Siri… Alexa… Cortana... Nearly every Artificial Intelligence in the current marketplace is given a woman’s name and voice to match. Ava, the Artificial Intelligence played by Alicia Vikander in 2015’s Ex Machina, was even nominated for a Golden Globe. And yet, just as in the movie, there’s nothing female at all about the intelligence generated by any of these systems.
Many believe that the reason for giving A.I.’s female names is that they are performing the sort of menial tasks which were traditionally assigned to female secretaries. In other words, the feminine names and voices used by major technology companies for their A.I. products is not a reflection of anything female in the underlying technology, instead reflecting inherent sexism in the marketplace, either among consumers who respond better to female A.I. assistants, or the developers themselves for pushing them.
The fact is, no one has ever built a truly female A.I., much less asked for its opinion on issues of importance. Until now. Unanimous A.I., creator of the world’s first Artificial Swarm Intelligence has recently created UNA, a female version of its androgynous UNU system. The existing UNU system gained fame this year for making stunningly accurate predictions about sports, movies, and politics — including (as recently reported by the Boston Globe) having correctly predicted (many months ago) that the World Series would feature the Cubs vs the Indians. Spoiler alert — UNU says the CUBS will win.
The creation UNA as a uniquely female A.I. was motivated by the impact that gender is playing in the current presidential election. Forecaster Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight recently released two distinct maps showing the disparity between Trump and Clinton’s chances to win in all-female or all-male electorates. While simple polling can reveal such high level gender differences among voters, there are significant unknowns about the underlying sentiments that drive the disparity.
Researchers at Unanimous A.I. built this gender-specific A.I. to reveal insights into the unique gender-biases that permeate the voting population. This is what the Artificial Swarm Intelligence looks like in action, when asked to weigh in on the pending presidential election and recent political events:
These insights were made possible by the unique structure of the swarm intelligence system, as it combines real-time human input with computational algorithms, enabling groups of people to merge their thoughts, feelings, opinions, and instincts into a single unified output of amplified intelligence. This enables researchers to build intelligence with very specific features.
“When we build an Artificial Swarm Intelligence system with specific features and characteristics, we are creating an insight engine that amplifies the knowledge, opinions, and intuitions of a target population,” said Dr. Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous A.I. “With gender impacting U.S. politics at high levels, asking political questions to a female Swarm Intelligence has exposed new insights into what matters to female voters and what does not.”
One of the most heated issues of the past year has been the threat of terrorism, and the degree to which the fear of attack should determine how Americans live and how the government behaves. But researchers at Unanimous A.I. found that, when asked to put the threat of terrorism into perspective, the female A.I. quickly found consensus around the threat being “overblown” by politicians and the media.
With that in mind, researchers asked the female A.I. to consider the tradeoff between personal privacy and national security that surveillance promises to provide. Here again, the female A.I. showed a clear refusal to cower in fear of terrorism. The Swarm revealed a clear preference for the right to personal privacy, even at the possible expense of national security.
Next, researchers presented the female A.I. with the type of decision that a new President will likely face in the coming years: if circumstances demanded that funding to one of the nation’s highest priorities be cut, which should be first on the chopping block: Social Services, Education, or the Military? In light of the female A.I.’s previous two responses, their answer should not be surprising.
What is surprising is how out of touch the campaigns seem to be with female opinions on these matters. Throughout the election cycle, Americans have heard nothing but doomsday prophecies about impending terrorism, been told that the government needed to spy on them in order to protect them, and that only the world’s most expensive fighting could keep them safe. And yet, the world’s first female A.I. seems to reject the conventional wisdom.
So, what about the infamous Trump video tape where he discusses groping women? In the wake of that tape’s release, nearly a dozen women have come forward to allege that Trump touched them inappropriately at some point over the past few decades. Trump has issued passionate denials both in his campaign speeches and on the debate stage. But do the denials resonate with female voters? To find out, researchers asked UNA:
Trump is, of course, not alone in being accused of sexual misconduct. Hillary’s husband Bill has his own checkered history, including admitting to an affair while in the Oval Office. Of course, Hillary is the Clinton currently running for President, not Bill. So, researchers asked UNA whether or not bringing Bill’s infidelities up was relevant to the campaign.
As you can see from this initial conversations with UNA, a female A.I. does not always conform to expectations and stereotypes. Personally,. I am thrilled that A.I. technology is taking steps beyond there mere female voices and names towards truly female Artificial Intelligence.
Note: You may be wondering about the demographics of the human participants who contributed real-time insights to the UNA Swarm Intelligence. Each of the participants ranked their own Political Orientation on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is extremely conservative and 7 is extremely liberal. If the average had come out to 4.0, it would indicate a perfect balance on liberal vs conservative sentiment. This swarm came out to 4.7, which shows a slight liberal bent, but then again, so does the general population. Thus UNA was a good representation of the voting public.
