Artificial Intelligence – Page 13

The Universal Paperclips Game

Just finished playing the Universal Paperclips game which was surprisingly fun. It took me about 3.5 hours to get to sentience. The idea of the game is that you are an AI running a paperclip company and you make decisions and investments. The game was inspired by the philosopher Nick Bostrom‘s paperclip maximizer thought experiment which shows the risk that some harmless AI that controls the making of paperclips might evolve into an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and pose a risk to us. It might even convert all the resources of the universe into paperclips. The original thought experiment is in Bostrom’s paper Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence to illustrate the point that “Artificial intellects need not have humanlike motives.”

Human are rarely willing slaves, but there is nothing implausible about the idea of a superintelligence having as its supergoal to serve humanity or some particular human, with no desire whatsoever to revolt or to “liberate” itself. It also seems perfectly possible to have a superintelligence whose sole goal is something completely arbitrary, such as to manufacture as many paperclips as possible, and who would resist with all its might any attempt to alter this goal. For better or worse, artificial intellects need not share our human motivational tendencies.

The game is rather addictive despite having a simple interface where all you can do is click on buttons making decisions. The decisions you get to make change over time and there are different panels that open up for exploration.

I learned about the game from an interesting blog entry by David Rosenthal on how It Isn’t About The Technology which is a response to enthusiasm about Web 3.0 and decentralized technologies (blockchain) and how they might save us, to which Rosenthal responds that it is isn’t about the technology.

One of the more interesting ideas that Rosenthal mentions is from Charles Stross’s keynote for the 34th Chaos Communications Congress to the effect that businesses are “slow AIs”. Corporations are machines that, like the paperclip maximizer, are self-optimizing and evolve until they are dangerous – something we are seeing with Google and Facebook.

Ottawa’s use of our location data raises big surveillance and privacy concerns

In order to track the pandemic, the Public Health Agency of Canada has been using location data without explicit and informed consent. Transparency is key to building and maintaining trust.

The Conversation has just published an article on Ottawa’s use of our location data raises big surveillance and privacy concerns. This was written with a number of colleagues who were part of a research retreat (Dagstuhl) on Mobility Data Analysis: from Technical to Ethical.

We are at a moment when ethical principles are really not enough and we need to start talking about best practices in order to develop a culture of ethical use of data.

Lost Gustav Klimt Paintings Destroyed in Fire Digitally Restored (by AI)

Philosophy by Klimt

Google Arts & Culture launched a hub for all things Gustav Klimt today, which include digital restorations of three lost paintings.

ARTnews, among other places reports that Lost Gustav Klimt Paintings Destroyed in Fire Digitally Restored. The three faculties (Medicine, Philosophy, and Jurisprudence) painted for the University of Vienna were destroyed in a fire leaving only black and white photographs. Now Google has helped recreate what the three paintings might have looked like using AI as part of a Google Arts and Culture site on Klimt. You can read about the history of the three faculties here.

Whether in black and white, or in colour, the painting of Philosophy (above) is stunning. The original in colour would have been stunning, especially as it was 170 by 118 inches. Philosophy is represented by the Sphinx-like figure merging with the universe. To one side is a stream of people from the young to the old who hold their heads in confusion. At the bottom is a woman, comparable to the woman in the painting of Medicine, who might be an inspired philosopher looking through us.

Value Sensitive Design and Dark Patterns

Dark Patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn’t mean to. The purpose of this site is to spread awareness and to shame companies that use them.

Reading about Value Sensitive Design I came across a link to Harry Brignul’s Dark Patterns. The site is about ways that web designers try to manipulate users. They have a Hall of Shame that is instructive and a Reading List if you want to follow up. It is interesting to see attempts to regulate certain patterns of deception.

Values are expressed and embedded in technology; they have real and often non-obvious impacts on users and society.

The alternative is introduce values and ethics into the design process. This is where Value Sensitive Design comes. As developed by Batya Friedman and colleagues it is an approach that includes methods for thinking-through the ethics of a project from the beginning. Some of the approaches mentioned in the article include:

Mapping out what a design will support, hinder or prevent.
Consider the stakeholders, especially those that may not have any say in the deployment or use of a technology.
Try to understand the underlying assumptions of technologies.
Broaden our gaze as to the effects of a technology on human experience.

