[alicebot-aiethics] Greetings

[Noel Bush]

It's definitely great to have Robby Garner here.

I think that Robby's points about computers creating more things to do is an
important one. Funny thing is, many of those "more things to do" are
arguably things that pull us farther and farther from the things that really
matter.

Yesterday evening we had dinner with an athlete who lives here in St.
Petersburg and is a world champion kickboxer. We were talking about health,
professional sports, and what people do with their time. It wouldn't be
unfair to liken Natasha to an ancient Greek athlete, at least in philosophy.
She is a complete purist -- someone who puts purity in diet and balance in
activity at the highest priority, above all else. She works in an industry
where people regularly are forced to take drugs that "enhance" their
abilities, but she herself vociferously rejects this way of life. Her
lifestyle seems to be very rewarding for her.

She also has something of a disdain for people who spend a large part of
their lives sitting in front of computers. "Botanics", she calls them (er,
us). When I recently went into the hospital for an unexplained attack of
excrutiating migraine headaches, she put the blame squarely on my lifestyle,
which includes quite a lot of sitting in front of a computer. Apparently I'm
to become a personal project of hers now, to get me in shape and organize my
life a bit better so that I don't fall into such a hole again. Lucky me
(sincerely).

But in last night's conversation I found myself becoming a little resentful.
Who was this strong, shiny young sports star to sit at my table and call
people like myself "plants"? So I don't get a lot of exercise, I don't have
the most balanced diet, but I'm in fairly good shape and I'm really excited
about how I'm spending my time these days. Doesn't that count for something?

So then I thought about how I had spent my previous night, which was
migrating all of our mailing lists over to another server. What in the world
is that? It's certainly not intellectual work. And while I was really tired
by the end it surely wasn't because I exerted myself in any way. Basically I
sat at a computer for about 14 hours and occasionally got up to go to the
bathroom or get a cup of tea. I can't even say that I was hacking away at
some marvelous piece of code, or wrenching out some piece of music. I was,
well, "configuring stuff". What does that even mean?

I found it humorous, in a bleary-eyed way, to find that after the main
alicebot list was moved over, the first posts to pop up were from some
contribuors who were trading little jabs about some kind of a bot contest
they run on some IRC channel. The essence of this contest appears to be a
sort of "battle of the buffers", or something like that. They turn their
bots loose spewing nonsense at each other and see which one crashes first.

I guess since ALICE is philosophically minimalist, you could be generous and
say that this is ultra-minimalism. But I would have to be a real pro-league
ethnographer to start identifying this activity as a significant behavior of
a "burgeoning social group coalescing in the crawlspace of the Web blah blah
blah".... Especially after tonight's dinner I'm looking at it from a
decidedly more opinionated perspective.

Natasha was describing how her brother, who also used to be quite athletic,
has recently reenrolled in a university and is in danger of becoming a
"botanic". He spends a lot of time at a computer, and somehow or another has
made the acquaintance of a Russian "hacker" (that word has more of its
evil-media-hype connotations here than it does in the politically correct
US). This guy, I was informed, spends literally all of his time at the
computer, barely eating, engaged in some questionable activities, and
also...you guessed it...playing DOOM. Not only does he play DOOM, but he is
some kind of reigning champion in some circle.

So this is the ultimate laugh for Natasha, right? She's a champion in a
physical world (did I really just say "a" physical world?) where strength of
body, strength of mind, balance of all the humors etc. is critical to
success. Here is a guy whose major muscle groups have probably atrophied
from his sedentary lifestyle, and he is also a "champion"...except in a
world that "exists" only according to a re-engineering of the notion of
"existence" that has taken hold within the last couple of decades at best.

Now, a few years ago Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book called "The End Of Work",
which was pressed on me by a woman who worked at a magazine where I went to
fix the computers, maybe because she thought I would somehow identify with
or better understand the thesis that this man was putting forth. I guess
knowing how to defragment a hard drive somehow gives you insight into the
deeper meanings of technology and its role in our society. I suppose I
absorbed a little bit of the book, but I'll restrain myself from looking it
up on the Web to refresh my memory and look smarter. What stayed with me was
the general idea that various kinds of super-efficiency -- things like "just
in time production" as pioneered in Japan -- were progressively eliminating
the need for human beings to be involved in production. Rifkin cited a lot
of examples of legislation that shortened work weeks, stuff like that. What
I didn't retain, or maybe it wasn't there, was a clear sense of what he
proposed we'd all be doing with our time.

