Where’s my talking robot?
“Be aware of how the balance of control is shifting”
NB: This article was first published in 2012 and was copied here in 2020.
For as long as humans have been inventing new technologies, we have tried to use these technologies to create automatons in our image. In other words, robots that we can talk to.
Our oldest myths include robots made from clay. With the advent of metalworking, Hephaestus, blacksmith to the ancient greek gods, built handmaidens out of gold. With the spread of mechanics, René I-think-therefore-I-am Descartes is said to have built a daughter out of metal and sprockets. Following the industrial revolution, steam and then electrical robots proliferated including a (fictional) Thomas-Edison-like inventor introducing the term “android” in The Future Eve.
People have been predicting that talking robots are just 5 years away … for about 50 years now. Our expectations have exceeded the complexity that is necessary to make this a reality. A good example is from 2001: A Space Odyssey:
“I’m sorry, Frank, I think you missed it … “
In 1968 — a year before the moon landing — audiences balked at the idea that a computer would be competitive with a human in chess by 2001, but no one batted an eyelid that the computer was carrying on a conversation in English at the same time. Not only was the English flawless, the computer had mastered the art of subtle condescension. The condescension was more than linguistic expertise — it signaled that perhaps the robot was not the willing servant and that is possessed a hidden agenda that gave it more power than its human counterparts realized.
What was the name of the robot in 2001: A Space Odyssey? To test your knowledge, answers for this robot (#1) and 19 others below are at the end of the article.
Aristotle suggested in Politics (322 BCE) that automatons could bring the abolition of slavery. The term “robot” didn’t come until relatively recently in Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots, published in 1920. Echoing Aristotle, “robot” is derived from the Czech word “rab”, which means “slave”. The tension has remained: are robots our servants and should we fear that they will rise up to control us?
So where is your talking robot? And should you be worried about it rising up to control you? You may not be having a conversation with a robot every day, but you are interacting with artificial intelligence which is understanding your communications and making decisions that are changing your life in profound ways. They cannot produce flawless sentences, but they can understand language at a scale beyond that of any one person. These robots are working with you to make you smarter, choose your friends, select your news, protect your health, move you around, and locate your enemies.
We’ll go through examples of these influences one by one:
Making you smarter
In the US, the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) is taken by every student applying to graduate school. One of the examiners for the written task is an automated process, grading the quality of your writing by evaluating a complex combination of the words that you use and the structure of your sentences.
The robot grading your GRE may not be speaking back to you directly, and there are still human graders for every exam. It is not the robots alone who have determined a million or more educational futures, but it is likely that the robots have been the deciding vote in thousands of borderline cases.
Choosing your friends
Every social network employs some form of language technology. The understanding of your communications is one of the factors that determine what appears in your social news feed or trending topics.
For some people — an increasing number of the most online — this will mean that the majority of their interactions with friends and family are being mediated by robots understanding their communications and making decisions about what to show and what to leave out.
Filtering your news
If you also get your news from social media, then the same bots that determine your news feed are also determining the news that you consume. If read the news online, then chances are there are also some language technologies that are dynamically selecting what appears to be read, as online news services and aggregators are increasingly offering personalized services by observing your reading habits and guessing your preferences.
And if you only watch broadcast news? Pretty much every news agency now uses social media to decide what to broadcast, so while the actual broadcast might be by humans, there were robots helping to select each story along the way.
Protecting your health
Disease outbreaks are among the world’s greatest killers. A well-known case being the 1918 “Spanish Flu” that killed more people than World War I. The first signs of a new outbreak are often local reports in plain language. In 2009, an obscure report about a “strange epidemic outbreak” in La Gloria, Mexico (pop 3,000) was not noticed by human epidemiologists first, but by GPHIN, a system in Canada that reads information about potential outbreaks and alerts health professionals. This outbreak became known as H1N1, or more simply Swine Flu — a robot got there first.
Health is one area where the machines are very quickly gaining on humans. We may only be making incremental progress in machines that understand human communication, but it is out-pacing the rate at which we are increasing the ratio of doctors to patients.
Moving you around
So what will be the first talking robot that you own? There is a good chance that it will be a self-driving car with a voice-recognition system.
In other words, your first robot will be one that you sit inside, the doors will lock, and it will take you down a busy road at high speed. That’s a lot of trust.
Locating your enemies
The 9/11 masterminds Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh became upset at the lack of attribution they were receiving, and so in 2002 they allowed an al-Jazeera reporter to record an audio interview bragging about their involvement. The reporter was blindfolded and taken to an unknown location, but within days of airing voice-recognition technology from the interview is believed to have been used to pinpoint their location from satellite phones, leading to their arrests.
It is one version of the future that we were promised in cartoons: evil geniuses are doing battle with artificial intelligences that control satellites, ultimately being brought down by their own egos.
Who controls your robots?
Who knows the exact nature of these robots and how they are influencing our lives? Probably no one. When you create an algorithm where machine-learning bootstraps its own knowledge, it is often difficult to determine exactly why some particular decision or prediction was made — it is simply happening at too great a scale for a person to fully understand with limited time.
And even without the inherent uncertainly, how can we know whether these language technologies are being used for good rather than evil? These use cases here could as easily be used to have a negative impact on your education, health, relationships, news consumption, and security.
Thank you robots
While our predictions about robots may have over-emphasized their human form, their ability to speak, and their seemingly autonomous nature, history did get one part right: we need to be aware of how the balance of control is shifting. Each of these examples should be at least a little unsettling, and this awareness is something that we should all be carrying with us.
For this awareness, we thank the real creators of these 20 imagined robots: the authors, filmmakers, etc, who have explored the implications of allowing decisions to be made by machines instead of people. We may not have the exact robots that they imagined, but they have made us explore many of implications in advance of the actual technologies. Our part now is to continue to explore the of implications of relying on machines to make decisions for us, especially the ones who increasingly understand what we are saying, even if they don’t talk back.
– Rob Munro, 2012
Key to robots (impressed if you identified them all!):
1 HAL 9000, 2001 A Space Odyssey, MGM
2 Dalek, Dr Who, BBC
3 Robby the Robot, The Forbidden Planet, MGM
4 David, Prometheus, 20th Century Fox
5 Johnny 5, Short Circuit, TriStar Pictures
6 SICO, Rocky IV, MGM/UA
7 Motoko Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell, Manga Entertainment
8 Batou, Ghost in the Shell, Manga Entertainment
9 Astro Boy, Astro Boy, Mushi Entertainment
10 Cyclon, Battlestar Galactica, Universal
11 Rosie, The Jetsons, Hanna-Barbera
12 Tin Man, The Wizard of Oz, MGM
13 Johnny Cab, Total Recall, TriStar
14 Google Car, TechCrunch, Google
15 Data, Star Trek, Paramount
16 The Terminator, Terminator, Orion
17 Megatron, Transformers, Hasbro
18 Optimus Prime, Transformers, Hasbro
19 Huey, Silent Running, Universal
20 Bender, Futurama, 20th Century Fox
PS: This article came from a series of talks I gave in 2012 about the dangers of AI. There’s only one public video that I’m aware of, a 5 minute Ignite talk:
