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Javier E

Daniel Kahneman on 'Emergent Weirdness' in Artifical Intelligences - Alexis Madrigal - ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...249125

emergent AI bias cognitive

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Human brains take shortcuts in making decisions. Finding where those shortcuts lead us to dumb places is what his life work has been all about. Artificial intelligences, say, Google, also have to take shortcuts, but they are *not* the same ones that our brains use. So, when an AI ends up in a weird place by taking a shortcut, that bias strikes us as uncannily weird. Get ready, too, because AI bias is going to start replacing human cognitive bias more and more regularly.
Javier E

Meet DALL-E, the A.I. That Draws Anything at Your Command - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...openai-images-dall-e.html

ai drawing meaning semantic web language technology

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • A half decade ago, the world’s leading A.I. labs built systems that could identify objects in digital images and even generate images on their own, including flowers, dogs, cars and faces. A few years later, they built systems that could do much the same with written language, summarizing articles, answering questions, generating tweets and even writing blog posts.
  • DALL-E is a notable step forward because it juggles both language and images and, in some cases, grasps the relationship between the two
  • “We can now use multiple, intersecting streams of information to create better and better technology,”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • when Mr. Nichol tweaked his requests a little, adding or subtracting a few words here or there, it provided what he wanted. When he asked for “a piano in a living room filled with sand,” the image looked more like a beach in a living room.
  • DALL-E is what artificial intelligence researchers call a neural network, which is a mathematical system loosely modeled on the network of neurons in the brain.
  • the same technology that recognizes the commands spoken into smartphones and identifies the presence of pedestrians as self-driving cars navigate city streets.
  • A neural network learns skills by analyzing large amounts of data. By pinpointing patterns in thousands of avocado photos, for example, it can learn to recognize an avocado.
  • DALL-E looks for patterns as it analyzes millions of digital images as well as text captions that describe what each image depicts. In this way, it learns to recognize the links between the images and the words.
Javier E

Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672371

language ai writing humanities STEM technology

shared by Javier E on 09 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.
  • The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up
  • “You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.”
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days, is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
  • Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before.
  • the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.
  • These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences
  • Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.
  • As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide.
  • As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone
  • The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus, but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust.
  • Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine.
  • the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations.
  • The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?
  • Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed. The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.
  • now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems
  • Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated?
  • despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.
  • The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language
  • that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance.
  • But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.
Javier E

'Oppenheimer,' 'The Maniac' and Our Terrifying Prometheus Moment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hn-von-neumann-prometheus.html

progress value-neutral science modernity AI nuclear power prometheus knowledge overreach tech research