Well, okay, a lot of people have a lot to say about that, so much so that
it's overbearing. We're all becoming consumerist vegetables, etc. I read a
great article in the Atlantic Monthly supposedly written by an exasperated
reader who'd had more than enough of canny contemporary writing that
"exposes" the consumerist mindset of life today. This guy really trashed
people like Don DeLillo who write with unabating "irony" about shopping
malls, grocery stores, and the glorious feast for the senses that is
delivered to us daily and keeps us occupied, working hard to earn the money
to buy a new car and satellite TV. We all know that already, this guy was
saying. He seemed to me to be faulting the self-identified "knowing ones" in
society who read these books and are repeatedly amused and congratulate
themselves, especially critics, even more than he faulted the authors
themselves who look like robots in comparison. Game-playing, chip-munching
robots.

But wait -- that's interesting, isn't it? They are robots in a certain way.
Robots replace people in factories -- there's no doubt about that. Certainly
you find that new jobs to maintain and "configure" those robots are created,
but with each advance comes a shove into a higher and higher layer of
abstraction. Acting as a project manager nowadays is quite different from
being a boss in a shoe factory. The factory boss is "on the floor",
inspecting people and their work, turning it over and throwing it out if
it's bad, looking out for slips in quality and on the prowl for suppliers
who try to slip in inferior leather. The project manager -- okay, a good one
is also walking around and talking to people -- but by and large the project
manager is sitting at a desk, clicking through Gantt charts and assigning
tasks, making progress reports and configuring the "Rule Wizard" to make
email easier to handle.

Hang on, though, because I'm not just slipping into some romantic point of
view about the physicality of work. Because look at what else that project
manager is doing. The tools at his or her disposal are different ones --
they don't just have more buttons: they are actually whole environments unto
themselves. The contemporary First World office worker is checking stocks,
looking up sports scores, "surfing" for who knows what (do they?) --
basically living inside this machine. And this machine isn't the passive
research wondertoy that Vannevar Bush imagined: all this hyperlinked
wonderland is really being *pushed*, whatever failures the earliest ideas of
"push technology" may have encountered. It's not just that Microsoft or AOL
"claims the desktop", it's that a whole self-propelling industry is underway
to fold in more and more "content" into this web world.

As every content-oriented industry matures, it finds more formulas.
Hollywood movies are rolled off an assembly line. Bestselling authors and
pop stars are manufactured by detached "media moguls". And in the same way,
the web is churned out as an endless tasty product, just another part of the
never-neverland that assures us we'll never have to fix another horseshoe or
solder another bolt again.

But in this case the workers in the industry are us. I don't mean "us" who
care about "technology", whatever that precisely is. I mean all of us. That
sentimental slogan that the Internet "lets everyone be a publisher" misses
the point by a million miles. It's not just CNN.com that's delivering the
goods 24 hours a day. It's also Slashdot (gasp!) and the bazillions of other
"zines", and even the endless flood of emails we fire off to each other,
streaming content everywhichway incessantly...content that is authored by,
automated by, us.

We are becoming the bots, you see. We are programming ourselves. At dinner I
asked Natasha: what did these kids who spend all hours playing DOOM or
otherwise engaging in "virtual smash-ups" do before they had this virtual
environment? What did people do before they had 500 channels and Nintendo?
What drove people to go, go, go before there were great new cars every year,
new fashions every season? Was everybody like my grandfather, who read the
Bible at home and played music with the family and went to sleep when the
sun went down?

I don't have the answer to that and don't care to go down that sentimental
pathway either. It's a rhetorical question, naturally. Baudrillard wrote a
killer of a little book called "The Illusion of the End". In it he takes up
the vogueish notion that "history is over", and turns it on its ear, or
inside out maybe. Baudrillard is talking about the trumping of
apocalypticism by the real-time world, in which the possibility to literally
live out any vision of "the end" in any sense is so complete, so available,
that there's just no grounds anymore for speaking about progress, about
concrete production, about achievement of certain ends or fulfillment of the
mysteries of the universe. He looks at the Gulf War and its otherworldly
kind of "happening", if you could call it that, in the lives of the citizens
of the Western world, as some kind of exemplary "event" that only exposes
the absence of an event. Sounds terrible to say, especially if you're from
Iraq, but in essence he's saying that the Gulf War "happened" so completely
that it didn't happen. As in: it's intense, it's on the news, it's going on
now with twelve camera angles...and then it vanishes -- the next event is
almost superimposed on the TV screen.

