Category: Digital Culture

AI & Ethical Determinism

Photo by moipokupkigmailcom.

As artificial intelligence (AI) moves from the realm of science fiction to everyday science, leading  technologists and scientists are asking themselves questions about how to write an ethical code. The most widely reported ethical dilemma involves the self-driving automobile and what’s known as the Trolley Problem.  This hypothetical challenge asks whether or not you would make the decision to divert a speeding train from one track to another knowing that doing so will kill one person but save the lives of several others.

This problem is transposed to the world of driverless vehicles and how a car’s AI should make split-second, life-and-death decisions. It’s a challenge that doesn’t just raise technological or ethical questions, but psychological ones as well.  Because the ways in which we cope with tragedy—or the anticipation of potential tragedy—in modern, developed society does not generally encompass the kind of determinism implied by AI.

Many cope with tragic accidents through faith—a belief that there is a deity with a plan, even if that plan cannot be known.  Those of us who are not religious cope without faith in a plan—by making peace with the fact that chaos and human fallibility can produce terrible outcomes.  In either case, there is a degree of comfort in the uncertainty—not comfort that lessens the pain of loss per se, but comfort that enables us to rationalize terrible events or to step outside the door without living in abject fear.  The uncertainty coupled with probability, and maintaining a measure of control, allows us to confidently get into our cars and drive around without expecting to be wiped out.  Remove a factor, for instance the measure of control, and this likely explains why more people are anxious about flying than riding in cars despite the statistics proving that the opposite should be true.

In this regard, when the unforeseen event occurs—brakes fail, an obstacle suddenly appears in the road, etc.—the outcome of the split-second reaction of a human driver is arguably more the result of chance than of any kind of rational decision-making. Even in relatively common examples, drivers are told that they should almost never swerve to avoid wildlife running across the road and risk hitting an oncoming car or slamming into a tree and killing themselves rather than hit a squirrel. But that instinct to avoid is strong and gets stronger when the animal that suddenly appears is a stray cat or dog.  The point is that whatever the outcome—whether a flattened squirrel or several dead motorists—the whole series of events, including the driver’s reaction, can be chalked up to a degree of uncertainty, and in that uncertainty lies many of our psychological coping mechanisms.

But what happens when humans pre-determine the outcome of certain ethical dilemmas and encode these into machines that we then grant authority to make these decisions?  In the simple case cited above, the squirrel is killed and all humans live, but what about a split-second decision that will result in the death of a passenger versus the deaths of a mother and baby crossing the road?  In the Summer of 2016, MIT researchers, grappling with exactly these types of questions, launched a website called Moral Machine which asks users to make a set of lose-lose decisions in various hypothetical traffic scenarios in which some parties face certain death.  Anyone can take the “test”, and the site will reveal how you “score” relative to the ethical decisions made by others.

Of course, the Moral Machine tests present the user with information that a car’s AI would, in principle, never know—like the fact that some of the potential victims are criminals.  But in a more likely scenario, age is a factor in some of the scenarios, a condition that strikes me as being more credible—that a vehicle might know it’s carrying a septuagenarian couple and may, therefore, decide that it is more ethical to kill them rather than a young family. The senior couple might even make the same selfless decision themselves, but such calculations don’t really occur when a human operator is reacting to an emergency faster than he can think.

What’s eerie about some of these Moral Machine tests is the implication that the data set used to enable an AI to make ethical decisions could theoretically include more than mere numbers (i.e. that the machine would simply default to save more lives than it takes).  Age could be a factor, but what about net worth or relative “value” to society?  Does the AI wipe out a whole busload of kids to save one physicist or surgeon or even a Kardashian? What about race or sexual orientation? This then begs the question of whether or not these pre-determined decisions are public knowledge or trade secrets, both of which present huge and unprecedented moral dilemmas.

