"I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot."

Is this scary, or just silly? - "I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot." | http://t.co/nxcbUd9vUA
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) August 21, 2013

"In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One"

"In our houses, cars, and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Now they are beginning to talk to one another. Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives."

So: Is that appealing, appalling, or what?

Thanks to Francis Harvey for sharing this.

"In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One" | Wired - Gadget Lab s.shr.lc/6hNVx2 - s.shr.lc/12AOtIw
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) May 17, 2013

Automated essay grading and Twitter followers

Let's see: College professors are starting to depend on computers to grade essays, and Twitter users are spending millions of dollars to get fake followers. Is this the best that AI can offer?

Less attention to teaching and fewer jobs for scholars? - Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break nyti.ms/ZaKIof
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) April 6, 2013

Can someone explain this to me? Pure vanity? - Fake Twitter Followers Become Multimillion-Dollar Business nyti.ms/12rV9aW
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) April 7, 2013

"Cars that drive themselves"

Always at the cutting edge of risky behavior, Nevada has "released draft rules to govern self-driving cars, which it has approved for testing on its public roads" (Cars that drive themselves, MSN Money, February 22, 2012). The car will have to have a sober, licensed driver behind the wheel. But it'll be legal to text while driving.

Thanks to Donald Searing for bringing this to my attention.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"The Future of Moral Machines"

This article by Indiana University professor Colin Allen (New York Times, December 25, 2011) is a clearly-written and engaging short introduction to the controversies surrounding "moral" machines.

I made the mistake of reading a few of the comments written by Times readers, the majority of whom seem to have either misunderstood the article or not bothered to read beyond the title. One wonders why people so disdainful of the New York Times and/or philosophy would torment themselves by reading the Times' "forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless" known as "The Stone."

At any rate, I do recommend that you read and enjoy the article itself.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Killer apps" and "big data"

Several years ago, I read an article - possibly a book review, probably in Science - that outlined the science underlying certain aspects of ancient and medieval warfare, including the mathematics of fortifications and catapults. Science and engineering have always been servants of war, for better and for worse, steadily producing more powerful and more accurate ways to kill and maim people, destroy property, and wreak havoc. My knowledge of military history is incomplete at best, and my knowledge of the history of diplomacy is probably even weaker, but I venture to guess that the "science" of negotiation and diplomacy - war by peaceful means - has not kept pace with the science of war, perhaps because it is so much easier to make better weapons than it is to make better men.*

This rumination was precipitated by two recent articles: A comment by P.W. Singer ("Military robotics and ethics: A world of killer apps," Nature 477:366-401, September 22, 2011) and a news article by John Markoff ("Government aims to build a 'data eye in the sky'," New York Times October 10, 2011).

Singer opens his piece by commenting on the unexpected consequences of the Manhattan Project, which "opened up entirely new areas of physics, revolutionized the energy industry and transformed world politics."

What is different today is the speed with which our technology can outpace our ethical and policy responses to it. Astounding advances grab the headlines so frequently that the public has become numb to their significance - whether it is robotic planes, directed-energy weapons such as high-energy lasers, or 'electric skin', tiny sensors that are applied to the body like tattoos.

We are "giants" when it comes to technology, but "ethical infants" when it comes to understanding its consequences, as US Army general Omar Bradley remarked in 1948. Bradley was referring to nuclear research, but as the pace of technologic change takes off, that gulf - between our sophisticated inventions and our crude grasp of the consequences - continues to widen. We need to start bridging it.

In light of this perspective, we should all be alarmed by news that both DARPA and IARPA (U.S. agencies that support cutting-edge research; the acronyms stand for Defense/Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency/Activity) are interested in using social science techniques to "mine the vast resources of the Internet" with automated systems that will provide a "data eye in the sky" to follow and, they hope, predict "political and economic events" as well as "pandemics and other types of widespread contagion."

There's not much point in demanding the cessation of such initiatives; they will be pursued by someone. There might be a chance to direct and control them, however. If we know how.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

*I use the word "men" in the old-fashioned sense of "human beings" because that usage, in spite of its sexist connotations, has a certain power and dignity, at least to my ear. Besides, until recently, war was pretty much a monopoly held by the males of the species, so I think we deserve the blame.

Mind-controlled robots, the Supreme Court on GPS, Wii without a wand, and computers that write

A small avalanche of PAIT-related articles buried me this weekend; let me see whether I can dig my way out.