In this kind of world what can you be but an automaton? An automaton that
creates automatons, that's what. You are producing, but not in the sense of
labor: in fact people like Baudrillard would even tell you it's stupid to
call this activity "production". But I don't know a better word, so let's
say it: you are producing and consuming "content". Enough robots have been
built that quite a few worries simply vanish out from underneath you. This
applies whether or not you're a member of a privileged class, too, because
you can't help but interface with this machine. The interface is human:
human to the nth degree. If you're begging for change, you're still doing it
at McDonald's and hoping to eat a cheeseburger and drink a Coke. (Is that
harsh?)

So you may be a more or less complicated automaton. You may be writing code,
you may be editing an online magazine, you may be smashing bots against each
other. You may be writing about "ethics" and the contemporary world and
wondering about what you're doing. But, well, you gotta serve somebody, even
if it's just yourself or your "milieu".

Now, here in Alice's Wonderland, as well as in a number of other camps,
people are a little more self-consciously building automatons. Instead of
just practicing fluency in consumerism, assisting in the manufacture of more
desire, and replicating children to do the same, people are dissecting the
process of replication, trying to figure out what makes a human automaton
tick. Naturally there's a strong focus on the "consumer applications", since
we all take it for granted that that's what makes the world go round. But
the fact that this activity is slightly more self-referential than we
usually tend to get makes for some interesting possibilities, like the
possibility that a long-lost objectivity might emerge.

The "long-lost" is just a joke: the sense of having had but now having lost
is just some kind of feedback effect probably, unless you're really gnostic.
But we can still talk about this long-lost objectivity -- I mean some kind
of perspective on what it "means to be human" that might have a chance of
re-entering us in the dialogue that went on for a few centuries in our
world. I don't think anyone has said anything really penetrating (or
absorbing) about what it means to be human in quite some time. Show me your
latest Amazon.com purchase of a post-postmodern sociotechnological
"commentary" and I'll beat it anytime, usually just by pulling out one of
the "sources" so carelessly thrown in the mix and yanking it out to take a
real look at. But I think that there probably *are* some more things to be
said about what it means to be human: we just have to stretch in a way we
haven't in a long time.

This seems to fly in the face of Baudrillard's idea about the
self-immolation of history -- it smacks of retrograde moralizing, no doubt,
just another posture still trapped in a fantasy of progress. So be clear
that I'm not saying we ought to "return to basics", "think again about who
we are". No, it's more like: as automatons, who beget other automatons, and
participate life-long in a cybernetic process of continual self-improvement,
self-enhancement, bettering of the world and so on, can *we* achieve
consciousness?

The question about whether a bot who fools a person into thinking it's also
a person isn't cynical at all. Nor is the drive to shove out all of the
theoretical crap that's been piled on in artificial intelligence in the last
50 years. It seems perverse and awful to say: we are robots, we are simple,
there is a very basic machine that drives us. Maybe it is awful, but if
that's awful then so is the "Judeo-Christian" ethic that built the modern
capitalist Western world, because they're both reductionist to the extreme.
Fundamentalist Christians exemplify this the best, claiming only a passing
interest in "earthly affairs", and drawing some incredible strength from a
philosophy that looks so negative on the surface. But you have to admit that
the drive to reduce the world to a simple interplay of subatomic particles
shares more than a lot in common with the drive to reduce the meaning of
life to "love your neighbor as yourself", and with the drive to recreate a
human being out of material that can never be.

So out of this come some issues of ethics, but ethics in the more original
sense, ethics in the sense that crosses a lot of borders and isn't only
preoccupied with "is it right or wrong to shoot someone when they break into
your house". This kind of ethics is about being a self-conscious automaton.
If you know that you are an automaton, and you busy yourself with building
this automaton, are you sure about the reasons you're doing it? Are you sure
that you get the implications of each move you make? Do you see the
relationship between each decision you make, and whether or not it
enlightens or dulls you?