In this regard, an article that appeared just a few days ago tells us that the next generation of self-driving cars from Mercedes-Benz will be programmed to save the passengers regardless of circumstances.  On the one hand, this is an algorithmic variation on the theme that the privileged class enjoy a priority lane on the right to life ahead of everyone else; but there is also something to be said for Mercedes choosing not to become trapped in the moral miasma of programming an ethical AI. Perhaps if all vehicles are required by law to default to a single directive like try to save the passengers, then this would approximate the instinctive but fallible reactions of human drivers and still allow uncertainty to play a role, thus absolving engineers of the responsibility to “play God.”  At least until the AI becomes self aware and begins to make such decisions on its own.

After all, it’s hard not to notice the dystopian implications of a man-made, ethical determinism when we remove the element of chance and cede authority to carry out life-and-death decisions to machines.  When we remove the psychological buffer provided by chance, fate, God’s will, etc., then tragic events naturally beg explanation and, therefore, an instinct to assign blame. This of course raises the companion question about those who would inevitably try to game the system, people who would “jailbreak” their vehicles to override any code that might not favor them as the chosen survivors of an accident.  Suddenly, this places the civil libertarians who complain about the “right” to tinker with technological property on the wrong side of that argument insofar as the theoretical “greater good” is concerned.

The ethical AI question also becomes another factor leading to the conclusion that autonomous vehicles might not be private property for very long. Rationally, to have an AI shuttling all of us hither and yon, the system would have to be level in order for it to be remotely ethical, suggesting that the private property models from Mercedes or Tesla or Ford are merely stepping stones toward a public system, or a highly regulated one. But these outcomes are not what manufacturers or leading data companies investing in this future are going have in mind.

This is one reason I agree with President Obama, when he said in a recent Wired interview with Joi Ito conducted by Scott Dadich, that it is essential that public funding play a role in the development of AI.  “…part of what we’re gonna have to understand is that if we want the values of a diverse community represented in these breakthrough technologies, then government funding has to be a part of it. And if government is not part of financing it, then all these issues that Joi has raised about the values embedded in these technologies end up being potentially lost or at least not properly debated,” said Obama.

Of course, the president is referring to developing an ethical AI beyond just vehicles, and his point is well taken.  The sci-fi future of AI is already here.  But the questions as to what values drive the decision-making are just barely being asked in the public debate. Meanwhile, the corporate rhetoric of “disruption” has already absolved many sins in the areas of privacy and intellectual property infringement.  Or as Sam Kriss put it so well in his excellent article for The Atlantic:  “Silicon Valley works by solving problems that hadn’t heretofore existed; its culture is pathologically fixated on the notion of ‘disruption.’ Tech products no longer feel like something offered to the public, but something imposed: The great visionary looks at the way everyone is doing something, and decides, single-handedly, to change it.”

NPR reported in late September that computer scientists from the major tech giants—IBM, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, & Google formed The Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society.  One of the goals of the partnership is to develop standards for best practices in the field of AI, including tackling ethical questions like the Trolley Problem for vehicles.  But it is essential that the public interest be represented in the development of these technologies, and as much as I may fault the Obama administration for being too Googley in various policy areas, I also credit the president himself for apparently thinking deeply about questions like how we develop an ethical AI. At the present rate of development and investment, let’s hope the outgoing president is not the last public representative to keep this conversation in the foreground.

Are We Ruining Facebook with Politics?

Photo by Pond5
Photo by Pond5

Last week, Karol Markowicz, writing for The New York Post, said that we’re “ruining Facebook (and friendships) with political rants.”  Taking the position that Facebook is meant to be an environment for connecting with friends and family in traditionally gregarious ways—sharing kids’ photos and personal news, etc.—Markowicz makes a case that chronic political grandstanding is harming the social atmosphere of the platform, even citing a 2014 Pew study showing that roughly a quarter of users have blocked “Friends” because of political disagreements.

