Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral

Johnny Five is Alive!

Sun, 14 May 2017 00:38:54 +0100

The name comes from the movie Short Circuit. Remember? A robot is struck by lightning and becomes self aware. His name was Johnny Five and he was friendly and curious about humans, nature and how stuff works.

A while back, I used the name for a small home automation project I was working on. In its current version, Johnny makes sure the lights are turned off or on, keeps track of when I arrive and leave home. And he takes commands through the Telegram Bot API to turn off the TV or respond to friends saying when he last saw me.

The workings are pretty simple. My television is an old Monitor, which I turn on and off through the HDMI cable’s signal. The lights are Philips Hue bulbs. To trigger my arrival and departure I’m using a service that was recently “Discontinued”, Locative.

If you’re familiar with the lights you are probably wondering why I didn’t just use the Philips App. Well, for starters Johnny is doing a few other things. He could, for example, gently dim down the lights if I’m working late.

Johnny Five is living inside a Raspberry Pi, and with that he also backs up my personal and work computer. This saved me 329,00 €.

Add that the Media Center. It runs Kodi and fetches content automatically, which includes the local public TV and Radio Stations. I’m still trying to hook up my spotify account to it.

Did I mention he runs as a Telegram Bot ? This means he can send messages to notify me of new episodes of my favourite shows. Soon I plan to add a feature where he send an email to a select number of friends if I don’t check in for an extended period of time.

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

Home automation is just a small part of what bots, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence can do for us. Imagine you are dealing with a problem and after spending days searching the web you gave up. You’ve hit a dead end. You have better things to do than to keep coming back to google and look up new information.

Bots and other agents can handle these tasks for us. And it seems we don’t want another fancy graphic interface, we want something like Alexa, Amazon Echo, and Google Home. These bots are able to process our natural language and execute commands.

(Keep in mind, bots do this at the expense of our privacy. The companies behind these new bots assure we are safe but they are still complex systems that we should keep an eye on.)

Commercial Brands and other organisations are joining the bandwagon of Bots for customer service at many levels. Whether it’s customer support or something more complex, they want to be the first to prove the return of investment on bots. I have been playing around with some services that provide tools to set up Facebook Bots.

Chatfuel, Morph.AI, Api.AI, Mobile Monkey … being able to provide a working bot and prove it’s usefulness is the new gold rush. Even Gartner has a report about it, Four Use Cases for Chatbots in the Enterprise Now.

And don’t think bots are just going to live in customer support or inside little apps. We already see integration of systems with company tools like Slack and Email and they provide information that is critical for the business. These can be system alerts on how your website and service is performing so that your development team can act quickly.

When you build a brand, you are building an artificial intelligence

This is where things begin to get interesting. Heidi Hackemer would say a brand is an operating system, I think it can go much further to a full intelligence.

We have been building brands based on how they look and only after did we worry about how they wrote. With the tools that we have now, we have to be concerned about how they sound and most of all, how they make decisions.

If you don’t believe me come with me to 1943. Johnson & Johnson is about to become a publicly traded company and Robert Wood Johnson is writing what will be known as the Johnson & Johnson Credo. In it you find a mention to all of their stakeholders and a statement of what the company’s values are.

Our Credo is more than just a moral compass. We believe it’s a recipe for business success. The fact that Johnson & Johnson is one of only a handful of companies that have flourished through more than a century of change is proof of that.

People working at Johnson & Johnson have been using the Credo as a way to make decisions, and it seems to be working. Like Heidi says, it’s a system.

Other brands have similar tools. Visions, Values, Mission Statements. Some are better than others, and they all aim to “align” stakeholders. Soon we will be moving towards giving a brand some personality that can be reflected by one or more bots.

This poses a problem, do we let the humans know they are talking with a bot or do we just let that Touring Test take its course? I’m going to leave that for some other time.

What if a robot talks with another robot? This can easily happen, and with the emergence of Smart Contracts these bots may have the power to guide the organisation.

