ROBOPHILOSOPHY

February 2, 2020February 2, 2020

Towards a Human-like Chatbot

Google is currently working on Meena, a particular chatbot, which should be able to have arbitrary conversations and be used in many contexts. In their paper “Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot“, the developers present the 2.6 billion parameters end-to-end trained neural conversational model. They show that Meena “can conduct conversations that are more sensible and specific than existing state-of-the-art chatbots”. “Such improvements are reflected through a new human evaluation metric that we propose for open-domain chatbots, called Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which captures basic, but important attributes for human conversation. Remarkably, we demonstrate that perplexity, an automatic metric that is readily available to any neural conversational models, highly correlates with SSA.” (Google AI Blog) The company draws a comparison with OpenAI GPT-2, a model used in “Talk to Transformer” and Harmony, among others, which uses 1.5 billion parameters and is based on the text content of 8 million web pages.

February 1, 2020February 1, 2020

HTML, SSML, AIML – and MOML?

On behalf of Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel, a student at the School of Business FHNW, Alessandro Spadola, investigated in the context of machine ethics whether markup languages such as HTML, SSML and AIML can be used to transfer moral aspects to machines or websites and whether there is room for a new language that could be called Morality Markup Language (MOML). He presented his results in January 2020. From the management summary: “However, the idea that owners should be able to transmit their own personal morality has been explored by Bendel, who has proposed an open way of transferring morality to machines using a markup language. This research paper analyses whether a new markup language could be used to imbue machines with their owners’ sense of morality. This work begins with an analysis how a markup language is structured, describes the current well-known markup languages and analyses their differences. In doing so, it reveals that the main difference between the well-known markup languages lies in the different goals they pursue which at the same time forms the subject, which is marked up. This thesis then examines the possibility of transferring personal morality with the current languages available and discusses whether there is a need for a further language for this purpose. As is shown, morality can only be transmitted with increased effort and the knowledge of human perception because it is only possible to transmit them by interacting with the senses of the people. The answer to the question of whether there is room for another markup language is ‘yes’, since none of the languages analysed offer a simple way to transmit morality, and simplicity is a key factor in markup languages. Markup languages all have clear goals, but none have the goal of transferring and displaying morality. The language that could assume this task is ‘Morality Markup’, and the present work describes how such a language might look.” (Management Summary) The promising results are to be continued in the course of the year by another student in a bachelor thesis.

January 18, 2020January 18, 2020

Will Biorobots Clean Up the Seas?

In a paper published on 13 January 2020, researchers from the University of Vermont and Tufts University discuss computer-designed, novel organisms called Xenobots. Xenobots consist of skin and muscle cells. The skin cells stabilize the organisms, the muscle cells enable them to perform different activities. A nervous system is not present. An AI system calculates the optimal structure and ratio of the cells in relation to a specific function. The Xenobots are assembled according to the resulting construction plan. In fact, the cells appear to work together. The researchers see different areas of application. One could build Xenobots that move forward in the sea and have a pocket inside in which they collect microplastics. Once the biorobots are filled, they can go to a place where they die, whereby it is not clear whether they live at all, like classical organisms. In any case, all that would remain in this place would be the plastic particles and functionless cells. Both can easily be disposed of. However, Xenobots would also be swallowed by marine animals like fishs and turtles during their work and would be exposed to other dangers. In addition, normal robots are better suited for the removal of macroplastics.

January 17, 2020January 17, 2020

The Birth of the Morality Menu

The idea of a morality menu (MOME) was born in 2018 in the context of machine ethics. It should make it possible to transfer the morality of a person to a machine. On a display you can see different rules of behaviour and you can activate or deactivate them with sliders. Oliver Bendel developed two design studies, one for an animal-friendly vacuum cleaning robot (LADYBIRD), the other for a voicebot like Google Duplex. At the end of 2018, he announced a project at the School of Business FHNW. Three students – Ozan Firat, Levin Padayatty and Yusuf Or – implemented a morality menu for a chatbot called MOBO from June 2019 to January 2020. The user enters personal information and then activates or deactivates nine different rules of conduct. MOBO compliments or does not compliment, responds with or without prejudice, threatens or does not threaten the interlocutor. It responds to each user individually, says his or her name – and addresses him or her formally or informally, depending on the setting. A video of the MOBO-MOME is available here.