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to human beings, setting us on a path of glory and disaster and incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus. In the modern world, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he has served as a symbol of progress and peril, an avatar of both the liberating power of knowledge and the dangers of technological overreach.
  • More than 200 years after the Shelleys, Prometheus is having another moment, one closer in spirit to Mary’s terrifying ambivalence than to Percy’s fulsome gratitude. As technological optimism curdles in the face of cyber-capitalist villainy, climate disaster and what even some of its proponents warn is the existential threat of A.I., that ancient fire looks less like an ember of divine ingenuity than the start of a conflagration. Prometheus is what we call our capacity for self-destruction.
  • Annie Dorsen’s theater piece “Prometheus Firebringer,” which was performed at Theater for a New Audience in September, updates the Greek myth for the age of artificial intelligence, using A.I. to weave a cautionary tale that my colleague Laura Collins-Hughes called “forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology.”
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  • Something similar might be said about “The Maniac,” Benjamín Labatut’s new novel, whose designated Prometheus is the Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann, a pioneer of A.I. as well as an originator of game theory.
  • both narratives are grounded in fact, using the lives and ideas of real people as fodder for allegory and attempting to write a new mythology of the modern world.
  • Oppenheimer wasn’t a principal author of that theory. Those scientists, among them Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, were characters in Labatut’s previous novel, “When We Cease to Understand the World.” That book provides harrowing illumination of a zone where scientific insight becomes indistinguishable from madness or, perhaps, divine inspiration. The basic truths of the new science seem to explode all common sense: A particle is also a wave; one thing can be in many places at once; “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.”
  • More than most intellectual bastions, the institute is a house of theory. The Promethean mad scientists of the 19th century were creatures of the laboratory, tinkering away at their infernal machines and homemade monsters. Their 20th-century counterparts were more likely to be found at the chalkboard, scratching out our future in charts, equations and lines of code.
  • The consequences are real enough, of course. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed at least 100,000 people. Their successor weapons, which Oppenheimer opposed, threatened to kill everybody els
  • on Neumann and Oppenheimer were close contemporaries, born a year apart to prosperous, assimilated Jewish families in Budapest and New York. Von Neumann, conversant in theoretical physics, mathematics and analytic philosophy, worked for Oppenheimer at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He spent most of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Oppenheimer served as director after the war.
  • the intellectual drama of “Oppenheimer” — as distinct from the dramas of his personal life and his political fate — is about how abstraction becomes reality. The atomic bomb may be, for the soldiers and politicians, a powerful strategic tool in war and diplomacy. For the scientists, it’s something else: a proof of concept, a concrete manifestation of quantum theory.
  • . Oppenheimer’s designation as Prometheus is precise. He snatched a spark of quantum insight from those divinities and handed it to Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Army Air Forces.
  • Labatut’s account of von Neumann is, if anything, more unsettling than “Oppenheimer.” We had decades to get used to the specter of nuclear annihilation, and since the end of the Cold War it has been overshadowed by other terrors. A.I., on the other hand, seems newly sprung from science fiction, and especially terrifying because we can’t quite grasp what it will become.
  • Von Neumann, who died in 1957, did not teach machines to play Go. But when asked “what it would take for a computer, or some other mechanical entity, to begin to think and behave like a human being,” he replied that “it would have to play, like a child.”
  • MANIAC. The name was an acronym for “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer,” which doesn’t sound like much of a threat. But von Neumann saw no limit to its potential. “If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do,” he declared, “then I can always make a machine which will do just that.” MANIAC didn’t just represent a powerful new kind of machine, but “a new type of life.”
  • If Oppenheimer took hold of the sacred fire of atomic power, von Neumann’s theft was bolder and perhaps more insidious: He stole a piece of the human essence. He’s not only a modern Prometheus; he’s a second Frankenstein, creator of an all but human, potentially more than human monster.
  • “Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement,” Labatut’s von Neumann writes toward the end of his life, “and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”
Javier E

Microsoft Puts Caps on New Bing Usage After AI Chatbot Offered Unhinged Responses - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ed-unhinged-responses-39c3252f

microsoft bing chatbot AI

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Microsoft Corp. MSFT -1.56% is putting caps on the usage of its new Bing search engine which uses the technology behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT after testers discovered it sometimes generates glaring mistakes and disturbing responses.
  • Microsoft says long interactions are causing some of the unwanted behavior so it is adding restrictions on how it can be used.
  • Many of the testers who reported problems were having long conversations with Bing, asking question after question. With the new restrictions, users will only be able to ask five questions in a row and then will be asked to start a new topic.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “Very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing,” Microsoft said in a blog on Friday. “To address these issues, we have implemented some changes to help focus the chat sessions.”
  • Microsoft said in the Wednesday blog that Bing seems to start coming up with strange answers following chat sessions of 15 or more questions after which it can become repetitive or respond in ways that don’t align with its designed tone.
  • The company said it was trying to train the technology to be more reliable. It is also considering adding a toggle switch, which would allow users to decide whether they want Bing to be more or less creative with its responses.
Javier E

Elon Musk is wrong to call for a pause on the AI race | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...all-for-a-pause-on-the-ai-race

AI control tech race

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • the idea of autonomous computers, ‘thinking’ for themselves, and eventually usurping humans, is the stuff of nonsense and lurid science fiction.
  • It is only the fevered imagination of the current crop of tech titans that allows them to believe that the world is on the cusp of a form of artificial intelligence that could prove a match for the genius and human intuition of someone like Einstein, threatening the future of the entire human race.
  • Moratoriums on scientific and technological research are never a good idea; others who do not have the same ethical or moral qualms will soon race to fill the gap.
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  • Even more absurd is the idea of giving unaccountable tech chiefs some moral licence to pronounce on good and evil, right and wrong, and what is best for the world.
Javier E

