[alicebot-aiethics] Greetings

[Robby Garner]

Hi All,

My name is Robby Garner, and I've been interested in chatterbots for many
years now. At Rich's suggestion, I've joined this list to participate, and
to ease my way back into the ALICE community.

I see that gun control has raised it's controversial head on the list, but
can only add that hanguns in America are like a pandora's box, because they
are everywhere already.

There is something fundamentally wrong in our society where people are
becoming more and more tightly wound like springs.  There is a sense of
urgency to get from place to place, evidenced by road rage, etc.  We've gone
from a primarily agrarian society to the information age in just 200 years,
and I don't think people have adapted their priorities yet to the new
demands placed on families, where both parents work, children are delegated
to a TV nanny, and schools are just prisons.  Oh, and the prisons! We have
more people in jail than any country in the world, and as a solution we just
build more jails? Okay, so back to AI ethics!

Here are some of my recent thoughts about whether robots will unemploy us.
These may seem unpopular views right now since most of us would like to put
a bot in every workplace, but I must assert that I am merely taking a
counter position to stimulate discussion.

I don't believe bots will unemploy us. They'll find their own niche the way
people do. Early Sci-Fi authors toyed with the idea that robots would give
humanity more free time and reduce the amount of menial labor that we do.
But in the reality of now, it takes people to build bots, the bots don't
self-produce. That means even more jobs for human beings. And the human mind
is incredible. Don't expect to see it duplicated soon. But imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery.

The information age brings with it more work. In converse to what one would
expect, the computer did not revolutionize the workplace, it merely created
more things to do, to support them, to sell them, maintain them, to use
them, to learn how to do new things. So in terms of robots ever putting
people out of work, it may be that some jobs will become obsolete, just as
there are few blacksmiths around any more. The computer/robot/android will
integrate into society to perform tasks that may or may not already be
performed by human beings. So I think it is more accurate to say that the
job market may change as it always has, but not because robots are putting
people out of work. Rather the job market will change because people are
doing new things, new jobs that may not exist yet. This is very little
sollace to someone who is displaced and out of work. But the indispensible
tool rules.

Also, I think that if you say robots will unemploy us, that has bad
connotations, and might scare people.  To me, a better sales pitch is that
it makes jobs easier to perform, helps people, or makes hard jobs more easy
to do.

Thanks for the invitation Rich! I know you open source guys probably frown
on most of my current work, but I still have some open source projects of my
own, and I applaud all of your efforts in the ALICE project. I just work in
the same area, down the street.

In closing, I have to say that every advance that ALICE makes in
legitimizing the gainful use of chatterbots, helps us all and vice versa.
You guys have postured yourself against commercial chatterbot companies, and
rightly so, since price is one of your strong assets, but we commercial
companies are not all the evil empire. My company, HuMimics, Inc.is closely
tied to a non-profit organization that I co-founded called the Institute for
Mimetic Science.  Much like the ALICE AI Foundation, we promote the study of
human imitation, including projects like ALICE where being human-like is the
name of the game.  IMS is still in it's infancy, with a newly selected board
of directors.  Hope to have a web page up soon, but for now we are just
working behind the scenes to establish the thing.

Thanks, and Best Regards,

Robby Garner
Chief of Research
HuMimics, Inc.( http://www.humimics.com )
Institute of Mimetic Science ( http://www.mimetics.org )