are human autonomy and machine autonomy compatible?
The US Department of Defense wants to know.
Special Interest Area
“Understanding the social impact of [machine] autonomy” is Special Interest Area 1 for the DoD’s Minerva Research Initiative 2017 research funding opportunities. The DoD recognizes that advances in machine autonomy are outpacing our ability to adapt individually and socially to these changes, creating the potential for significant societal disruption.
Support is needed from the social science community to examine the social, cultural, psychological, political, economic, and ethical impacts of these advances
such as
The disruptive effects of autonomous systems on military affairs and society at large
The societal impacts of military autonomy technology crossing over to civilian applications
How social and moral norms shape the adoption of autonomy
How does reliance on autonomy shape individual and organizational decisions. For example, in human organizations, delegating serves to increase the moral distance from the consequences of one’s actions. Might operating through a combat robot decrease empathy and increase dehumanization of others?
Hearts and Minds
It seems to me that human autonomy and machine autonomy are inversely proportional — as one increases, so the other decreases.
One thing we do know — perhaps thanks to previous Minerva Initiative-funded research — is that autonomous computational agents, dba algorithms and ‘bots’, can manipulate public opinion and therefore influence social norms to shape reality in the material plane.
Take machine-brain interfaces for example. Bryan Johnson of Braintree finds our biological mind-body connection so limited that he wants to improve it with neuroprotheses that would enable us to program brain activity. (Wasn’t there a good evolutionary reason for the autonomic nervous system?)
Mark Zuckerberg aspires for you to type with your mind, circumventing that inconvenient social habit of thinking before you speak. Facebook’s brain-computer interface guarantees “the privacy of text” while publishing those thoughts you decided to share by “sending them to the speech center of your brain,” since that is a conscious process we’ve demonstrably mastered in these inadequate biological husks. Thankfully, Regina Dugan, former DARPA director, is overseeing F8’s research and development in brain-to-text tech.
Textual Consent
Elon Musk is also pursuing “consensual telepathy” between your brain, your partner’s brain, and all of the other incidentally networked brains and machines in between. Like Musk, another former DARPA director Arati Prabhakar promotes human-machine hybridization as the only hope for human survival in an era of autonomous technology.
In the meantime, social scientists can apply for DoD funds to study how far autonomous systems can go before dehumanization becomes irreversible.
Further Reading
Biddle. 22 May 2017. Facebook Won’y Say if it Will Use Your Brain Activity for Advertisements. Intercept.
Clark. 21 April 2017. Elon Musk Reveals More About his Plan to Merge Man and Machine with Neuralink. Wired.
Creighton. Zuckerberg: Facebook Is Working on a Brain Interface That Lets You “Communicate Using Only Your Mind.” Futurism.
Kramer, Guillory & Hancock. June 2014. Experimental Evidence of Massive-scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Lennard. July 2014. The Troubling Link Between Facebook’s Emotion Study and Pentagon Research. Vice News.
Metz. 27 April 2017. Facebook’s Race to Link Your Brain to a Computer Might Be Unwinnable. Wired.
Minerva Research Initiative, Department of Defense. 2017 Minerva Topics of Interest.
Porges. April 2009. The Polyvagal Theory: New Insights into Adaptive Reactions of the Autonomic Nervous System. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine.
Wolverton. July 2014. Did Pentagon Help Fund Facebook’s Mood Manipulation Experiment? New American.
Woolley & Guilbeault. May 2017. Computational Propaganda in the United States of America: Manufacturing Consensus Online. Working Paper 2017.5. Oxford Project on Computational Propaganda.
