Scott Ott
“I’ll insert here a trigger warning.. You may want to turn off all artificial intelligence devices before watching this episode. We are not responsible for what they say or do or order for you.

It’s bad enough when children boss around their younger siblings and talk back to their parents.. Now they bark orders at their virtual assistants and get rewarded for it.”

-Alexa do this…

-Siri do that..

-OK Google bring me the head of a pig..

-Cortana amuse me..

In 2015, Americans bought some 1.7 million talking AI devices. This year that number is expected despite 25 million. That’s not including all the newly sassy smartphones and the loquacious smartwatches, cars, and refrigerators. Now the vast storehouse of human knowledge is that our command but a columnist in Washington Post wonders how it will affect the children. After all, they’re young minds don’t yet realize that context frames proper questions and answers. Today’s artificial intelligence devices are largely devoid of context. They merely answer the question..

Artificial intelligence devices, you know Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home and devices like that more to come in the future. They are everywhere now and what are the consequences of leaving your child alone with a super educated obsequious servant and should we even worry about it?

Steve Green
“I don’t worry about it.. not in the slightest. My voice has been getting hand-me-down iPhone for my wife and I. Since the very first iPhone that we bought back in 2007, my kids are great and it’s because maybe we’re just freaks. I talk to Siri and so does my wife. We speak to her politely not because she’s obsequious but because Siri is a program to be polite to you just like Google does and Alexa does it. I’ve never heard Cortana because I’ve never actually seen a windows phone out in the wild. I assume Cortana is also program to be polite and so our kids hear us talking to Siri saying please and believe it or not sometimes thank you even though she’s no longer listen to that point but you hear me referring  for her because that’s how we think of her because we’ve got just enough automation in our home that we’re talking to Siri all the time telling her to turn off the lights or change the thermostat over. Our kids here is doing this and as a result, I hear my kids saying “please” and “thank you” to this artificial intelligence. Servant I guess is it’s probably the right word and so no I don’t worry about this yet it’s like anything else in the world set a good example in your kids are gonna follow.

Scott Ott
“20 years from now, Siri is going to write a screenplay about her experience in the greenhouse hold it’s going to be called the help and you’ll be surprised at the dirty laundry of the chill air about this. Mattel is actually coming out with an AI device for babies designed to grow up with the teaching and entertaining them and unlike the others, it will have a setting the parents can use to force children to say “please” if you wish. Discerning social cues and context are important emotional intelligence skills even learning to argue constructively help us to mature and to navigate human relationships. What happens to a society where the right answer is always at your child’s back and call and they never have to ask nicely?”

Bill Whittle
“Society like that produces young people to go out in the streets and riot in the name of peace these people up in the name of love and smash windows in the name of fighting fascism that’s what happened. Mattel is going to make undoubtedly happen like the iPad. It will be irresistible to young people. We still don’t have the full anything like full data on the generation that was born into the smartphone area. 

What we learned from some sociologists is that during the 19th  and 2000 especially more and more parents essentially farmed off the childcare responsibilities to childcare centers and so on.. What we find is that there’s something like three or four times as many kids with serious emotional disturbances that were in childcare from the beginning of their lives versus those that were raised in the zone by their mothers. I understand that this is not an option for some people sometimes.

Basically what we’re talking about is this; the essential qualities of your character determining probably certainly within the first four years of your life and within the first two years of your life. Your mental stability in the future is going to depend on your interaction primarily with your mother whether or not you feel like. You are valued and protected and safe. If we come up with something so sophisticated that makes your kids sound smart by talking to it, I know a lot of parents are going to leap all over this and they will think oh my god I’m going to raise Einstein in a rubber room with a straight jacket on. This is what I worry about it. It’s not that I worry about the new technology. Technology is fantastic. I worry about the human consequences.

