+1 for friendly AI (even with its narrowness)
How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F
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Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F
#32This is a great article that highlights some things people have been thinking about for a while (starting with Isaac Asimov), but haven't been much of an immediate concern until now: namely the nature of artificial intelligence and our relationship with it.
We could consider the emergence of a friendship like this a milestone, a bit like when chess AI got good enough to beat a typical club player, but wasn't quite ready to beat Kasparov. We're probably only a few years away (OK, maybe 10+, but it's not 50+) from the Kasparov point, where an AI like Siri can beat the turing test for any living human.
There are all sorts of questions like whether, to be considered alive and imbued with the inalienable rights that should come with sentience, is self-awareness necessary, or is the anthropomorphic perception of nearby humans more important? Should an AI have similar rights by proxy as a pet dog?
One especially important question is what does it mean for an AI to die? If Siri developed a fault, and fixing that fault would cause a change in personality so that it was no longer recognisable to Gus as his BFF, should that act be called "roboticide"? Such questions are particularly relevant when AI/ML systems (deep recurrent nets, for example) are so complex that we don't really understand them fully, so we have no way to surgically correct specific faults; all we can do is revert to an earlier state and re-train. That may be loss of life, for certain definitions of "life".
As an occasional game developer, I tend to think about these issues in other contexts too, such as our relationship with virtual characters in games. It's already very easy to get highly immersed in single-player virtual worlds, like any of the Elder Scrolls games. Most would not be fooled into thinking that an NPC is "alive", but it's certainly possible to develop emotional reactions to certain characters that we perhaps like because they say nice things about us, or dislike because we find then annoying, etc.
There are two kinds of character interaction a person can have in a game: NPCs and human avatars. As we start to build virtual worlds (partly spurred by the Oculus Rift and partly just because of the Internet), this could affect not only our relationship with NPCs, but with other humans too. I don't know whether this will a net positive or negative thing, but we're certainly going to learn a lot about human psychology as we head towards the point where, in VR, nobody knows you're a human.
Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F
#33Siri does have a very friendly sounding voice. I've been using the Siri voice library (not the AI) in a classroom robot that help kids with autism engage with their therapy.
Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F
#34This is a great article that highlights some things people have been thinking about for a while (starting with Isaac Asimov), but haven't been much of an immediate concern until now: namely the nature of artificial intelligence and our relationship with it. We could consider the emergence of a friendship like this a milestone, a bit like when chess AI got good enough to beat a typical club player, but wasn't quite re…
"Should an AI have similar rights by proxy as a pet dog?"
I think so, when valued in the same way by a human. This is no different to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8465088
Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F
#35This is a great article that highlights some things people have been thinking about for a while (starting with Isaac Asimov), but haven't been much of an immediate concern until now: namely the nature of artificial intelligence and our relationship with it. We could consider the emergence of a friendship like this a milestone, a bit like when chess AI got good enough to beat a typical club player, but wasn't quite re…
When phones' personal assistants (every company seems to want to have theirs these days) become orders of magnitude more advanced, we may be able to tell them to "check on our vacation booking" and they will know to search through our emails and calendars and connect the dots, so in those tasks they will be more advanced. There will probably be more services tied more deeply into them- for example, you'll be able to say "get me an Uber" and they will reply with "A blue civic will be here in 3 minutes", or "fill up the fridge on Sunday morning" and an Instacart-like company will show up at your door Sunday morning with eggs, vegetables (but no milk because you didn't finish this week's).
However, we won't be able to have those deep meaningful conversations with our voice assistants, because they won't have the necessary life experience to follow meaningful conversations. The current products on the market have no parents, no age, no experiences in school, no previous job, no former lovers, etc (they will jump around those questions playfully, but the canned answers get old quite fast). Those trite details that we recount when we bond with people do not exist in current personal assistants and likely never will.
There are several reasons for this: the first being that being able to model a structure of "life experiences" that can be queried based on what the user is saying is an incredibly complex problem on which we have pretty much no angle of attack on.
12 year old child: "I got picked on at school today." Digital personal assistant: "You know, it happened to me too when I was your age. Let's talk to your mom about it."
Or even more complex:
24 year old student: "Hey, remember that problem on the Trigonometry 402 final from my senior year that I asked you to solve the equations for back in college?" Digital assistant: "Oh yes! Here it is."
