conversational interfaces; speaking with irresponsible black-boxes
TRANSCRIPT
Conversational Interfaces; Speaking with irresponsible black-boxes
31/8/2017 Dr. Raúl Tabarés
#4S2017 Boston
Index
Introduction Speaking to the Internet
The rising of Platform Economy & AI
Conversational Interfaces as Autonomous Technologies
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What is a conversational interface exactly?
The need for Responsible Innovations
Discussion
During the last years we have witnessed how conversational interfaces have popped up in the digital landscape due to the great advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Speech Recognition (SR). That has made possible that chatbots and virtual assistants became common in different platforms and devices. This emergence has been also coined as “conversation-as-a-platform” stressing the radical change that means to communicate with machines throughout the human voice in terms of user experience (UX). This emphasis in outlining a new version of the Web is not new as it was also something previously stressed in past techno-market paradigms like “Web 2.0” but it also reflects the need of political reflection about the introduction of emergent and pervasive technologies in our society. The development of these chatting agents mirrors the concentration of AI resources around a bunch of companies that lead the so-called “platform economy”.
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Introduction
“It's a simple concept, yet it's very powerful in its impact. It is about taking the power of human language and applying it more pervasively to our computing” Satya Nadella - Microsoft CEO´s
Different platforms have emerged and become common in our routines. This paradigm shift in business has been driven by the growing digitalization of sociality (Van Dijck, 2013) and the decentralization effect that Internet culture provokes on society (Castells, 1997) favoring this transition to digital services created by nascent start up´s. These digital ecosystems are trying to position themselves as cultural intermediaries while they look for sustainable business models (Gillespie, 2010) and they are totally depend on the contribution of human beings and the digitization of value-creating human activities (Kenney & Zysman, 2016). The emergence of Web 2.0 (O´Reilly, 2005) and Social Media (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010) paradigms have fuelled the growing datasets (Helmond, 2015) that are available in different UGC platforms (Van Dijck, 2009).This has made possible “digital labor” (Scholz, 2012) or “free labor” (Terranova, 2000) that is characterized by the exploitation of commons by capital (platform owners) on the Internet (Fuchs, 2010; Fuster-Morell, 2010; Tufekci, 2010). AI is the last breakthrough in this technological race because it has attracted a lot of attention due to promising applications like self-driving cars (Stilgoe, 2017), banking (Pasquale, 2015) and conversational interfaces (Geller, 2012), all of them favored by the greater availability of data that has made possible to train computers in these tasks.
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The rising of Platform Economy & Artificial Intelligence
“If the industrial revolution was organized around the factory, today´s changes are organized around these digital platforms, loosely defined. Indeed, we are in the midst of a reorganization of our economy in which the platform owners are seemingly developing power that may be even more formidable than was that of the factory owners in the early industrial revolution”
(Kenney & Zysman, 2016).
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The conviction that humans will be able to interact with machines through speech has been widely covered by sci-fi (Allen et al., 2001). It has also been commonly argued that speech is the technology that will bring the Internet to everyone (Lai, 2000) because spoken language “is the most natural, efficient, flexible, and inexpensive means of communication among humans” (Zue & Glass, 2000). We can define a conversational interface like any user interface that mimics chatting with a real human and therefore; can provide a quasi-human experience in a human-computer interaction. There are two major conversational interfaces; chatbots and virtual assistants. But there are also other artifacts that can implement a conversational interface like social robots. The origins of NLP are tightly related with Alan Turing´s article published in 1950; “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” where he wondered whether a machine can act indistinguishably from the way a thinker acts (Turing´s Test). New competitions have been fostered like “Winograd Schema Challenge” for improving “Turing´s test” and ask computers to make sense of sentences that are ambiguous but usually simple for humans to parse (Knight, 2016b). Common-sense reasoning is the next frontier as it is something that can´t be trained through data and is probably out of reach for current deep learning models (Chollet, 2017).
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What is a conversational interface exactly?
Since the irruption of the WWW in the 80´s (Berners-Lee, 2000) the PC was the only one gateway to access this platform but this will change with the advent of the iPod (O´Reilly, 2005) and the iPhone (Honan, 2007). Although it wasn´t the first smartphone , it was the most popular (Vogelstein, 2013) and it clearly contributed to a massive access to the Web. Afterwards, Android OS and other smartphones will appear in the market favoring multi-touch controls that radically changed the development of UI´s (Tabarés-Gutiérrez, 2015). Apple also launched a virtual assistant in 2011 called “Siri”. This innovation is also a byproduct of “CALO” (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project funded by DARPA under its PAL (Personalized Assistant that Learns) program. The aim of the project was “to create cognitive software systems, that is, systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.” (SRI project web). CALO project proved that different disciplines of AI can cooperate together (Bosker, 2013). This new approach opened up doors to a new paradigm in machine learning because every part of the project learned “in vivo” and with an uncontrolled diet of information instead of a fixed set of data.
