Fashion Polices AI

As I worked my way through Vogue's September issue, 800 pages featuring clothes global designers see us wearing in the coming months, you can imagine how surprised I was to find an article about artificial intelligence (AI).

     It seems Kate Darling, who studied law in Basel, Switzerland, and now works at MIT, develops robot ethics based on findings from experiments involving the way people and robots with AI that think on their own relate to each other. She began thinking about the way human beings design, use, and treat machines with AI after she bought a small, intelligent robot dinosaur ten years ago. When someone held her dinosaur upside down by its tail, and she heard its tilt sensor causing it to squirm and cry, she'd tell the culprit to put the dinosaur down, and she found herself petting it until it stopped crying.

     Now, Darling deals with questions that are philosophical as well as technical concerning:

• Privacy, if sensors in things (the Internet of things") can spy on us
• Surgery performed by robots
• Companions for vulnerable elderly populations
• How robots with AI will affect the labor market, since they do things like make complicated cocktails and teach
• Autonomous weapon systems
• Choices made by driverless cars faced with killing passengers or pedestrians
• Ways robots can motivate and manipulate people--What can toys cause kids to do? Can robocalls influence people to vote a certain way or buy a certain product?

     Darling sees a need for legal protections for robots, if violence against robots (just as violence against animals) can lead humans to be violent toward each other. Her experiments show humans treat robots as if they were alive, not as if they were toasters or other kitchen appliances. What does it say, if someone is unable to empathize with a machine? Or can violence toward a machine be a healthy outlet for someone who otherwise would be violent toward a person.

     What about a robot's look and speech?  Years ago Japanese research showed robots that look too human can inspire fear or revulsion. Humans like the look of little, soft, and cute new robot characters. Some social robots are learning to understand and even use humor and sarcasm as well as regular expressions. Siri is said to have helped an autistic boy who developed a relationship with her to interact with real people. But impolite robots also might have a negative influence on behavior.

     Since AI technology can be used for good or bad, robot ethics is a very cutting-edge, fashionable field of study all over the world these days.