"Technology for technology's sake" hardly characterizes what you might wish
to avoid. What you might wish to avoid....Well, put it positively -- what
you might wish to pursue at all costs are "developments" that take you *out*
of the loop, out of the feedback mechanism that propels the "wheel of
progress". Because if you believe Baudrillard, that wheel is an illusion and
has been for a long time. So if you approach the task of botmaking as a task
of "continuous improvement", in pursuit of a machine that can "do anything",
you may be a vital contributor to the march of "improvement of the human
race", but you're discovering nothing! except how this plug fits into that
socket, how you can make the leatherworkers go faster, how you can plow a
whole field of cotton in a quarter of the time it used to take. That's great
stuff, but it hardly gets you involved in any new ethical questions. Just
the same old same old: is it wrong to kill? is it wrong for a robot to kill?
is it wrong to kill a robot? is it wrong for a robot to kill another robot?
Nothing new.

What's new, repeat: we are automatons, begetting other automatons. Can we
achieve consciousness? Which directions in AI development keep us submerged
in the same old mechanistic obsessions that characterize (and
departicularize) all other technological projects? Which directions in AI
development strain the borders so hard that they pop: that the automaton you
create starts telling you something about what you are that you could never
have imagined?

That's the ethics of AI for me, and my position is probably obvious: I'm
against "progress", I'm for popping the borders by ratcheting up
contemplatively. Maybe that's as close as I can get to Natasha's
whole-health minimalism. ALICE is a project of such minimalism that it's
perverse. But it's already demonstrated some fascinating things, by means of
staying to a course that looks almost pin-headed from standard AI. But I see
a sort of "moral imperative" in this approach. The moral imperative is
trying to kick us out of the way of thinking that makes us assume that *we*
are giant complex structures, whose complexity can only be plumbed by more
and more abstruse theory, more and more genetic analysis, linguistic theory,
safer cars and better prison systems. Natasha sees the whole key to a happy
life in an ultra-simplified focus on physical and mental balance in
everything. The kids who smash up bots, spend all hours playing DOOM,
ravenously snap up all new technology and fit it together, are just engaged
in more noticeable forms of the same kinds of things we're all doing in our
unquestioned support of increasing technological sophistication, consumer
safety, and "civil society". Everybody's still wrapped up in illusions of
progress, illusions of an "end" that will make it all make sense (O,
Singularity, come sooner, we pray). ALICE is something more akin to the
Jewish mystics who have been studying the Torah for centuries, looking at it
as a complete-unto-itself, a perfect code that explains itself, that may in
fact be the engine behind all reality, but in fact is most interesting as
its own self. ALICE is treating language in that same way: something that
isn't ultimately interesting in any meta-sense, but more as a giant machine
that explains itself well enough, without any meta-rules. That says a lot
about what it means to be human. And that might point the way for us
post-industrialist automatons to ultimately achieve some kind of
consciousness.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: alicebot-aiethics-admin@list.alicebot.org
> [mailto:alicebot-aiethics-admin@list.alicebot.org]On Behalf Of
> Richard Wallace
> Sent: Sunday, 5 August 2001 19:51
> To: alicebot-aiethics@list.alicebot.org
> Subject: Re: [alicebot-aiethics] Greetings
>
>
> Wow, we are delighted to have a celebrity on our Ethics committee.  For
> those who don't already, Robby Garner won the Loebner prize in 1998 and
> 1999.  His work on chat robots and his courage to work "outside
> the system"
> were a big inspiration to me and a big influence on the
> development of ALICE
> and AIML.
>
> Robby and I also implemented (with the help of Paco Nathan) what was
> probably the first bot-to-bot conversation over the web.   His
> bot Barry met
> an early version of ALICE in early 1998 in what we called "The Forbin
> Project", and their conversation was quoted in the New York Times!
>
> Incidentally, Robby Garner's Robitron mailing list was formerly
> the home of
> many good "AI Ethics" discussions too.
>
> I think everyone here will join me in giving a big warm welcome to Robby
> Garner!
>
> Rich
>
> Donate to the ALICE A.I. Foundation "Cooler than Humans" -- TIME
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Robby Garner" <meo1@bellsouth.net>
> To: <alicebot-aiethics@list.alicebot.org>
> Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2001 8:40 AM
> Subject: [alicebot-aiethics] Greetings
>
>
> > 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 )
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > alicebot-aiethics mailing list
> > alicebot-aiethics@list.alicebot.org
> > http://list.alicebot.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/alicebot-aiethics
> >
>
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