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Speaking to the Internet
Chatbots like “Tay” demonstrated how to love Hitler and hate feminism can be rewarded with fame and followers in the social media landscape (Wong, 2016). The digital assistant Alexa has been involved in several controversies (Green, 2017). Other chatbots have been used in a non-ethical ways by portals like “Ashley Madison” (Morris, 2016; Newitz, 2015) or to spread fake news in US presidential elections (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016; Ferrara et al., 2016). As Winner argues; “The term AT is understood to be a general label for all conceptions and observations to the effect that technology I somehow out of control by human agency” (Winner, 1977:15). Control and knowledge over technological systems have been deterred in favor of “progress” as a major ideal. Our incapacity to decrypt the algorithmic culture (Hallinan & Striphas, 2014; Striphas, 2015) that is at the backbone of digital platforms (Gillespie, 2011) impedes to analyze the technological systems that stand for them (Dourish, 2016). It also remains unclear to public opinion how these companies gather, store and manage data about users what it clearly contributes to create formidable black-boxes that operate in the cultural sphere with rules and mechanisms that are not open to public scrutiny.
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Conversational Interfaces as autonomous technologies
“The loss of mastery manifests itself in a decline of our ability to know, to judge, or to control our technical means. It is in this general waning of intellectual, moral, and political command that ideas of autonomous technology find their basis” (Winner, 1977:30)
AI techniques are built up in methods and tools that defy the human reasoning and are confident about computer processing power; that is, a power that has been centralized during the last years due to the development of cloud computing (Bustamante Donas, 2014), and the availability of high-speed bandwidths (Geller, 2012). The biggest aspiration of conversational interfaces is to provide with a more natural way of communication between humans and machines, erasing the recurrent frictions that many users experiment when they want to get things done on a computer. But fewer frictions with computers could also mean fewer barriers to shop, or less space for moral deliberation. These technologies can provide advantages to interact with computers but also with greater technological somnambulism (Winner, 1983) to act impulsively in the digital ecosystem. These artifacts can reduce our already declining autonomy in the cultural sphere favoring to have conversations with digital agents that will assess and recommend us what to do, shop or like. The diversity of human languages can be also endangered. Nuances, tones and dialects belong also to the cultural landscape that is behind our linguistic diversity and the standardization of these corpuses might not be beneficial for speaking minorities. Current developments in the AI ecosystem are gathered by a minority of companies that command the majority of resources (Echeverría & Tabarés, 2016).
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Conversational Interfaces as autonomous technologies
There is a need to develop conversational interfaces in liaison with other stakeholders for promoting a collective and reflexive dialogue about its development that can foster shared responsibility (Von Schomberg, 2013), can prevent potentially dangerous or non-socially desirable products (Stilgoe et al., 2013) and can create the “right impacts” at the same time (Owen, Macnaghten, & Stilgoe, 2012). Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) aims to foresee the threats that emergent technologies can bring to our societies while trying to reframe responsibility in innovation contexts (Owen et al., 2012) as well as conferring new responsibilities (Douglas, 2003). As conversational interfaces are being promoted as new UI´s in computer-human communication it will be necessary to establish these long-term collaborations between different stakeholders in order to promote responsible digital assistants. This can prevent the pitfalls that many innovations in the field of AI have committed due to the lack of social diversity and political critique that is present in the R&D departments that promote these innovations. The AI industry is not open and inclusive. This prevents it for becoming a socially desirable technology. “Progress” in this sense means “inequality” as the benefits of these advances are not available to the majority of society.
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The need for Responsible innovations
Conversational Interfaces can offer new possibilities to improve human-machine communications that can lead to a mass adoption of digital technologies and at the same time contributing to mitigate different digital divides that exist in society. Nevertheless, it is still not clear how these innovations are going to confront the growing inequality that the digital revolution is creating in society throughout what has been coined as the “platform economy”. In this sense, the development of these technologies is the next step in the growing digitization of sociality. The role of chatbots and other virtual assistants in the social media landscape has generated a lot of controversy. We cannot fully understand how these socio-technological systems are built up but its impact in society is much greater than we can expect. Conversational interfaces can help humans in their daily frictions with computers trying to get things done but at the same time this lowering of resistance can make people more prone to be “automatic”. Our current declining autonomy in the social sphere is driven by the introduction of autonomous technological systems that are disturbing spaces for moral and political deliberation. Conversational interfaces are being branded as digital servants but we have to reflect about the ways that are being developed for assuring that they will not become digital tyrants. 21 ▌
Discussion
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Bibliography
Dr. Rául Tabarés [email protected]
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