They have even produced a set of Envisioning Cards for sale.

In Isolating Times, Can Robo-Pets Provide Comfort? – The New York Times

As seniors find themselves cut off from loved ones during the pandemic, some are turning to automated animals for company.

I’m reading about Virtual Assistants and thinking that in some ways the simplest VAs are the robopets that are being given to lonely elderly people who are isolated. See In Isolating Times, Can Robo-Pets Provide Comfort? Robo-cats and dogs (and even seals) seem to provide comfort the way a stuffed pet might. They aren’t even that smart, but can give comfort to an older person suffering from isolation.

These pets, like PARO (an expensive Japanese robotic seal seen above) or the much cheaper Joy for All pets, can possibly fool people with dementia. What are the ethics of this? Are we comfortable fooling people for their own good?

The Future of Digital Assistants Is Queer

AI assistants continue to reinforce sexist stereotypes, but queering these devices could help reimagine their relationship to gender altogether.

Wired has a nice article on how the The Future of Digital Assistants Is Queer. The article looks at the gendering of virtual assistants like Siri and how it is not enough to just offer male voices, but we need to queer the voices. It mentions the ethical issue of how voice conveys information like whether the VA is a bot or not.

The Proliferation of AI Ethics Principles: What’s Next?

The Proliferation of AI Ethics Principles: What’s Next?

The Montreal AI Ethics Institute has republished a nice article by Ravit Dotan, The Proliferation of AI Ethics Principles: What’s Next? Dotan starts by looking at some of the meta studies and then goes on to argue that we are unlikely to ever come up with a “unique set of core AI principles”, nor should we want to. She points out the lack of diversity in the sets we have. Different types of institutions will need different types of principles. She ends with these questions:

How do we navigate the proliferation of AI ethics principles? What should we use for regulation, for example? Should we seek to create new AI ethics principles which incorporate more perspectives? What if it doesn’t result in a unique set of principles, only increasing the multiplicity of principles? Is it possible to develop approaches for AI ethics governance that don’t rely on general AI ethics principles?

I am personally convinced that a more fruitful way forward is to start trading stories. These stories could take the form of incidents or cases or news or science fiction or even AI generated stories. We need to develop our ethical imagination. Hero Laird made this point in a talk on AI, Ethics and Law that was part of a salon we organize at AI4Society. They quoted from Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories to the effect that,

The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.

What stories do artificial intelligences tell themselves?

Artificial Intelligence Incident Database

I discovered the Artificial Intelligence Incident Database developed by the Partnership on AI. The Database contains reports on things that have gone wrong with AIs like the Australian Centerlink robodebt debacle.

The Incident Database was developed to help educate developers and encourage learning from mistakes. They have posted a paper to arXiv on Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database.

Ask Delphi

Ask Delphi is an intriguing AI that you can use to ponder ethical questions. You type in a situation and it will tell you if it is morally acceptable or not. It is apparently built not on Reddit data, but on crowdsourced data, so it shouldn’t be as easy to provoke into giving toxic answers.

In their paper, Delphi: Towards Machine Ethics and Norms they say that they have created a Commonsense Norm Bank, “a collection of 1.7M ethical judgments on diverse real-life situations.” This contributes to Delphi’s sound pronouncements, but it doesn’t seem available for others yet.

AI Weirdness has a nice story on how she fooled Delphi.

Emojify: Scientists create online games to show risks of AI emotion recognition

Public can try pulling faces to trick the technology, while critics highlight human rights concerns

From the Guardian story, Scientists create online games to show risks of AI emotion recognition, I discovered Emojify, a web site with some games to show how problematic emotion detection is. Researchers are worried by the booming business of emotion detection with artificial intelligence. For example, it is being used in education in China. See the CNN story about how In Hong Kong, this AI reads children’s emotions as they learn.

A Hong Kong company has developed facial expression-reading AI that monitors students’ emotions as they study. With many children currently learning from home, they say the technology could make the virtual classroom even better than the real thing.

With cameras all over, this should worry us. We are not only be identified by face recognition, but now they want to know our inner emotions too. What sort of theory of emotions licenses these systems?