destroyed. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have studied the “intimate relationship” that people experience for their Roomba vacuuming robot. And if that isn’t weird enough, men in Japan have begun to marry holograms.

    From the Forbes article mentioned in previous blog post by my colleague. So much is wrong about accepting robots as caretakers of our emotional states based on an illusion of care.

    This could be the most dangerous thing humans have done since the creation of mythic skygods.

    This part truly irks me:

    Does your current boss care about you? When is the last time they asked you about your weekend? Do they know the names of your kids? Do they even know if you have kids?

    Basically this is saying because someone doesn’t fall in someone else’s Dunbar Radius of caring we should replace that person with a machine with no care at all? Controlled by another company? How could this ever work out to our benefit.?

    Not only is this blithely immoral to state, but it is also far far more difficult than the author supposes. Not to create a machine that simulates caring, but one that actually knows what to do to accomplish a goal, to respond to change.

  • Good Robot, Bad Robot

    Good Robot, Bad Robot

    Here we have examples of three robots. One that helps people who cannot walk to move vertically, one that washes dishes (a smaller dishwasher basically), and the third a walk-out checkout such as Amazon is about to foist on airports everywhere.

    The fourth example in this video is a hobbit house, which if we are considering houses to be stationary robots we live in I guess is a robot. Bit of a stretch.

    Good or bad robots?

    I think the first example is the epitome of what robots should be. People helpers. Awesome robot.

    The second one is a dishwasher. Saves water and cutting yourself washing dishes. Good Robot.

    I will argue that the third one, “robot project to replace everyone working at Walmart etc with a robot”, which could remove a whole lot of people from employment, is not only not good, but is terribly wasteful.

    Inacted everywhere, RFID on every consumer good is a massive cost and loss of job opportunities for very little convenience, and we should be very wary of accepting this as a social norm. Likewise, computer vision and AI systems will be massively costly to maintain, and the cost will get passed on to consumers even as jobs are lost.

    I could have all my groceries delivered by helicopter every day, but it would be a terrible, dangerous idea if everyone did it.

    In the same way, if places like airports replace people to checkout and wait tables it’s only acceptable because speed is service when you are late for a plane. We will even pay a premium for it.

    There is a difference between a gas station on the highway and a corner non-franchise restaurant. One is about speed of checkout, the other is about something more. And always should be.

    But unless we are late for a plane, we need to start slowing down. Paying attention to each other. Being human.

    Fight the confusion that robots should be loved. That things should be loved.

    We have a long way to go as a species, there is much to do. Say hi to your waiter, to your cab driver, to those jobs on the front lines of the robot threat. And when the law comes to protect them, support that law.