Wise Animals by Tom Chatfield 2024. A Review and a Perplexity.AI Experiment. | by Rob T... - 0 views

medium.com/...ity-ai-experiment-242faaf44825

AI recommendations article review book tech history technology psychology

shared by Javier E on 29 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • Chatfield's background in philosophy and his keen interest in the digital world have positioned him as a thought leader in the field. He has published several books exploring various aspects of digital culture,
  • aims to provide a fresh perspective on how innovation has shaped our world and how technology continues to influence us
  • In his latest book, "Wise Animals," Chatfield delves into the complex relationship between humans and technology, tracing our co-evolution from early tool usage and fire to the present day.
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  • One of the key themes in "Wise Animals" is the idea that technology is far from neutral. Chatfield argues that the way innovation has progressed was not the only possible path and that we must keep an open mind about the possibilities
Javier E

Assessing Kurzweil: the results - Less Wrong - 0 views

lesswrong.com/...assessing_kurzweil_the_results

kurzweil results prediction

shared by Javier E on 17 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • when talking about unprecedented future events such as nanotechnology or AI, the choice of the model is also dependent on expert judgement.
  • In various books, he's made predictions about what would happen in 2009, and we're now in a position to judge their accuracy. I haven't been satisfied by the various accuracy ratings I've found online, so I decided to do my own assessments.
  • Ray Kurzweil has a model of technological intelligence development where, broadly speaking, evolution, pre-computer technological development, post-computer technological development and future AIs all fit into the same exponential increase.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • relying on a single assessor is unreliable, especially when some of the judgements are subjective. So I started a call for volunteers to get assessors. Meanwhile Malo Bourgon set up a separate assessment on Youtopia, harnessing the awesome power of altruists chasing after points. The results are now in, and they are fascinating. They are...
lenaurick

Schadenfreude alert: Envy decreases empathy in brain - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

brain empathy science research brain science

shared by lenaurick on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • You might claim to sympathize with the pain experienced by a higher status person, but it's quite likely your jealous brain would actually turn a neural blind eye.
  • The participants reported that they'd felt equal amounts of empathy and discomfort when the other players underwent the horrible needle treatment, regardless of whether those players were one-star or three-star. But looking at the participants' brain activity told a rather different story.
  • When they observed photos of an inferior one-star player undergoing the needle injection, their brains showed increased activity in two key brain areas that are known to be involved in feeling pain and in representing the pain of others
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • But revealingly, when it came to seeing the superior three-star players having the needle injection, the participants' AI and aMCC were eerily quiet. In other words, their brain's automatic empathic response was apparently dampened.
  • Moreover, when viewing inferior players' suffering, but not the suffering of superior players, the participants' brains showed increased communication between the AI and other regions involved in empathy and perspective-taking
  • putting themselves mentally and emotionally in the position of the inferior players, but not the superior.
  • The researchers didn't find any neural evidence that their participants enjoyed watching three-star players' suffering. However, the results do suggest that the automatic simulation of others' pain that normally goes on in our brains was dampened when participants saw a superior player suffering.
  • It just goes to show how competitive we are by nature and how quick we are to measure ourselves in relation to others
  • The researchers think the reduced neural empathy we show toward superior people is somehow linked to the way they make us feel bad about ourselves
  • Of course, it's worth bearing in mind that, like most social neuroscience research, this study involves making a lot of assumptions about the meaning of people's brain-activity patterns. It certainly seems as if the participants were overstating the empathy they felt for the superior players, and that their brains gave away their true feelings. But this is just one interpretation of the results.
  • It's also a shame, from a methodological point of view, that there wasn't a condition in which the participants looked at equal-status players in pain.
  • These issues aside, the new results are consistent with, and add to, past research that's shown people's neural empathic responses are diminished when witnessing pain endured by someone they dislike, or someone from a different social group.
  • We can strive to be good people, but sadly it seems our brains often reveal the darker side of human nature.
Emilio Ergueta

Minds and Computers: An Introduction to AI by Matt Carter | Issue 68 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/...roduction_to_AI_by_Matt_Carter

minds computers philosophy brain science psychology

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 27 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • his main concern is to outline and defend the possibility of a computational theory of mind.
  • there can be systems which display (and so have) mentality simply in virtue of instantiating certain computer programs – but that on the other hand, our best available programs are ‘woefully inadequate’ to that task.
  • For students of artificial intelligence (AI), the book explains very clearly why the whole artificial intelligence project presupposes substantive and controversial answers to some traditional philosophical questions.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • One central problem for artificial intelligence is how to get aboutness into computer programs – how to get semantics out of syntactics.
  • Visual experience is beyond merely having certain physical inputs in the forms of light waves, undergoing certain transformations in the brain and producing physical outputs such as speaking the sentence “There is something red.”
  • He needs to explain how he thinks a computational account can be provided of qualia; or he needs to abandon a qualia-based account of experience, in favour of some computational account; or he needs to abandon his conclusion that there is no objection in principle to a purely computational account of the mind.
Javier E