Markowicz’s observations prod consideration of a few different subjects, including the fact that even in an era of divisive politics, we’ve never had a candidate with the polarizing capacity of a Donald Trump before. And while it seems that our political climate has become more radical—and apparently less well-informed—over the last 20 years, is it more accurate to say that politics is ruining Facebook or that Facebook is ruining politics?   The latter notion has certainly been my bias since starting this blog—that the information revolution is generally a flop owing to the multitude of ways in which the electorate can now reinforce ignorance, racism, sexism, or xenophobia by fostering online communities predicated on exactly these sensibilities.  The so-called information age is one reason I believe fringe lunacy has gone mainstream.

With regard to Markowicz’s thesis, though, that political grandstanding is “ruining Facebook”, this presupposes that Facebook was somehow earmarked for a different destiny, which is a hard premise to accept a face value. For better or worse, social media is still an experiment—a catalyst only recently added to human interactions and which cannot fail to yield unpredictable results.  How can anyone say that Facebook is being ruined rather than come to the more reasonable conclusion that Facebook, for which there is no real precedent, was destined to become exactly what it is?  A social media platform itself is not society, which we do have a collective responsibility to maintain despite our differences.  Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg’s ant farm comprising a half-billion ant users, and it remains to be seen whether the farm thrives or dies, or if the ants just get bored.  Either way, how much does it really matter?

Society is outside my front door.  I don’t know who my neighbor is voting for, but I know he’s a hell of a nice guy, a great dad, and the kind of person who will do anything for you.  If he posted a Trump sign on his lawn tomorrow, yes, I’d think he has a serious disconnect, but am I going to walk over to his house and set him straight? Or will I suddenly be rude to him once he declares his intentions? Of course not. And to Markowicz’s point, if most of us would respect such boundaries in the real world, why do we feel it’s okay to cross these lines in cyberspace?

The answers are going to be found in the medium itself, in the nature and design of the platform.  The platform wants you to say something. That is its purpose.  And the environment fuses public and private behavior in ways that are relatively new in human experience, especially for the two generations who became adults before Facebook’s inventor was even born. Add to this the fact that most people don’t express themselves very carefully with the written word and that all other communication—facial expression, tone, body language—is obliterated, and of course friends and relatives are going to insult one another.

When I was a kid, most adults repeated the rule that one does not talk about religion or politics in polite company, and again to Markowicz’s point, social media often exemplifies why this was a pretty good rule.  It has been widely discussed—and it is empirically obvious—that people will say things on a social media platform that they would never say to someone, let alone a friend or family member, in person.  This phenomenon has provided grist for many a psychologist’s mill, but the actual effects on relationships within the confines of the platform itself are merely data in the ant-farm experiment. And it should be obvious that the farmers want Facebook to be as lively as possible—for the articles, memes, and comments we share to be substantive, political, and even self-righteous and bitchy because these interactions produce richer data.  If we shared nothing but baby pictures and snapshots of what we’re having for lunch, that would surely ruin Facebook from its owners’ perspective.

At the same time, while I could give a damn whether Facebook thrives or crashes, there’s no question the experiment is interesting.  If relatives or friends who would ordinarily get along by keeping their views generally hidden discover animosity for one another through a medium that fosters expressing those views, is there any value in this?  Maybe. Does the platform make relationships more honest, or does it just produce unnecessary conflict?  Presumably, it’s a bit of both.  Regardless, whether we’re talking about political ideology, tackling tough social issues, or cultivating interpersonal relationships, the question should not be what we are doing to the ant farm called social media, but what it’s doing to us.

Sci-Fi Film Written by AI is Still Fundamentally Human

Image by Pond 5
Image by Pond 5

Back in June, ArsTechnica hosted the online debut of a short film called Sunspring. Directed by Oscar Sharp and featuring the actors Elizabeth Gray, Humphrey Ker, and Thomas Middleitch, the film was made for the Sci-Fi London film festival according to guidelines for the 48-Hour Film Challenge, and it placed in the top ten out of hundreds of entries.  What is most distinctive about Sunspring, though, is its screenwriter Benjamin. No last name.  At least not one he’s told anyone yet.  You see, Benjamin is an AI.