• Disabled Patients Mind-Meld With Robots by Sara Reardon (ScienceNOW, September 6, 2011) - Using Skype and wearing "a cap of tiny electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes," two people "whose lower bodies were paralyzed and who had been bed bound for 6 or 7 years" controlled the movements of a modified commercial robot - Robotino -100 kilometers away. They used only their brain waves - no moving eyes, no twitching fingers. The paralyzed subjects had been trained for 1 hour a week for 6 weeks. The system had been tested earlier with non-paralyzed people, and the paralyzed subjects "performed just as well as the healthy subjects." Think of what this would mean to paralyzed people and their friends and families - it would be a miracle.
  
  My enthusiasm is, of course, always tempered by caution. The Hollywood version would have someone hack the system and take control of the robot to frame a paralyzed person for murder. My real concern, though, is accessibility. There's no mention in the article how much this rig would cost, and the manufacturer of Robotino, Festo Didactic, lists all of the prices associated with Robotino as "on request." I fear this is an instance of "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it."


• Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS by Adam Liptak (New York Times, September 10, 2011) - At least three federal judges have compared the use of global positioning system (GPS) devices by police to George Orwell's novel, 1984. In November, the Supreme Count "will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?"
  
  The answer seems obvious to me (hint: it begins with a "y"), but with the current court I'm not making any bets.


• Remote Control, With a Wave of a Hand by Anne Eisenberg (New York Times, September 10, 2011) - "Scientists at Microsoft Research and the University of Washington have come up with a new system that uses the human body as an antenna. The technology could one day be used to turn on lights, buy a ticket at a train station kiosk, or interact with a world of other computer applications. And no elaborate instruments would be required." No need for a Wii wand or the Kinect's cameras that track motion.
  
  Nothing is said about whether this technology could be used to identify and track specific individuals (is your repertoire of everyday gestures as distinctive as your face or fingerprints?).


• In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column, allegedly by Steve Lohr (New York Times, September 10, 2011) - I had heard some time ago about the effort to make computers write newspaper-style sports articles based solely on the statistics of the game. That such writing would soon be indistinguishable from prose written by a human sports writer I did not doubt. The time seems to be near.
  
  Somehow I can't get excited by this one.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

More on personalization; loving our devices; censor-proof Internet

Three interesting articles, two that have languished for weeks awaiting my attention, and one more recent.

• The Trouble With the Echo Chamber Online by Natasha Singer (New York Times, May 28, 2011) draws on Eli Pariser's recent book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You (see my earlier post) and an interview with Pariser, among other sources, to explore the downside of personalized Web searches and other online experiences: Increasing isolation.

• Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts. (New York Times, May 28, 2011) is an op-ed piece by John Franzen and drawn from his May 21 commencement address at Kenyon College, in which Franzen contrasts "the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love." It's a better than average commencement address, but, to my taste, the profundity mandate implicit in the genre gives the talk a sophomoric tone.

• U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors by James Glanz and John Markoff (New York Times, June 12, 2011) describes a "global effort" to develop technologies that will be able to do an end-run around Internet censorship, such as an Internet server that can fit in a suitcase. The goal is to empower groups struggling against "repressive governments."
  
  It's one of those ideas that give me a momentary thrill followed by a longer-lasting chill. I'm all for providing non-violent support to dissident groups, but it seems likely that these technologies could also be used for nefarious purposes. Once a technology is deployed, it will be imitated and re-deployed, and not necessarily for democracy-loving purposes. Would it be a boon for terrorists? For rogue governments?
  
  The only answer I have is that if the U.S. can develop these technologies with good intentions, others with bad intentions could develop them, too. Perhaps it's best to be ahead of the curve.
  

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"When the Internet Thinks It Knows You"

In this opinion piece from the New York Times (May 22, 2011) is written by Eli Pariser, one of the founders of and current president of the board of MoveOn.org. Pariser expresses concern about the "Internet giants - Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft -" who are so good at mining our browsing habits to customize advertising to the reader.

It isn't the advertising practices of these giants that bother Pariser; its the search filtering. To Pariser, some of the democratization that the Internet has fostered is a risk.

[W]hen personalization affects not just what you buy but how you think, different issues arise. Democracy depends on the citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints; the Internet limits such engagement when it offers up only information that reflects your already established point of view. While it’s sometimes convenient to see only what you want to see, it’s critical at other times that you see things that you don’t.

Insofar as this is a threat (and I think it is), I would say that Facebook has the potential to do the most harm. Doesn't it seem likely that the more time a person spends living in Facebook-land, talking only to chosen friends, the more likely her or his worldview will narrow?

Parsier believes that companies that use this kind of technology should "give us control over what we see - making it clear when they are personalizing, and allowing us to shape and adjust our own filters."