January 12, 2020January 19, 2020

The Old, New Neons

The company Neon picks up an old concept with its Neons, namely that of avatars. Twenty years ago, Oliver Bendel distinguished between two different types in the Lexikon der Wirtschaftsinformatik. With reference to the second, he wrote: “Avatars, on the other hand, can represent any figure with certain functions. Such avatars appear on the Internet – for example as customer advisors and newsreaders – or populate the adventure worlds of computer games as game partners and opponents. They often have an anthropomorphic appearance and independent behaviour or even real characters …” (Lexikon der Wirtschaftsinformatik, 2001, own translation) It is precisely this type that the company, which is part of the Samsung Group and was founded by Pranav Mistry, is now adapting, taking advantage of today’s possibilities. “These are virtual figures that are generated entirely on the computer and are supposed to react autonomously in real time; Mistry spoke of a latency of less than 20 milliseconds.” (Heise Online, 8 January 2019, own translation) The neons are supposed to show emotions (as do some social robots that are conquering the market) and thus facilitate and strengthen bonds. “The AI-driven character is neither a language assistant a la Bixby nor an interface to the Internet. Instead, it is a friend who can speak several languages, learn new skills and connect to other services, Mistry explained at CES.” (Heise Online, 8 January 2019, own translation)

January 7, 2020January 8, 2020

Another Animal-friendly Machine

Between June 2019 and January 2020 the project HAPPY HEDGEHOG (HHH) was implemented at the School of Business FHNW. Initiator and client was Oliver Bendel. In the context of machine ethics, the students Emanuel Graf, Kevin Bollier, Michel Beugger and Vay Lien Chang developed the prototype of a lawnmower robot that stops working as soon as it discovers a hedgehog. HHH has a thermal imaging camera. If it encounters a warm object, it further examines it using image recognition. At night a lamp mounted on top helps. After training with hundreds of photos, HHH can identify a hedgehog quite accurately. Firstly, another moral machine has been created in the laboratory, and secondly, the team provides a possible solution to a problem that frequently occurs in practice: commercial lawnmower robots often kill baby hedgehogs in the dark. HAPPY HEDGEHOG could help save them. The video on youtu.be/ijIQ8lBygME shows it without casing; a photo with casing can be found here. The robot is in the tradition of LADYBIRD, another animal-friendly machine.

December 31, 2019December 31, 2019

Opportunities and Risks of Facial Recognition

The book chapter “The BESTBOT Project” by Oliver Bendel, David Studer and Bradley Richards was published on 31 December 2019. It is part of the 2nd edition of the “Handbuch Maschinenethik”, edited by Oliver Bendel. From the abstract: “The young discipline of machine ethics both studies and creates moral (or immoral) machines. The BESTBOT is a chatbot that recognizes problems and conditions of the user with the help of text analysis and facial recognition and reacts morally to them. It can be seen as a moral machine with some immoral implications. The BESTBOT has two direct predecessor projects, the GOODBOT and the LIEBOT. Both had room for improvement and advancement; thus, the BESTBOT project used their findings as a basis for its development and realization. Text analysis and facial recognition in combination with emotion recognition have proven to be powerful tools for problem identification and are part of the new prototype. The BESTBOT enriches machine ethics as a discipline and can solve problems in practice. At the same time, with new solutions of this kind come new problems, especially with regard to privacy and informational autonomy, which information ethics must deal with.” (Abstract) The book chapter can be downloaded from link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-658-17484-2_32-1.

December 29, 2019December 29, 2019

Towards an Anti Face

Face recognition in public spaces is a threat to freedom. You can defend yourself with masks or with counter-technologies. Even make-up is a possibility. Adam Harvey demonstrated this in the context of the CV Dazzle project at the hacker congress 36C3 in Leipzig. As Heise reports, he uses biological characteristics such as face color, symmetry and shadows and modifies them until they seem unnatural to algorithms. The result, according to Adam Harvey, is an “anti face”. The style tips for reclaiming privacy could be useful in Hong Kong, where face recognition is widespread and used against freedom fighters. Further information can be found on the CV Dazzle website. “CV Dazzle explores how fashion can be used as camouflage from face-detection technology, the first step in automated face recognition.” (Website CV Dazzle)

December 28, 2019December 28, 2019

Robots against Plastic Waste

WasteShark is a remotely controlled robot by Ranmarine Technologies that collects plastics from the surface of lakes and oceans. “Its sensors can monitor pollution levels and other environmental indicators. It is electrically powered, emission-free and can collect hundreds of kilos of rubbish at a time.” (Euronews, 15 December 2019) According to Euronews, Richard Hardiman, the founder of the start-up-company, said: “What we’re trying to do is create a small enough vessel that will get into tight spaces where waste collects, particularly in the harbours and the ports, and stop all that waste being taken out into the greater ocean.” (Euronews, 15 December 2019) The project received support from the European funds allocated to making plastic circular. An overview of the most important projects against plastic waste in water can be found here.