This, happening for millions and millions of possible interactions, life experiences, contexts? That's the algorithmic equivalent of light speed travel. Who knows maybe we'll get here one day. But 10 years from now? 50 years from now? 100 years from now? Not a chance. Remember that 40 years ago, Minsky thought it'd take a bunch of grad students a summer to write a program that recognize objects in pictures.
The second reason that such systems are extremely unlikely to emerge is that even if it would be doable technically, it would be extremely expensive to a company. And there would be literally no demand for it, because the overwhelming majority of people don't care about talking to robots. They already don't have enough time to spend with their children, partners, friends, parents... why would anyone waste time with a fake person? No company would invest the billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars, to solve this problem in the next few hundred years.
Those questions of sentience and whether powering off a digital voice is "killing it" are appealing to ask to those of us who grew up reading Isaac Asimov, because we want this future to exist so bad. But they are red herrings- those questions have no meaningful answers, because our society is not configured in a way in which those questions could actually arise. When you turn your phone off today, the personal assistant definitely doesn't "die"; and in 50 years, even if it can carry out tasks way more efficiently and give somewhat more "human sounding" answers to certain categories of questions, people will still have no problem turning it off.
Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F
#36I think Siri is pretty useful as a conversation partner for foreign language. I had tried out the British and Scottish voices for kicks, settled on Aussie for quite awhile and then while playing with my wife's Japanese Siri realized it was actually excellent language practice.
Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F
#37This piece is absolutely adorable.
As a parent of an autistic child, I found this article very disturbing.
I have spent the last several years working with my child: to engage people and to establish empathy (among other skills) - empathy with real people. My child exhibits obsession with topics and we cover this using the Internet and other resources (eg. books, magazines). However, I have worked hard so that my child can relate to others and to learn essential skills to cope with life. My young autistic child has gone from avoiding eye contact, hitting and punching and general "fuck you if I don't like the look of you" to somewhat synthetic behaviour that's been learned - it now comes across as fairly natural... but it's been a lot of work. This was achieved by focussing on real people, both with similar issues and those without. It also came through honest and open communication about autism and autistics vs Neuro Typicals (NT).
Interestingly, my autistic child used siri briefly and poked holes through the AI and found it severely limiting.
As a parent of an autistic child that has read text-books, worked in class, spoken at length with specialists, attended support groups and training programs, and supported my child's turn-around that fellow parents/teachers/specialists described as "amazing" etc... I am horrified at an approach that diverges from constructive social behaviour. The younger you learn to engage others, the easier it is and more readily it will stick.
I'd encourage any parent of an autistic child to research this area thoroughly before going down the "Siri as BFF" path.
Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F
#38Siri does have a very friendly sounding voice. I've been using the Siri voice library (not the AI) in a classroom robot that help kids with autism engage with their therapy.
Is there any public information on what you're doing? I have a son who is not necessarily ASD (we don't know exactly what he is dealing with yet), but he has some similar symptoms to ASD and he loves robots (we have three LEGO WeDo sets and we regularly build WeDo robots). I would love to hear or read more on how you're using robots with ASD children!
Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost certainly they special-case some inputs -- have you ever recited the Konami Code to Siri? What amazes me is sheer variety of questions that people ask Siri that s/he can now answer humorously. It wouldn't surprise me if they watch the number of queries (from actual users) that don't get an answer and/or fall back to Wolfram Alpha to see if there are any new ones that need special treatment. That said, most of…
The flight information is powered by Wolfram Alpha which appears to source it from ADS-B data via (I assume) the FAA, so that actually is entirely automated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...
I doubt it's from the FAA. ADS-B is trivial to monitor, there's lots of private individuals/groups grabbing this info.
Re: How Apple’s Siri Became One Autistic Boy's B.F.F
#40This piece is absolutely adorable.
As a parent of an autistic child, I found this article very disturbing. I have spent the last several years working with my child: to engage people and to establish empathy (among other skills) - empathy with real people. My child exhibits obsession with topics and we cover this using the Internet and other resources (eg. books, magazines). However, I have worked hard so that my child can relate to others and to lear…
The OP said interacting with Siri, far from causing her son to diverge from constructive social behavior, helped him learn it - he ended up being better able to interact with real people. I have no particular reason to believe her son's experience was atypical. Do you have any reason to believe it was?