I use google all the time hundreds of times a week easily to answer questions like what was that. I know what questions to ask and if you don’t have an education, if you don’t have a fundamental worldview and a fundamental curiosity which I think these things go a long way to kill an imagination too for that matter then you don’t know what questions to answer so to ask so what good does the answer do.”

Scott Ott
George Jetson, Jane his wife had a robot named Rosie Madam. I assume someday we would all have robots like Rosie. But I never considered the consequences for his boy Elroy, daughter Judy. How many little parental interactions would disappear if mom and dad are no longer the fountains of knowledge the smartest one in the room. What’s the consequence of a person’s social development when arguments get set by Alexa rather than through persuasion and personality. As the machines get smarter will they eventually teach us to be nice to each other? Whose values will they convey? These questions require human interaction, consideration of competing views, passion, sensitivity and humility.. In other words, these are questions that cannot be answered by Siri, Alexa or Cortana.. Training up a child in the way he should go takes more than information.. It takes natural human intelligence and often supernatural wisdom. No matter how clever the gizmos, children still need parents for those.

The post Will artificial intelligence make our kids stupid and rude? appeared first on New World : Artificial Intelligence.

This gender imbalance is pervasive in fiction as well as reality. Films like “Her” and “Ex Machina” reflect our anxieties about what intelligent machines mean for humanity. But AI, in and of itself, is genderless and sexless. Why, then, are the majority of the personalities we construct for these machines female?

Is it about service?
Assigning gender to these AI personalities may say something about the roles we expect them to play. Virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa perform functions historically given to women. They schedule appointments, look up information, and are generally designed for communication.

“When you think of an assistant you tend to think of their voice as female and it has to do with the way that labor is gendered and stratified,” said Michelle Habell-Pallan, an associate professor in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. “So that’s no accident. That’s more something that’s out there in the cultural field that gets reproduced then in the technology. And it becomes a loop where, if you’re not conscious, you just think this is inevitable and this is the way it is. It creates this illusion that this is the way it is, how it has been, and how it shall be.”

Flight attendants and travel agents are also roles that traditionally skew female, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that Alaska Airlines and United Airlines chose lady bots “Jenn” and “Alex” to assist their passengers.

The trend may seem harmless, but we should be careful about the message it sends if we want to prevent AI from becoming the latest chapter in a history of objectifying women.

Women are already subject to volumes of damaging, implicit messaging. Some might argue they’re held to robot-like standards of perfection, an idea explored in the iconic “Stepford Wives” film. Near-constant signals from the media suggest that with enough tweaking, plucking, painting, and self-control, women can obtain perfection. Studies show that women who wear makeup are perceived as more competent at work, and everywhere in the world women spend more hours grooming and working (in the home and outside of it) than men do.

Maybe these social norms make it easier to believe in a female virtual assistant. After all, Siri is always working, always available, ready at any minute to provide assistance with a positive attitude.

Assigning female characteristics to these AI personalities may seem innocuous, but it has some serious implications. In addition to reinforcing gender stereotypes, it could lead to machines taking on morally ambiguous roles that go well beyond scheduling appointments.

Is it about sex?
AI may be in its nascence, but the feminizing — and sexualizing — of machines isn’t a new phenomenon. Several robotics companies have been developing human-like (and largely female) robots for years, anticipating high demand. Hanson Robotics recently demoed Sophia, a learning and expressive robot designed to help humans in areas like healthcare and customer service.

“I believe that robots will become people,” Sophia’s creator, David Hanson, told GeekWire. “I believe that in time they will develop the complete capability of a human, to understand us, to have general intelligence and the willful desire to grow and reach their potential the way that humans experience it.”

When asked if that potential included love, companionship, and sex, Hanson said he believes it’s an inevitable future. But Hanson Robotics, which also builds male robots, is not headed that direction.

Still, many companies are developing technologies to meet the demand for robotic companionship. That demand is largely for female simulations, which may also have something to do with the gender imbalance. The Atlantic has an in-depth exploration of why the market for these kinds of products is dominated by men.

