from the Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/listening-machines/396179/)
Beware the Listening Machines When dolls and friendly robots can listen and respond to what people say, where's the line between personal assistance and mass surveillance?
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To reduce the creepy nature of their surveillant behavior, listening systems are often embedded in devices designed to be charming, cute, and delightful: toys, robots, and smooth-voiced personal assistants. Proponents of listening systems see them as a major way technology integrates itself more deeply into our lives, making it routine for computers to become our helpers, playmates, and confidants. A video of a robot designed to be a shared household companion sparked a great deal of debate, both about whether we would want to interact with a robot in the ways proposed by the product’s designers, and how a sufficiently powerful companion robot should behave.
If a robot observes spousal abuse, should it call the police? If the robot is designed to be friend and confidant to everyone in the house, but was paid for by the mother, should we expect it to rat out one of the kids for smoking marijuana?
Valley Oak
06-23-2015, 09:42 AM
Or maybe our legislators will reason that in the commission of certain crimes (fill in the blank here_______), any domestic robot must act as if they are the police themselves and begin violent law enforcement against you and everyone else in your family and stop at nothing.
What if you have a conversation about terrorism or Al Qaida and the robot's programming does not have its software and voice recognition abilities very well developed? Your cute, helpful robot could suddenly fly into its auxiliary police protection program because it misunderstood your innocent, scintillating conversation as a terrorist plot in the making and violently arrest or even kill everyone in your house, kiddies included. No quarter for terrorists, especially remembering how the US government deliberately and knowingly assassinated a 15 y/o son of Saddam Hussein, was it???
The logic behind it would be a zero tolerance, shoot first policy of national security. It's "fun" just to entertain the possibilities. Or if you have a criminal record of any kind then legislators could reason that in YOUR case then, without your knowledge, it is legal and compulsive to spy on your ass and then use convoluted arguments asserting that you did this and said the other and here's the video to prove it. And a judge could legally use this for authorizing home searches, preventative detention (just in case you are guilty and might run away), confiscation of property (and good luck getting it back after it's demonstrated in court that you are 100% innocent, especially considering the strong economic incentives that many police departments have in confiscating goods and monies from people to increase their own revenues).
Or you might even say something brazen, in the "privacy" of your own home, such as, "The US provoked 911." Then this might "legally" constitute probable cause because the government or a private security firm (such as Blackwater) doesn't like your opinion one bit, and so the robot switches to Robocop mode and you're in serious trouble. And they have the audio and visual "evidence" to "prove" your "guilt" in expressing a very unpopular or disturbing political opinion.
from the Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/listening-machines/396179/)
Beware the Listening Machines
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podfish
06-23-2015, 09:51 AM
Or maybe our legislators will reason that ...the thing is, though we're on a slippery slope, at least we have developed some equipment over the years to keep from sliding uncontrollably. A couple of factors, some of them kind of horrible, help in this effort. For example, the blowback from drone killings will probably inform the debate a bit - killing foreign non-combatants hasn't gone over all that well and accidental killings of US citizens in their homes probable will bother even more people. Not that such things don't happen now but drones do scare people in a way that a cop or neighbor with a gun doesn't seem to.
And we do have the history of our car's black-boxes to go on; there's a lot of personal tracking built in to our phones and vehicles, and they aren't instantly open to law enforcement or other corporate/government bodies. I know a lot of people think it is, but that shows a lack of imagination - it's the difference between someone peeking through your curtains and someone drunkenly showing up in your bed.
Valley Oak
06-23-2015, 10:24 AM
I added an additional comment to my previous post, which I have put in a "bubble" below.
It's becoming a different world and robots are here to stay. Isaac Asimov put all his money in, so to speak, on the future impact of robots in many of his science fiction publications, such as "I, Robot," and many others. Asimov was right, more than a half century before this fact has just started to become evident to the general public.
In the future, wealthy countries will have the resources to build robot armies with few or no human casualties, while the poorer countries will have to fight wars the old fashioned way, with live men dying in horrific numbers in the battlefield and elsewhere. The skies will be filled with drones from many different countries spying on us. We could have some rich, fanatic jerk or government from the US or Uganda or wherever, spying on us in our own backyards, for whatever reason.
Here is a 6 min clip of combat robots competing in a tournament from 2012. But there are annual competitions every year in California and around the world taking place all the time. There is a different set of technologies that the US Armed Forces is developing secretly:
RoboGames 2012 Mosquito vs Last Rites (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztQpwI1KfEk)
We could see those little runt robots that go around the house on their own, vacuuming your floor, and then going ballistic on you, just like the combat robots in the video I provided. And then clean your clock instead of cleaning your floor if it sees or hears something it doesn't like. They might clean up the mess they made of you from the floor, though, as a morbid consolation.
And here is my previous, added comment:
Or you might even say something brazen, in the "privacy" of your own home, such as, "The US provoked 911." Then this might "legally" constitute probable cause because the government or a private security firm (such as Blackwater) doesn't like your opinion one bit, and so the robot switches to Robocop mode and you're in serious trouble. And they have the audio and visual "evidence" to "prove" your "guilt" in expressing a very unpopular or disturbing political opinion.
podfish
06-23-2015, 01:16 PM
...In the future, wealthy countries will have the resources to build robot armies with few or no human casualties, while the poorer countries will have to fight wars the old fashioned way, with live men dying in horrific numbers in the battlefield and elsewhere. The skies will be filled with drones from many different countries spying on us.I suspect it's going to be weirder than that. In the same way that predictions from fifty years ago had flying cars but had no idea that people would be standing in lines looking at a little hand-held computer, sharing pictures of cats, the robot armies won't be the most salient feature of future military actions. I think we'll be lucky if all the drones do is snoop. And big airborne drones won't be the most common kind.
Someone recently pointed out, in reaction to a columnist's article about his creation of a 3D printed unregulatable gun, that this isn't anything new - people have always been able to make destructive things on small scales. That ignores the major impact that, for example, the AK47 had on 20th century politics. Without cheap and readily available weaponry, the last century would have played out like the Great Game of the previous one - only rich nation-states could get a seat at the table, and all the individual could do was shoot an occasional duke. But instead, we had the end of colonialism and the rise of warlords all over the world. Just because that's invisible to most Americans doesn't mean that small fragmented governments aren't almost the norm. We now have even more power available, to smaller groups more widely dispersed, with instantaneous communications and ability to coordinate with each other. They'll be able to make and distribute all kinds of things to disrupt normal daily life in very destructive ways.
Tech that leverages smaller groups has immense effects on societies, and scarily there's as much deadly tech as there is tech that enables beneficial change. Yet another test of what essential human nature really is... we've made it this far, and probably will muddle through (as a species, anyway, and hopefully as an organized civilization) for a long time. Just like the threats of the future are impossible to predict, so are the ways we all adapt and change our societies. Most of the world is arguably more free and healthy than they've ever been, and with luck enough of them appreciate that to try and keep it going.