Will they heed his call? I doubt it. Would it do any good if they did? Not much, I'd guess. Most people wouldn't take the time to shape their own filters. It's so easy and pleasant to let someone else filter for me and categorize my behaviors so I don't have to - it's like Shangri-La.

But I'd use the "search filter off" option sometimes.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Preventing the Next Flash Crash"

In this editorial (New York Times, May 6, 2011), Edward E. Kaufman Jr., a former U.S. Senator (D-Delaware) and current Senator and chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Carl M. Levin (D-Michigan) decry the lack of regulatory reform on high-speed automated trading. They recall the 2010 flash crash:

One year ago, the stock market took a brief and terrifying nose-dive. Almost a trillion dollars in wealth momentarily vanished. Shares in blue-chip companies were traded at absurdly low prices. High-frequency traders, who use computers to look for microscopic price differences in stocks on different exchanges and other trading venues, stopped trading, while others immediately sold whatever they bought, mainly to each other, in what has been called “hot potato” trading.

Their tale of inaction and obstacles to action is depressing, and all too familiar. Here's an example of a practice with a demonstrated capacity to do tremendous harm to the world economy, balanced only by dubious claims of benefits and the religion of profit. The federal government clearly has the power and authority to remove the enormous risk but can't - or won't - take action.

It doesn't bode well for our cultural ability to deal with far less dramatic and harmful, but still serious, ethical issues raised by other pervasive and autonomous information technologies whose risk has not yet been demonstrated (shall we always wait for disaster, or could we once in a  while prevent it?) and for which no single entity with the capacity to control them can be found.

For more on the flash crash, see my earlier post.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Poker Bots Invade Online Gambling"

This article from the New York Times by Gabriel Dance (March 13, 2011) describes the use of AI poker bots in online gambling. The bots apparently can win tens of thousands of dollars for the humans who deploy them. Professor Tuomas W. Sandholm of Carnegie Mellon University is quoted as saying that poker bots "can rival good players, but not the the best - yet."

Naturally the use of the poker bots is defended by some, condemned by others. Those of us who don't play poker online are safe from them. But then again:

The poker bots’ arrival may be just another sign of an emerging world where humans, knowingly or unknowingly, encounter robots on an everyday basis. People already talk with computers when they call customer service centers or drive their cars.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Watson, Facebook, and IP numbers

I go out of town for a couple of days and one of my favorite sources, the New York Times, publishes four articles relevant to this blog. Rather than wait until I have time to summarize and comment on each of them (which won't be soon), I'm going the cheap-and-easy way - three bullet points for four articles.

• Watson, IBM's Jeopardy!-playing computer, gets two articles, both by John Markoff: A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans (Feb. 14, 2011), a thoughtful, wide-ranging reflection on how Watson's language facility might (and might not) change economies and cultures; and Computer Wins on 'Jeopardy!;" Trivial, it's Not (Feb. 16) is more narrowly focused on describing Watson's performance on the TV show.
• Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts by Jennifer Preston (Feb. 14) highlights the critical role Facebook and other technologies have played in the recent (and ongoing) uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere. Facebook and Twitter, at least, take the stand that they are providers of social and communication services, not king-makers (the only safe stand they can take, of course).
• I suppose it calls my nerd credentials into question that I didn't know that we were running out of IP numbers until I read Drumming Up More Addresses on the Internet by Laurie J. Flynn (Feb. 14). The 4.3 billion numbers that were created in 1977 are almost all used up; but a fix, IPv6, is in the bag, but like Y2K, there are a lot of entities that need to be fixed individually. Some people scoff at the Y2K problem - "The world didn't end!" - but only because they don't realize that the problems were averted by thousands of people working hard to make it a triumph rather than a disaster. Let's hope we do as well with this transition.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"When Computers Keep Watch"

This article from the New York Times (January 1, 2011) describes advances and uses of computerized analysis of visual images of people, including face recognition. The first example is of a system that monitors a prison yard in an annual training exercise for correctional officers.

Perched above the prison yard, five cameras tracked the play-acting prisoners, and artificial-intelligence software analyzed the images to recognize faces, gestures and patterns of group behavior. When two groups of inmates moved toward each other, the experimental computer system sent an alert - a text message - to a corrections officer that warned of a potential incident and gave the location.

Other examples include a computer-vision system that reminds hospital personnel to wash their hands when they are supposed to; another mounted behind a mirror that can "read a man's face to detect his heart rate and other vital signs;" a third can "analyze a woman’s expressions as she watches a movie trailer or shops online, and help marketers tailor their offerings accordingly."