Back to Johnny Five

You may be wondering about the point of all this. Quite simply I believe bots are not just a shiny new object, they have been around since the days of IRC when they were used to let people browse and retrieve files from servers, mediate trades and play games.

These entities will also be a part of several levels of our life. At a personal level, organisational and society. Imagine talking to a robot so that you are issued a new citizen card, for example.

And as for home automation, it’s a growing business with vendors smart enough to require little or no installation. For example, using the wifi, Johnny could easily power an Arduino to raise and lower the shades in the apartment.

On the other hand I feel brands are running and stumbling trying to figure out what to do with the new technology. And as I said, their biggest challenge will be to build a whole personality for their chatbots and give it a good map of Values to make decisions if required.

There are fun times ahead.

Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, and Us

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 10:10:38 +0000

This post began with two articles on Digidig.

Abe and you, and me, and each of us. On relating with an algorithm
by Toni Muzi Falconi.

L'insostenibile leggerezza dell'algoritmo
by Italo Vignoli.

The conversation is more and more important each day, Toni and Italo are trying to bring the communication professionals to discuss it before the storm hits. I did feel the talk needs to take a few steps back to move forward. One of which is nomenclature, the other is in approach.

Please be patient, since little research was done in writing this post. I’m using a few references kept in Evernote, my own sensitivity towards the subject and my effort in organizing information to write what follows. Which is why anything you feel can be corrected should be posted as a comment, with my deepest thanks.

Data format

A data format is just a structure for our information, it can and should be able to be read by any human or system. We use data formats everyday, excel files or word documents can have the same information within, but only one of them lets us manipulate data and arrange it into formulas. For businesses where employees use Windows and Apple devices, there is a struggle that Open Office aims to solve in bringing data formats into the same standard.

Algorithm

The word is being used so often that we risk confusing it with something else. An algorithm is a set of steps to solve a problem. It takes input, from sensors or files and returns information that the user, or the next system, will use for a certain end.

It is a tool akin to a hammer or drill. Our relationship with it is one of practicality and we will abandon it as soon as it is no longer useful for our goals.

Like any tool, we measure its usefulness every time we use it and trust its quality based on the brand that built it.

(I feel we should make a distinction between algorithm and a sort of trigger. For example, the motion sensor in some office buildings will turn the light on when sensing people are present. It will turn off after inactivity. The simplicity of this trigger should not be considered an algorithm.)

Artificial intelligence

Allow me to risk a line of thought and say that an Artificial intelligence (AI) starts to form when you build a system that is able to gather data on its own, communicate information to humans, and act upon it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence exhibited by machines. In computer science, an ideal "intelligent" machine is a flexible rational agent that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success at some goal.[1]

[1] The intelligent agent paradigm:
Russell & Norvig 2003, pp. 27, 32–58, 968–972
Poole, Mackworth & Goebel 1998, pp. 7–21
Luger & Stubblefield 2004, pp. 235–240
Hutter 2005, pp. 125–126
The definition used in this article, in terms of goals, actions, perception and environment, is due to Russell & Norvig (2003). Other definitions also include knowledge and learning as additional criteria.

For example an automatic car will take input from the user (destination), use an algorithm to determine the best path (gps coordinates and traffic information) and drive avoiding obstacles that it finds on it’s way: other vehicles, people, red lights.

Our relationship with this AI is still based on practical goals at this point. Our choice to use a certain model or a certain version of this car depends more on our trust that it’s creator did a good job. Would you buy a car from Tesla or Microsoft?

Other AI’s may be more complex, and will be built using algorithms that no single human being can fully comprehend. (A plane for example, uses so many complex systems that we are not able to grasp their full body of knowledge)

Relationships : Human-AI, AI-AI

At this point we can pause and reflect on how we will relate with these new entities.

Toni did just that and proposes the following indicators for this relationship.