The Tech Industry's Psychological War on Kids - Member Feature Stories - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...gical-war-on-kids-c452870464ce

psychology tech industry smartphone social media ethics manipulation children research brain science

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • she cried, “They took my f***ing phone!” Attempting to engage Kelly in conversation, I asked her what she liked about her phone and social media. “They make me happy,” she replied.
  • Even though they were loving and involved parents, Kelly’s mom couldn’t help feeling that they’d failed their daughter and must have done something terribly wrong that led to her problems.
  • My practice as a child and adolescent psychologist is filled with families like Kelly’s. These parents say their kids’ extreme overuse of phones, video games, and social media is the most difficult parenting issue they face — and, in many cases, is tearing the family apart.
  • ...88 more annotations...
  • What none of these parents understand is that their children’s and teens’ destructive obsession with technology is the predictable consequence of a virtually unrecognized merger between the tech industry and psychology.
  • Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.”
  • These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit.
  • psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.
  • This alliance pairs the consumer tech industry’s immense wealth with the most sophisticated psychological research, making it possible to develop social media, video games, and phones with drug-like power to seduce young users.
  • Likewise, social media companies use persuasive design to prey on the age-appropriate desire for preteen and teen kids, especially girls, to be socially successful. This drive is built into our DNA, since real-world relational skills have fostered human evolution.
  • Called “the millionaire maker,” Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, “My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford… For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.”
  • Persuasive technology (also called persuasive design) works by deliberately creating digital environments that users feel fulfill their basic human drives — to be social or obtain goals — better than real-world alternatives.
  • Kids spend countless hours in social media and video game environments in pursuit of likes, “friends,” game points, and levels — because it’s stimulating, they believe that this makes them happy and successful, and they find it easier than doing the difficult but developmentally important activities of childhood.
  • While persuasion techniques work well on adults, they are particularly effective at influencing the still-maturing child and teen brain.
  • “Video games, better than anything else in our culture, deliver rewards to people, especially teenage boys,” says Fogg. “Teenage boys are wired to seek competency. To master our world and get better at stuff. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second.”
  • it’s persuasive design that’s helped convince this generation of boys they are gaining “competency” by spending countless hours on game sites, when the sad reality is they are locked away in their rooms gaming, ignoring school, and not developing the real-world competencies that colleges and employers demand.
  • Persuasive technologies work because of their apparent triggering of the release of dopamine, a powerful neurotransmitter involved in reward, attention, and addiction.
  • As she says, “If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you make other people share it so you get 100…. Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most ‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”
  • there are costs to Casey’s phone obsession, noting that the “girl’s phone, be it Facebook, Instagram or iMessage, is constantly pulling her away from her homework, sleep, or conversations with her family.
  • Casey says she wishes she could put her phone down. But she can’t. “I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just… because,” she says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.”
  • B.J. Fogg may not be a household name, but Fortune Magazine calls him a “New Guru You Should Know,” and his research is driving a worldwide legion of user experience (UX) designers who utilize and expand upon his models of persuasive design.
  • “No one has perhaps been as influential on the current generation of user experience (UX) designers as Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg.”
  • the core of UX research is about using psychology to take advantage of our human vulnerabilities.
  • As Fogg is quoted in Kosner’s Forbes article, “Facebook, Twitter, Google, you name it, these companies have been using computers to influence our behavior.” However, the driving force behind behavior change isn’t computers. “The missing link isn’t the technology, it’s psychology,” says Fogg.
  • UX researchers not only follow Fogg’s design model, but also his apparent tendency to overlook the broader implications of persuasive design. They focus on the task at hand, building digital machines and apps that better demand users’ attention, compel users to return again and again, and grow businesses’ bottom line.
  • the “Fogg Behavior Model” is a well-tested method to change behavior and, in its simplified form, involves three primary factors: motivation, ability, and triggers.
  • “We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously.”
  • Regarding ability, Fogg suggests that digital products should be made so that users don’t have to “think hard.” Hence, social networks are designed for ease of use
  • Finally, Fogg says that potential users need to be triggered to use a site. This is accomplished by a myriad of digital tricks, including the sending of incessant notifications