Writer Analee Newitz describes Sunspring as the product of Sharp’s own fascination with artificial intelligence, which led to his friendship and collaboration at NYU with researcher Ross Goodwin. Listed in the film’s credits as Writer of Writer, Goodwin is the chief architect of the AI—an LSTM recurrent neural network—that would eventually name itself Benjamin. “To train Benjamin, Goodwin fed the AI with a corpus of dozens of sci-fi screenplays he found online—mostly movies from the 1980s and 90s. Benjamin dissected them down to the letter, learning to predict which letters tended to follow each other and from there which words and phrases tended to occur together,” writes Newitz.  The whole process itself is very interesting, and I recommend reading her article to learn more.

The finished film is definitely engaging, though I would not personally subscribe to the descriptions hilarious and intense as stated in Newitz’s headline. But to each his own, and headlines are headlines.  What Sunspring emphasizes for me, of course, is not a contemplation of machine intelligence but the significance of human interpretation. Benjamin’s absurdist script is a list of non-sequiturs, both in dialogue and stage direction, making the film project an experiment that almost asks the question, “Can we make a watchable movie based on the screenplay of a madman?”  The answer is of course you can.  Because cinema is very much an interpretive medium—both for makers and viewers. We can’t help but interpret; it’s what humans do.

The distinction between Sunspring and the oeuvre of human-crafted, experimental, non-narrative cinema—sometimes comprising stream-of-consciousness writing akin to Benjamin’s composition of algorithmic probability—is subtle to the point of nitpicky. Sunspring is odd, yes, but barely so if one is familiar with a film like Daisies or Hallelujah the Hills or the works of David Lynch.  The difference, of course, is that Sunspring’s absurdity—at least at the script stage—is accidental while these other works are not. Having said that, though, artists do make instinctive choices all the time that defy literal analysis, and audiences make poignant meaning from of these expressions that were never intended or even considered by their authors.

Sunspring’s script is humorously absurdist, though presumably not in a manner of which its author could possibly be aware.  The experience of watching the finished product shares strands of comedic DNA with the same mechanism that makes the Bad Lip Reading series work—because it’s funny when a real person or a character says something absurd in an earnest manner.  When BLR has Mitt Romney on the 2012 campaign trail say to a supporter “Thank you for the bench,” the same comedy chromosomes are at work as when Sunspring’s Humphrey Ker says, “We’re going to see the money.”  Benjamin has no idea why these things are funny, but they are funny in a non-literal way that is indisputably human.

Sunspring may represent a baby step toward the expectation that an AI will inevitably write a traditional, narrative screenplay for a major motion picture.  As I wrote in a very early post, a comparison between human-only, formulaic script development and machine-made or assisted, formulaic script development may prove to be indistinguishable.  Instead of leading down that path, however, Sunspring reminds us that cinema is often most compelling when convention and formula are broken.  And giving the responsibility to an AI of writing the blueprint for a film is certainly one way to achieve broken conventions—not unlike the artist who might experiment with narcotics to break down barriers to his or her subconscious.  Naturally, the more an AI resembles or reflects us, the more we assume its destiny is to replace us.  This is always the two-part conversation, right? There’s the gadget question that asks what an AI can accomplish, but there’s also the existential question that asks at what point we can say the AI has an identity, which is really a reflexive inquiry about our own existence.

So, here’s a hall-of-mirrors thought exercise:  might a more advanced AI than Benjamin have written a very different screenplay for the film The Enigma Code about the life and work of Alan Turing?  Personally, I like certain things about that film but was ultimately disappointed because I felt the work neglected an opportunity to explore the narrative in which the father of AI—the inventor of the Turing Test to determine the “identity” of the machine—was a man who literally had to pretend to be someone he was not.

So, if Benjamin’s great-grandson were the co-writer of a biopic about Alan Turing, might “he” bring a unique empathy for Turing’s duality given the AI’s own centaur-like existence?  And if so, wouldn’t we have to call that writing?  I think we would. On the other hand, absent the capacity for empathy or the existential question, the script is just barely structured words on a page that, as in Sunspring, only humans can interpret has having any meaning at all.