I’ll be Bot: Give ‘em Frikkin’ License Plates

If you woke up one morning and a gaggle of Terminators were at your front door it might take you a minute to realize it’s not a dream. The scene is a nightmare. One Terminator is fondling the handle as another is poking the doorbell as another is tapping on the little hole you’re peeping through and you wonder when the hell Kyle Reese is going to show up with a shotgun.

Your front door is your identity. And the bots are breaking in. They won’t be bargained with. They won’t be reasoned with. They won’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until you’re sold.

Bots — more than TV, the web, or apps — are going to open the door and pwn us all. In the coming years people will start saying, “There’s a bot for that,” and soon — according to Microsoft’s CEO — we’ll hear bots saying that as well. Conversational interfaces are poised to become the front end for everything from apps to web to banks to coke machines, from airlines to any service that has an API. This may not be a good thing, and I’m going to tell you why, but first, let’s notice it’s not a dream.

SKYNET’S NOW A GRASS-ROOTS EFFORT

There are tons of bots around — ChatBots, BotNets, FemBots, GamerBots, real PornBots, LoL PronBots, MailBots, PhoneBots, SpiderBots, TwitterBots, MessengerBots, SlackBots, SpamBots and everything and a KitchenSinkBot.

When I say ‘bot” I’m talking about software that talks. And the fan of applications and services that follow in its wake.

Big companies are paying close attention to software that talks. Connie Chan (of Andressen-Horowitz) points out that conversational interface is overshadowing past content distribution methods, interfaces, and media strategies in her article, “When One App Rules Them All.” And Mark Zuckerberg clearly points out that Facebook’s bot platform, “is going to be the next big platform for sharing privately.” Google is going crazy over this stuff and they just hired an artist to help them write personalities. Microsoft’s also pretty damn good at predicting the future and CEO, Satya Nadella, tells us to expect, “people-to-digital assistants, people-to-bots and even digital assistants-to-bots.” He’s hot for this bot-on-bot action and calls bots “the new apps” because Microsoft is taking this stuff seriously — and Silicon Valley’s investors are falling in step with them. Amazon Echo can now order an Uber or a Domino’s Pizza (and a robot from Domino’s can deliver it). Even Taco Bell has a bot.

And even for us mere humans on the ground, inexpensive and high-calibre tools for talking software are in easy arm’s reach. Whether it’s the Amazon Echo ASK, Nuance Mix, Vicarious, Microsoft’s Cognitive Services, Wit.ai, IBM Watson, Slack, DiffBot, or that legion of bot tools that Facebook has loosed, you, too, can now contribute to the apocalypse. There’s dozens of these tools. And they’re being used to make cool bots on Twitter, things like @RestroomGender, @soft_focuses, @CensusAmericans. And bot-war bar-fights too. So now you, too, can decide the future of our bot overlords.

So what’s to worry about with a little bot?

BOTS NEED ETHICAL DESIGN

Bots can control how money is made, what information is exchanged, and why decisions are made. They can remove people from the money-making circuit by replacing knowledge workers. They can filter, rank, edit and change everything from headlines to emails, and therefor change how we decide everything from how to manage our health to our wealth. By removing humans from the process of earning capital there’s financial gains. Costs are cut, profits are increased, and headaches reduced. This isn’t new news. Even three years ago Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne were pointing out that 47% of the social class is about to get sent to the back of the room. Studies like these come out frequently but let’s face it, it’s hard to predict things, and in particular the future. What is clear is that bots will both cancel and create jobs (the calculator was once a desk job, as will soon be the accountant) and if the financial arguments aren’t enough, ethics will increasingly be needed on the romance front. As people share their intimate secrets with flirtatious bots like the fembots of Ashley Madison, fall in love with bots, marry digital characters, have sex with robots, and spill a litter of furbys some day the designers of these systems will be in a position of financial and emotional power over their bots’ users. Where there is power there is ethics. And like any love, these developers will have their users buy the balls, dates, dinners, advertising, upgrades and all the other courtly gifts that are commonly showered on a loved one. Bots will know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Whenever you make something act like a human you make ethical choices.

We need to learn how to make bots humane. One way to start is to consider how past technology design has generated profits that don’t think about end-user values. Just as social media has done, bots will allow designers to change the systems we interact with. Bots will control the dialogue (and therefor limit user options), build slot-machine rewards (and therefor capitalize user time), build bottomless content bins (and therefor capitalize user attention), interrupt us with notifications, rank our search results, rank us, and eavesdrop on our family’s intimate conversations. In summary, technology design has funny ways of hijacking how we think. Not ha-ha funny, but Terminator Your-clothes-give-them-to-me funny. This question is percolating in a few circles, and Amy Stapleton and Opus Research have noted some of the walled gardens that bots are spinning up.

We also need to learn how to interact with bots. Be careful with a bot whenever it’s got a wake word because that means everything is being recorded (and breaking the law). And be especially careful when a bot contacts you first. And really especially super careful when it presents itself as looking like a real person because this means that the designers are trying to fool you, at least subconsciously, into thinking it is a real person. Reeves & Nass warned us about this situation decades ago. Consider only Apple; with the acquisition of companies from IFlyBy Media, Faceshift, Vocal IQ, and Emotient to we can expect it to be increasingly hard to tell a person from bot — especially on FaceTime — within the next 24 months. Isn’t, after all, that the thing scariest about the Terminator? That, “outside, it’s living human tissue: flesh, skin, hair, blood — grown for the cyborgs?” The other day I was looking for someone on Skype and I saw the Bot option on in the upper-right portion of the menu.

The line between bot and person is getting fuzzy.

FACEBOTS WILL NEED AUTHENTICATION, TOO

If Mark Zuckerberg really thinks, “we will be able to talk to chat bots just as we do with friends,” then shouldn’t we be able to trust them?

More to the point, will bots have more freedom than people? What will Facebook do with bot identities? If Facebook’s mission (as they state it) is to allow people to “..use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them,” then they’ll treat bots with at least the same preference as humans. Or, won’t they? After all, they’ve just released this bot platform, they won’t want their bots to be abusive, and they’re already authenticating real users anyway.

Shouldn’t Facebook authenticate bots?

Bots need license plates. They need real names. They need to be treated like people. They need to be treated as Facebook treats you: authenticated.

Bots can do all the irritating stuff people on Facebook can do — and faster and more and without getting sick, tired or taking a day off. Trolling, spamming, flaming, stalking, shaming, bullying, phishing, griefing, twitter-pooping and general potty-mouthing are all bot-possible actions that none of us would like to see automated. And there’s bomb threats, 911 spoofs, or DDOSing personal phones or swatting. I really hope SwatBots stay in the Sonic The Hedgehog video games. Isaac Asmov’s three laws of robotics ain’t happening any time soon. Like, never.

Listen, and understand. The Terminators are out there. They will be bargained with. They will be reasoned with. They might feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And we’re building them today! So let’s make ’em humane. And let’s give ’em license plates, eh?

Quick, before they jump into the time displacement machine.