AI – Death in the Digital Age

While reading Robin Marantz Henig’s “Death by Robot,” I was reminded of a recent successful movie: Avengers: Age of Ultron. In the article, Henig discusses how we are currently striving to construct autonomous robots capable of making ethical decisions. This reminded me of a common trope used in science fiction films: the uprising of the robots.

Whenever humans construct artificially intelligent robots, the majority of the time, these robots begin to question why they are taking orders from their creators. As Henig mentions in the article, humans cannot process information as quickly as a computer can. Humans are also blinded by the emotions that robots cannot possess. In the robots’ minds, this makes the humans weaker. This is especially true for the character of Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron. In the video below, you can hear some of his best quotes, where he harps on humanity’s weaknesses.

Ultron was created as a peacekeeping force. However, similar to the ethical dilemmas presented in “Death by Robot,” Ultron is faced with his own dilemma: his creators cause some of the most damage, death, and destruction in the world. Thus, Ultron decides that the only way to create peace on the world would be to eradicate humanity entirely.

This story seems quite familiar to me—man creates machine, machine attempts to usurp man, man destroys machine. Whenever a robot seems capable of making ethical decisions, it realizes that humans are some of the least ethical creatures on the Earth, and that the Earth could do a lot better without us. Through media such as Avengers: Age of Ultron and I, Robot, humanity is taught to fear the day when robots and computers are able to make the same ethical decisions as humans. They can do so faster, and in some cases, better than humanity ever could. This begs the question though: do we really want robots to realize how much more capable they are?

In “Be Right Back” from Black Mirror (season 2, episode 1), I was blown away with the technology like the ultra-slim, durable phones and the protagonist Martha’s design display that she uses for work. Even though we have similar technology today, or at least the “grandparents” of such devices, I found it fascinating to imagine using such technology. However, I wasn’t as amazed with the text-based virtual “Ash” that Martha interacts with when her husband first dies. With the recent expansion artificial intelligence into our everyday lives, such as through Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, interacting with various artificial intelligence machines (AIs) is becoming commonplace. Creating a text-based AI to represent a person from their publicly available social media data seems like a plausible technology within the next five years.

Note that this prediction does not mention that the AI would even come close to passing as the specified human. The widespread AIs in today’s world (such as Siri or Alexa) are weak AI, meaning they excel on narrowly defined tasks, such as “Siri, who sings this song?” or “Alexa, how warm is it today?” To mimic a human, a strong AI is needed, one that has a broad, robust, human-like intelligence that can learn new things. Strong AIs are much more difficult to develop and getting humans to believe the machine is thinking is even more challenging. A common test (known as the Turing test) to determine whether an AI is “thinking” or not is to have humans spend five minutes individually interacting with the AI through the computer terminal. At the conclusion of the trial, the human decides if she was interacting with a person or a machine. If the machine fools humans in over 70% of the trials, the machine is considered to be thinking. In the episode, Martha goes through periods of believing in “Ash” (far beyond the 70% threshold) but each mistake “Ash” makes jars Martha into immediately emotionally reclassifying “Ash” as an imitation of her dead husband, and not his reincarnation. Since there is such as strong emotional connection between the user and the AI, the mistakes are more costly and Martha becomes less inclined to want to believe in the bot, limiting its effectiveness. Taking this episode as a “case study”, I think that using social media would enhance a generic AI’s personality but given the emotional toll seen in Martha, using this data to represent or recreate a specific known person would detract from its believability and effectiveness.

Martha becomes so attached to Ash’s AI, she orders a full-sized replica of Ash to complete the illusion of his reincarnation. katalinawatt2012. Digital Image. seenthefuture.blogspot.com/2013/02/studies-in-dystopia-black-mirror-be.html%5B/caption%5D

P.S. Messaging with Cleverbot is a fun way to experiment with human-AI text discussions.

Tag: AI

Do We Really Want Ethical Robots?

To Minimize Emotional Damage, Keep Your AI as an Acquaintance