Like most pervasive technologies, these computer-vision systems clearly have the potential to be beneficial in many ways, but also could easily be misused to violate privacy and cause other kinds of harms. As I read the article, the possibility of abuse by employers occurred to me before I reached this passage:

At work or school, the technology opens the door to a computerized supervisor that is always watching. Are you paying attention, goofing off or daydreaming?

Some people will argue that such a use would be justified because it would lead to great productivity and a thriving economy. Others, such as myself, would call it tyrannical; and I'd go on to say that there may be problems with ever-growing economies.

The examples above of the mirror that reads vital signs and the computer that monitors the reactions of shoppers or movie watchers are made possible by the research of Rosalind W. Picard and Rana el-Kaliouby at M.I.T. They have worked "for years" to apply "facial-expression analysis software to help young people with autism better recognize the emotional signals from others that they have such a hard time understanding" and co-founded a company, Affectiva, to market the software.

I am most alarmed by the use of these technologies to improve marketing and advertising, the practical science(s) of behavior control. Big business has the money and the incentive to propel the use of this software far and fast. What if the marketers actually perfect their art? Perfect marketing is perfect behavior control, and it might be reached under the flag of economic development with the blessing of our dominant paradigm. I find the fact that this may be made possible by the work of people who wanted to help people with autism bitterly ironic.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Aiming to Learn as We Do, A Machine Teaches Itself"

The machine mentioned in this article (New York Times, Oct 4, 2010) is, of course, a computer, and it is designed to teach itself semantics by trolling the Internet, primed with a few basic linguistic categories. To this non-expert, it looks inventive and promising. I'd like to see someone pursue a similar project to enable a computer to teach itself how to make moral judgments.

One problem with using the Internet is the heavy emphasis on pornography and celebrities. Perhaps there's a way to adjust for that.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic"

Similar stories to this one from the New York Times appeared elsewhere. The last I had heard, self-driving cars would require a retrofit of roads. (I don't remember when or where I read that; it might have been 30 years ago in one of my father's issues of Popular Mechanics.) Google's approach seems more feasible, though how feasible that makes it in absolute terms I couldn't say.

The obvious concerns about this technology include safety and reliability, as well as hacking (imagine kidnapping, or killing, someone by taking over her or his car; in fact, it might be an effective way to frame someone).

Perhaps less obvious: Will self-driven cars get better gas mileage? Will Americans put up with them, even if they prove safer than human-driving cars? Will they be the end of the designated driver?

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Surveillance for preschoolers; when algos takes over

Two tidbits today.

(1) An editorial in today's New York Times, Keeping Track of the Kids, expresses a "worry that we are all becoming a little too blasé about our scrutinized lives" in which we accept security cameras, mobile telephones that allow us to be tracked minute-by-minute, and RFID chips on preschool children. The editorial's final sentence: "Though it may seem innocuous to attach a chip to our preschoolers’ clothes, do we really want to raise a generation of kids that are accustomed to being tracked, like cattle or warehouse inventory?"

It's a nicely phrased question. There are, of course, other ways to put it, like, "do we really want to raise a generation of kids who are accustomed to being protected from predation, not to mention simply being lost?"

What, indeed, would be lost - or gained - by this generation's getting accustomed to being tracked? Their elders apparently became so accustomed with very little fanfare.

(2) Colin Allen, to whom my thanks, brought this ABC program, The flash crash (August 29), to my attention. The program is summarized as follows:

A few months ago the US share market plunged l000 points in a few minutes, and trillions were traded both up and down. What caused it, and can it happen again? Tiny high frequency computer algorithms - or algos - roam the markets, buying and selling in a parallel universe more or less uncontrolled by anyone. Did they go feral, or was it the fat finger of a coked out trader? In September US regulators bring out their findings.

One has to be more interested in stock markets than I am to listen to the entire program, or read the entire transcript, but you can find the good stuff easily enough at the very end - about the last 2 minutes in the audio. That's when Colin Allen himself sums up the underlying problems. Enjoy.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Moral responsibility and autonomous media"

In this short article, PAIT participant Bo Brinkman argues that we can't shift the blame for bad results from the use of advanced technologies to the technologies themselves. No matter how smart our robots, bots, software, etc., become, the people who design, manufacture, sell, and use them share moral responsibility.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Call for papers: Ethics and Affective Computing

Call for Papers

IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing

Special Issue on Ethics and Affective Computing

The pervasive presence of automated and autonomous systems necessitates the rapid growth of a relatively new area of inquiry called machine ethics. If machines are going to be turned loose on their own to kill and heal, explore and decide, the need for designing them to be moral becomes pressing. This need, in turn, penetrates to the very foundations of ethics as robot designers strive to build systems that comply. Fuzzy intuitions will not do when computational clarity is required. So, machine ethics also asks the discipline of ethics to make itself clear. The truth is that at present we do not know how to make it so. Rule-based approaches are being tried even in light of an acknowledged difficulty to formalize moral behavior, and it is already common to hear that introducing affects into machines may be necessary in order to make machines behave morally. From this perspective, affective computing may be morally required by machine ethics.