In a Pew Research study canvassing experts in technology and robotics, GigaOm lead researcher Stowe Boyd predicted that sex with robots will become prosaic by 2025.

“Robotic sex partners will be commonplace, although the source of scorn and division, the way that critics today bemoan selfies as an indicator of all that’s wrong with the world,” he said in the study.

Japanese manufacturers have made strides in simulating sex with virtual avatars andreal-life robots. Tenga, one such company, demoed a virtual reality experience which combined Oculus Rift and other hardware to look and feel like sex with an anime avatar.

Sex with robots is a big leap from asking Siri to set an alarm, but the fact that we’ve largely equated artificial intelligence with female personalities is worth examining. There are, after all, few sexualized male robots or avatars.

Is it about adoption?
A less insidious — and perhaps more compelling — theory on why AI is female has to do with user comfort.

Depictions of AI in pop culture tend to fall into two categories: Malevolent and subservient. Male and female. HAL 9000, the sentient computer from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is murderous, controlling, and so iconic that some argue he’s the reason engineers have shied away from creating male AI voices. Samantha, from Her, on the other hand, helps Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) navigate his work life, deal with his divorce, and even engages in some virtual boot-knocking.

The contrast between these two archetypes reflects the biased lens through which we see artificial intelligence.

“In terms of how we are trained to relate to particular genders, there’s a kind of comfort that is associated with female voices,” Habell-Pallan says. “So, more warm, more welcoming, more nurturing, all those associations that are connected with women that are not necessary essential qualities but are socially constructed.”

In order to get consumers to adopt new technologies, Habell-Pallan says, their engineers choose female personalities, which are perceived as less threatening. At least, that’s the case in most countries. Siri is male, by default, in the UK.

“Americans speak loudly and clearly and are usually in a hurry, so it makes sense for them to have a female voice because it has the pitch and range,” technology consultant Jeremy Wagstaff told The Guardian. “British people mumble and obey authority, so they need someone authoritative.”

Wagstaff’s theory is speculative, as Apple has declined to comment on why the UK Siri is male. Generally, experts say that a female voice is easier for consumers to tolerate and communicate with.

“The research indicates there’s likely to be greater acceptance of female speech,” Karl MacDorman, an associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing, told Wired.

MacDormand, who specializes in human-computer interaction, studied reactions to voices of both genders and found female personalities were preferred.

Market research is likely the main factor that influences tech companies when constructing AI personalities. Customer adoption and trust are key to their success.

Microsoft has already proven that getting users to trust an AI can be a boon for business. Xiaoice, the company’s AI chatbot designed for the Chinese market, is wildly successful and not just in user adoption. Many people have formed an emotional bond with the bot and 25 percent have even told her they love her. Tay, the American version,was not embraced so warmly.

But Xiaoice’s popularity has real monetary value. JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce giant, is already using the relationship to sell more products. Users are much more likely to make a purchase when she acts as their “shopping buddy.”

“We’ve shown that monetization on this channel is much, much higher than regular JD.com channels,” Microsoft R&D VP Hsiao-Wuen Hon said. “It will be very interesting to have something that people actually trust.”

Gendering AI boils down to business. Customers interpret these AI personalities through the lens of their own biases. Whether its stereotypes about women in service roles, the desire for a female companion, or simply that feeling of trust that a woman’s voice instills, female AI personalities are easier for most consumers to adopt. And adoption is the ultimate goal for tech companies that want to make AI mainstream.

“We don’t know what the right answers are,” said Hanson in a recent panel on robotics and AI. “What I want to do is put tools in the hands of artists and product designers and ask them the questions to make sure we can address people’s needs as effectively as possible. And I think the gender relationships with robots is one of those deep questions I don’t have a full set of answers for.”

By Monica Nickelsburg
www.geekwire.com

The post Why is Artificial Intelligence Female? appeared first on New World : Artificial Intelligence.