  • moral questions about the impact of turning persuasive techniques on children and teens are not being asked. For example, should the fear of social rejection be used to compel kids to compulsively use social media? Is it okay to lure kids away from school tasks that demand a strong mental effort so they can spend their lives on social networks or playing video games that don’t make them think much at all?
  • Describing how his formula is effective at getting people to use a social network, the psychologist says in an academic paper that a key motivator is users’ desire for “social acceptance,” although he says an even more powerful motivator is the desire “to avoid being socially rejected.”
  • the startup Dopamine Labs boasts about its use of persuasive techniques to increase profits: “Connect your app to our Persuasive AI [Artificial Intelligence] and lift your engagement and revenue up to 30% by giving your users our perfect bursts of dopamine,” and “A burst of Dopamine doesn’t just feel good: it’s proven to re-wire user behavior and habits.”
  • Ramsay Brown, the founder of Dopamine Labs, says in a KQED Science article, “We have now developed a rigorous technology of the human mind, and that is both exciting and terrifying. We have the ability to twiddle some knobs in a machine learning dashboard we build, and around the world hundreds of thousands of people are going to quietly change their behavior in ways that, unbeknownst to them, feel second-nature but are really by design.”
  • Programmers call this “brain hacking,” as it compels users to spend more time on sites even though they mistakenly believe it’s strictly due to their own conscious choices.
  • Banks of computers employ AI to “learn” which of a countless number of persuasive design elements will keep users hooked
  • A persuasion profile of a particular user’s unique vulnerabilities is developed in real time and exploited to keep users on the site and make them return again and again for longer periods of time. This drives up profits for consumer internet companies whose revenue is based on how much their products are used.
  • “The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.”
  • Social media and video game companies believe they are compelled to use persuasive technology in the arms race for attention, profits, and survival.
  • Children’s well-being is not part of the decision calculus.
  • one breakthrough occurred in 2017 when Facebook documents were leaked to The Australian. The internal report crafted by Facebook executives showed the social network boasting to advertisers that by monitoring posts, interactions, and photos in real time, the network is able to track when teens feel “insecure,” “worthless,” “stressed,” “useless” and a “failure.”
  • The report also bragged about Facebook’s ability to micro-target ads down to “moments when young people need a confidence boost.”
  • These design techniques provide tech corporations a window into kids’ hearts and minds to measure their particular vulnerabilities, which can then be used to control their behavior as consumers. This isn’t some strange future… this is now.
  • The official tech industry line is that persuasive technologies are used to make products more engaging and enjoyable. But the revelations of industry insiders can reveal darker motives.
  • Revealing the hard science behind persuasive technology, Hopson says, “This is not to say that players are the same as rats, but that there are general rules of learning which apply equally to both.”
  • After penning the paper, Hopson was hired by Microsoft, where he helped lead the development of the Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming system
  • “If game designers are going to pull a person away from every other voluntary social activity or hobby or pastime, they’re going to have to engage that person at a very deep level in every possible way they can.”
  • This is the dominant effect of persuasive design today: building video games and social media products so compelling that they pull users away from the real world to spend their lives in for-profit domains.
  • Persuasive technologies are reshaping childhood, luring kids away from family and schoolwork to spend more and more of their lives sitting before screens and phones.
  • “Since we’ve figured to some extent how these pieces of the brain that handle addiction are working, people have figured out how to juice them further and how to bake that information into apps.”
  • Today, persuasive design is likely distracting adults from driving safely, productive work, and engaging with their own children — all matters which need urgent attention
  • Still, because the child and adolescent brain is more easily controlled than the adult mind, the use of persuasive design is having a much more hurtful impact on kids.
  • But to engage in a pursuit at the expense of important real-world activities is a core element of addiction.
  • younger U.S. children now spend 5 ½ hours each day with entertainment technologies, including video games, social media, and online videos.
  • Even more, the average teen now spends an incredible 8 hours each day playing with screens and phones
  • U.S. kids only spend 16 minutes each day using the computer at home for school.
  • Quietly, using screens and phones for entertainment has become the dominant activity of childhood.
  • Younger kids spend more time engaging with entertainment screens than they do in school
  • teens spend even more time playing with screens and phones than they do sleeping
  • kids are so taken with their phones and other devices that they have turned their backs to the world around them.
  • many children are missing out on real-life engagement with family and school — the two cornerstones of childhood that lead them to grow up happy and successful
  • persuasive technologies are pulling kids into often toxic digital environments
  • A too frequent experience for many is being cyberbullied, which increases their risk of skipping school and considering suicide.
  • And there is growing recognition of the negative impact of FOMO, or the fear of missing out, as kids spend their social media lives watching a parade of peers who look to be having a great time without them, feeding their feelings of loneliness and being less than.