On the other hand, building machines with artificial affects might carry with it negative ethical consequences. In order to make humans more willing to accept robots and other automated computational devices, creating them to display emotion will be a help, since if we like them, we will, no doubt, be more willing to welcome them. We might even pay dearly to have them. But do artificial affects deceive? Will they catch us with our defenses down, and do we have to worry about Plato's caveat in the Republic that one of the best ways to be unjust is to appear just? Automated agents that seem like persons might appear congenial, even as any moral regard is ignored, making them dangerous culprits indistinguishable from automated "friends." In this light, machine ethics might demand that we exercise great caution in using affective computing. In radical cases, it might even demand that we not use it at all.

We would seem to have here a quandary. No doubt there are others. The purpose of this volume is to explore the range of ethical issues related to affective computing. Is affective computing necessary for making artificial agents moral? If so, why and how? Where does affective computing require moral caution? In what cases do benefits outweigh the moral risks? Etc.

Invited Authors:

• Roddy Cowie (Queen's University, Belfast)
• Luciano Floridi (University of Hertfordshire and University of Oxford)
• Matthias Scheutz (Tufts University)

Papers must not have been previously published, with the exception that substantial extensions of conference papers can be considered. The authors will be required to follow the Author’s Guide for manuscript submission to the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing at http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tac/author. Papers are due by March 1st, 2011, and should be submitted electronically at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/taffc-cs. Please select the "SI - Ethics 2011" manuscript type upon submission. For further information, please contact guest editor, Anthony Beavers at afbeavers@gmail.com.

"The First Church of Robotics"

Today's New York Times includes an op-ed piece by Jaron Lanier bemoaning what I'd call the metaphysical pretensions of artificial intelligence - including the term itself, how it is used to make technologies seem more impressive than they are, and, most importantly, how the combination changes the way we think about ourselves. As Lanier writes, "by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people."

Lanier compares Ray Kurzweil's idea of "the Singularity" to a religion, observing that "a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity,"and wondering whether these tensions would be eased a bit if technologists were less messianic.

I think Lanier's ideas are valid and worth contemplating, but I'll take the general train of thought on a slight detour. One of the objectives of AI research has been to make machines think like people. This has often driven researchers to try to understand how people actually think - how our brain, mind, emotions, and body interact to form thoughts, premises, conclusions, convictions, beliefs, and all the rest; even how we recognize a person's identity from her or his face.

The more I learn about AI and human psychology - and I have learned only a very small amount about either - the more convinced I am that AI research not only mystifies our understanding of human nature (as Lanier recognizes), but has potential to clarify it.

Lanier writes:

In fact, the nuts and bolts of A.I. research can often be more usefully interpreted without the concept of A.I. at all. For example, I.B.M. scientists recently unveiled a “question answering” machine that is designed to play the TV quiz show “Jeopardy.” Suppose I.B.M. had dispensed with the theatrics, declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new phrase-based search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology would have gained I.B.M.’s team as much (deserved) recognition as the claim of an artificial intelligence, but would also have educated the public about how such a technology might actually be used most effectively.

To me, this is also an example of how computers do not think like human beings, and that trying to make them think like us might be useful heuristically, but isn't really a desirable goal in and of itself. Why spend so much money trying to make more things that think like people when we already have several billion people who are already experts?

Perhaps we should recognize, and emphasize, that "artificial intelligence" only resembles human intelligence insofar as it can solve some problems only humans have  been able to solve heretofore. For the moment, I have yet to be convinced that AI is more than a really sophisticated hand-held calculator. We aren't metaphysically threatened by machines that can do arithmetic thousands of times faster and more accurately than ourselves; why should we be threatened by a handful of machines that seem to be able to hold a semi-coherent conversation with us under very narrow circumstances?

Ken Pimple, PAIT Program Director

"Computers Learn to Listen, and Some Talk Back"

One occupational hazard of being an ethicist is a tendency to dwell on the unethical, dangerous, and otherwise undesirable features of any given phenomenon. This story published on the New York Times Web site reminds me why advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and computing are exciting as well as (sometimes) scary. I found the accompanying time line, "Building Smarter Machines," ranging from 1936 to 2009, particularly compelling. Both are a part of the "Smarter Than You Think" series.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director