Thus, if it is true that there are at least four principal indicators to help investigate and evaluate the quality of any single relationship:

the trust in the relationship by the subjects of that relationship;

the satisfaction in the relationship by the subjects of that relationship,

the commitment in the relationship by the subjects of that relationship,

the equilibrium of reciprocal influence in the relationship by the subjects of that relationship ... plus other indicators pertaining specifically to the peculiar nature of the subjects of the relationship (individual/individual; organization/organization; algorithm/algorithm and one with the others and viceversa.

Finally, the questions that need to be investigated in order to move forward could be:

what batteries of questions need to be answered by the two subjects of the relationship for each of the selected indicators?

what AI processes need to be created to allow each single algorithm to – in parallel with the single web user- respond to the same battery of questions?

what other specific indicators need eventually to be introduced beyond the four? For example: in the relationship between organization and organization sometimes it is helpful to introduce an indicator pertaining the distinct epigenetic profiles of the two subjects of the relationship;

what are to be considered reasonable reciprocal influence on the balance of a relationship for each of the selected indicators? For example: In the individual/individual relationship any obvious unbalance resulting from the response might suggest to either of the subjects actions to create better equilibrium – with the possible exception of the reciprocal influence indicator related to parent/child, teacher/student, boss/subordinate…obviously keeping in mind the socio cultural specificities of the territory where the single relationship develops..and so on with every other possible combination.

Toni Muzi Falconi Abe And You And Me And Each Of Us On Relating With An Algorithm

In extreme we can imagine a future where a company exists and consists exclusively of an AI or group of AI’s. Companies are already jokingly compared to robots and Communication professionals break their hearts trying to make them “Authentic” and “Human”.

My point is that these AIs and Algorithms are so complex that in the end we will be measuring the trust we have in their creators, rather than the trust we have in the system on its own. Which does not mean I would disavow any effort to measure the trust in the artificial entity. Once there are no records of the creation process, we need a worthy diagnosis of the honesty of the AI.

At this point, my suggestion is that we look to other philosophers on robotics to setup ground rules and methods to keep the AI accountable. Similar to Asimov’s rules of robotics. It won’t be bullet proof unless we can audit the source code and make sure those ground rules are present and are in fact used in the decision making process.

Conscious Artificial Intelligence

To make things more complicated, this is a scenario where the AI is not self-aware. Once an AI becomes conscious of what it is and is able to make autonomous decisions, it will change the relationship it has with us and with other AI’s. At this point will the creator’s role in building the AI will begin to dwindle because he can’t foresee the effects of this autonomous decision process and the way it will impact the evolution of the system that was built.

This is still a scenario where the AI does not have free will. It takes information and context from the surroundings and makes decisions based on its experience and guidelines.

John Searle did a talk at Google on this exact subject.

Do computers have free will?

The next logical step is to question at what point does the AI have free will. It is also where I draw my line at the moment. The subject of free will is not something I have given much thought, so forgive me for going back to Searle on this topic.

Are computers capable of having free will ?

Update January 8th: A more granular view

This topic spurred interesting conversations among friends. The first of which was Adriana. She mentioned that we should only call something “intelligence” when it is able to produce something new. So a non-human entity capable of processing the world around it and that develops something new can be considered an Artificial Intelligence.

On a different note, Nuno Nunes was kind enough to read it and point out that even when we do have access to the source code, the way the system functions can be so complex that we are unable to audit it and ascertain its honesty (for lack of a better word).

One example are the Deep Learning Systems, where algorithms pass along data and information along different layers before producing an output.

Another point, is that in the concept of algorithms and AI there are different levels of detail for the concept. He explained that what I described above is a function and not the algorithm itself. The algorithm is the abstract list of instructions, not their automatic execution. In AI there is also the concept of Agent. The Agent observes the environment and runs specific routines based on that observation. Like what I did when building Johnny Five. (More on that later, when I find the time.)

Yet, for Communication Professionals and others dealing with understanding the implications of how we relate to non-humans, brands and companies, it is sufficient to have the broad strokes of what are AI’s. Otherwise we will find ourselves blocked by the learning curve.

Header photo on this page was done by Cryteria and is available from Wikimedia Commons.