I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for most of the last year. All around us, computers and other automated systems are becoming more autonomous and interacting with us more the way people do than as tools. Siri, Alexa and the like talk to us and respond to speech. Windows machines recognize us visually and unlock themselves, cars are becoming autonomous.

If these “personified” systems are going to act more like members of society, then they need to interact with us as trustworthy members of society. I’ve been contemplating what exactly that might mean, and it seems to me that they need to behave in ways that are consonant with important values like loyalty, discretion, and apropro this conversation, candor. “Candor” is more that just honesty, it is honesty that is open, transparent and clear.

A candid system does not pretend to be what it is not. As you point out, Veronica, these systems are not biological, they have no sex, and as yet, no actual gender. As they become highly sophisticated AIs, it is conceiveable that they might have some sort of artificial gender or its cognate, but for now, they do not.

They also don’t have emotions, wants and desires. When Hanson Robotics demonstrated “Sophia” at SXSW and CNBC covered it in a video interview, I wrote about this problem in a Facebook post that I’ve just copied to Medium to make referencing it here a little easier. (See “Sophia: Uncanny, and untrustworthy?”)