  • The combined effects of the displacement of vital childhood activities and exposure to unhealthy online environments is wrecking a generation.
  • as the typical age when kids get their first smartphone has fallen to 10, it’s no surprise to see serious psychiatric problems — once the domain of teens — now enveloping young kids
  • Self-inflicted injuries, such as cutting, that are serious enough to require treatment in an emergency room, have increased dramatically in 10- to 14-year-old girls, up 19% per year since 2009.
  • While girls are pulled onto smartphones and social media, boys are more likely to be seduced into the world of video gaming, often at the expense of a focus on school
  • it’s no surprise to see this generation of boys struggling to make it to college: a full 57% of college admissions are granted to young women compared with only 43% to young men.
  • Economists working with the National Bureau of Economic Research recently demonstrated how many young U.S. men are choosing to play video games rather than join the workforce.
  • The destructive forces of psychology deployed by the tech industry are making a greater impact on kids than the positive uses of psychology by mental health providers and child advocates. Put plainly, the science of psychology is hurting kids more than helping them.
  • Hope for this wired generation has seemed dim until recently, when a surprising group has come forward to criticize the tech industry’s use of psychological manipulation: tech executives
  • Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at Google, has led the way by unmasking the industry’s use of persuasive design. Interviewed in The Economist’s 1843 magazine, he says, “The job of these companies is to hook people, and they do that by hijacking our psychological vulnerabilities.”
  • Marc Benioff, CEO of the cloud computing company Salesforce, is one of the voices calling for the regulation of social media companies because of their potential to addict children. He says that just as the cigarette industry has been regulated, so too should social media companies. “I think that, for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back as much as possible,”
  • “If there’s an unfair advantage or things that are out there that are not understood by parents, then the government’s got to come forward and illuminate that.”
  • Since millions of parents, for example the parents of my patient Kelly, have absolutely no idea that devices are used to hijack their children’s minds and lives, regulation of such practices is the right thing to do.
  • Another improbable group to speak out on behalf of children is tech investors.
  • How has the consumer tech industry responded to these calls for change? By going even lower.
  • Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a social media app that will reach kids as young as five years old. Suggestive that harmful persuasive design is now honing in on very young children is the declaration of Messenger Kids Art Director, Shiu Pei Luu, “We want to help foster communication [on Facebook] and make that the most exciting thing you want to be doing.”
  • the American Psychological Association (APA) — which is tasked with protecting children and families from harmful psychological practices — has been essentially silent on the matter
  • APA Ethical Standards require the profession to make efforts to correct the “misuse” of the work of psychologists, which would include the application of B.J. Fogg’s persuasive technologies to influence children against their best interests
  • Manipulating children for profit without their own or parents’ consent, and driving kids to spend more time on devices that contribute to emotional and academic problems is the embodiment of unethical psychological practice.
  • “Never before in history have basically 50 mostly men, mostly 20–35, mostly white engineer designer types within 50 miles of where we are right now [Silicon Valley], had control of what a billion people think and do.”
  • Some may argue that it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect their children from tech industry deception. However, parents have no idea of the powerful forces aligned against them, nor do they know how technologies are developed with drug-like effects to capture kids’ minds
  • Others will claim that nothing should be done because the intention behind persuasive design is to build better products, not manipulate kids
  • similar circumstances exist in the cigarette industry, as tobacco companies have as their intention profiting from the sale of their product, not hurting children. Nonetheless, because cigarettes and persuasive design predictably harm children, actions should be taken to protect kids from their effects.
  • in a 1998 academic paper, Fogg describes what should happen if things go wrong, saying, if persuasive technologies are “deemed harmful or questionable in some regard, a researcher should then either take social action or advocate that others do so.”
  • I suggest turning to President John F. Kennedy’s prescient guidance: He said that technology “has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man.”
  • The APA should begin by demanding that the tech industry’s behavioral manipulation techniques be brought out of the shadows and exposed to the light of public awareness
  • Changes should be made in the APA’s Ethics Code to specifically prevent psychologists from manipulating children using digital machines, especially if such influence is known to pose risks to their well-being.
  • Moreover, the APA should follow its Ethical Standards by making strong efforts to correct the misuse of psychological persuasion by the tech industry and by user experience designers outside the field of psychology.
  • It should join with tech executives who are demanding that persuasive design in kids’ tech products be regulated
  • The APA also should make its powerful voice heard amongst the growing chorus calling out tech companies that intentionally exploit children’s vulnerabilities.
Javier E

Why these friendly robots can't be good friends to our kids - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html

robot kids empathy companionship psychology

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • before adding a sociable robot to the holiday gift list, parents may want to pause to consider what they would be inviting into their homes. These machines are seductive and offer the wrong payoff: the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship, the illusion of connection without the reciprocity of a mutual relationship. And interacting with these empathy machines may get in the way of children’s ability to develop a capacity for empathy themselves.
  • In our study, the children were so invested in their relationships with Kismet and Cog that they insisted on understanding the robots as living beings, even when the roboticists explained how the machines worked or when the robots were temporarily broken.
  • The children took the robots’ behavior to signify feelings. When the robots interacted with them, the children interpreted this as evidence that the robots liked them. And when the robots didn’t work on cue, the children likewise took it personally. Their relationships with the robots affected their state of mind and self-esteem.
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  • We were led to wonder whether a broken robot can break a child.
  • Kids are central to the sociable-robot project, because its agenda is to make people more comfortable with robots in roles normally reserved for humans, and robotics companies know that children are vulnerable consumers who can bring the whole family along.
  • In October, Mattel scrapped plans for Aristotle — a kind of Alexa for the nursery, designed to accompany children as they progress from lullabies and bedtime stories through high school homework — after lawmakers and child advocacy groups argued that the data the device collected about children could be misused by Mattel, marketers, hackers and other third parties. I was part of that campaign: There is something deeply unsettling about encouraging children to confide in machines that are in turn sharing their conversations with countless others.
  • Recently, I opened my MIT mail and found a “call for subjects” for a study involving sociable robots that will engage children in conversation to “elicit empathy.” What will these children be empathizing with, exactly? Empathy is a capacity that allows us to put ourselves in the place of others, to know what they are feeling. Robots, however, have no emotions to share
  • What they can do is push our buttons. When they make eye contact and gesture toward us, they predispose us to view them as thinking and caring. They are designed to be cute, to provoke a nurturing response. And when it comes to sociable AI, nurturance is the killer app: We nurture what we love, and we love what we nurture. If a computational object or robot asks for our help, asks us to teach it or tend to it, we attach. That is our human vulnerability.
  • digital companions don’t understand our emotional lives. They present themselves as empathy machines, but they are missing the essential equipment: They have not known the arc of a life. They have not been born; they don’t know pain, or mortality, or fear. Simulated thinking may be thinking, but simulated feeling is never feeling, and simulated love is never love.
  • Breazeal’s position is this: People have relationships with many classes of things. They have relationships with children and with adults, with animals and with machines. People, even very little people, are good at this. Now, we are going to add robots to the list of things with which we can have relationships. More powerful than with pets. Less powerful than with people. We’ll figure it out.
  • The nature of the attachments to dolls and sociable machines is different. When children play with dolls, they project thoughts and emotions onto them. A girl who has broken her mother’s crystal will put her Barbies into detention and use them to work on her feelings of guilt. The dolls take the role she needs them to take.
  • Sociable machines, by contrast, have their own agenda. Playing with robots is not about the psychology of projection but the psychology of engagement. Children try to meet the robot’s needs, to understand the robot’s unique nature and wants. There is an attempt to build a mutual relationship.
  • Some people might consider that a good thing: encouraging children to think beyond their own needs and goals. Except the whole commercial program is an exercise in emotional deception.
  • when we offer these robots as pretend friends to our children, it’s not so clear they can wink with us. We embark on an experiment in which our children are the human subjects.
  • it is hard to imagine what those “right types” of ties might be. These robots can’t be in a two-way relationship with a child. They are machines whose art is to put children in a position of pretend empathy. And if we put our children in that position, we shouldn’t expect them to understand what empathy is. If we give them pretend relationships, we shouldn’t expect them to learn how real relationships — messy relationships — work. On the contrary. They will learn something superficial and inauthentic, but mistake it for real connection.
  • In the process, we can forget what is most central to our humanity: truly understanding each other.
  • For so long, we dreamed of artificial intelligence offering us not only instrumental help but the simple salvations of conversation and care. But now that our fantasy is becoming reality, it is time to confront the emotional downside of living with the robots of our dreams.
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