Things are moving along. I’m trying a new style of writ­ing where I’m hand­writ­ing all notes and then begin typing. This seems to be help­ing tremendously.

One impor­tant point that Sherry Turkle raises in Life on Screen is that bots and other Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gences (AI) can be thought of as inter­faces (Turkle, 1995: In par­tic­u­lar 102-124). Any bot can be pro­grammed to inter­face with and com­mu­ni­cate to and from back­end data­bases. TinyMUD’s famed Julia bot is a prime exam­ple (Turkle, 1995: 89-90). Julia would, among other func­tion, con­tin­u­ally update a map of the MUD space, pro­vid­ing direc­tions to dif­fer­ent loca­tions. She also served as a sort of e-mail system, stor­ing and deliv­er­ing user to user messages.

Yes­ter­day, I encoun­tered another bot acting as a front end inter­face. In this case, the name­less bot was part of Chase Bank’s auto­mated phone ser­vice system. This name­less bot, while given a female voice, had little to no per­son­al­ity and few trap­pings of ‘humanness.’ Unlike Julia, the Chase bot was given no name. “She”¹ also didn’t appear have any col­lo­quial responses, as opposed to Julia who can be down­right sassy.

The most thought-​provoking part of my inter­ac­tion with the Chase bot, came about a minute into the inter­ac­tion. As part of her inter­ac­tion script, the bot stated:

By the way, if you know the option you want, you don’t have to wait until I finish speak­ing to say it. I don’t mind if you inter­rupt me.

I was more than a little taken aback by this. I already knew that this was the case, and in fact have known to talk over the bot for a while. But this was the first time a bot had given me per­mis­sion to do this. And that started to make me think about how inter­act­ing with a ser­vice bot changed the cul­tural rules of the inter­ac­tion. First and fore­most, the notion of civil­ity is more or less removed. It’s easy to see how, in these types of inter­ac­tions, man­ners become inef­fi­cient. Inter­act­ing with an emo­tion­less entity that doesn’t under­stand rude­ness removes the pos­si­bil­ity of abuse from the encounter.

Iron­i­cally, this eerily mir­rors how robots were treated in R.U.R (Rossum’s Uni­ver­sal Robots), the play that intro­duced the term “robot.” In Karl Capek’s play, the hero­ine, Helena, is first con­fronted by a robot sec­re­tary who appears to both her and the audi­ence as com­pletely human. To prove the secretary’s true nature the fac­tory super­vi­sor orders her to be dis­as­sem­bled and her parts brought to Helena for inspec­tion. While Sulla, the sec­re­tary has no reac­tion to these orders, Helena is hor­ri­fied at this notion:

Helena: You would have here killed?
Domain: You can’t kill machines.(Capek and Selver, 1923: 16)

The robot has no care about its own exis­tence and no con­cept of fair or unfair treat­ment. And as Capek notes through the voice of the fac­tory super­vi­sor Domain, this is key to their efficiency:

Domain: Young Rossum invented a worker with the min­i­mum amount of require­ments. He had to sim­plify him. He rejected every­thing that did not con­tribute directly to the progress of work. In this way he rejected every­thing that makes a man more expen­sive. In fact he rejected man and made the Robot.(Capek and Selver, 1923: 13)

Approx­i­mately 85 years after R.U.R. was first pub­lished we see how pre­scient the work was. Capek’s Robots were a thinly veiled alle­gory for the ulti­mately alien­ated and expend­able pro­le­tariat. The Chase Bot fits this descrip­tion per­fectly. No per­son­al­ity, not even a name, and it gives you the per­mis­sion to be rude to it, inform­ing you that like Sulla, it doesn’t mind abuse.

Until this point my focus on Bots as inter­face has been focused on sit­u­a­tions where they might main­tain the illu­sion of human­ness. How­ever, my encounter with the Chase bot and in par­tic­u­lar how iden­ti­fy­ing it as an AI allows it to be mis­treated under typ­i­cal con­ver­sa­tional prac­tices has led to ques­tion that theory. Per­haps, the promise of an effi­cient inter­ac­tion is enough to allow the removal of human inter­ac­tion. Perhaps.

¹ – I begrudg­ingly apply female gender des­ig­na­tions because this bot was given a neu­tral female voice and I have found that con­stantly refer­ring to bots as it tends to become dif­fi­cult to read/parse.

Bib­li­og­ra­phy

Capek, Karel, and Selver, Paul. 1923. R.U.R. (Rossum’s uni­ver­sal robots) A play in three acts and an epi­logue. London: H. Mil­ford Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press.
Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the screen: iden­tity in the age of the Inter­net. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Today, while mowing the lawn at Dre’s house I had an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence. As I stopped to take a break, I noticed Lila, one of Dre’s cats, sit­ting in the kitchen window. When I walked to the window to say hi, Lila appeared to get very skit­tish¹. She shifted posi­tion and began to furi­ously smell the window. At first this behav­ior puz­zled me. As far as I could tell, I wasn’t making any motion that could be inter­preted as threat­en­ing. So what was caus­ing this reaction?

Then it occurred to me: Lila was sniff­ing so furi­ously because she couldn’t smell me through the window. So, for her, a key sen­sory iden­ti­fier was miss­ing. Per­haps she was expe­ri­enc­ing cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance or some feline ver­sion of Freud’s Uncanny. Either way, I sus­pect that she didn’t know how to resolve the fact that the entity in front of her looked like me but had no smell. I had essen­tially become a “bot” to her: some­thing that appear to sim­u­late myself with­out man­i­fest­ing all of the nec­es­sary com­po­nents to be me.

¹ – Admit­tedly Lila is often very skit­tish, so I could be com­pletely mis­in­ter­pret­ing her behavior.

oops… had an issue with my host­ing company… all resolved now!

Today I made the mis­take of updat­ing Yahoo!Messenger. While v7 seems to work quite nicely, it removes the “follow this chatter” fea­ture that has been so useful to me. And with that my research capa­bil­i­ties ground to a halt. The reason is that with­out that fea­ture, I can’t track a bots move­ment through dif­fer­ent rooms.

Thank­fully, after a bit of googling, I came up with:

http://​www.​old​ver​sion.com/

Old Ver­sion col­lects and archives pre­vi­ous ver­sions of pop­u­lar public soft­ware prod­ucts. And within min­utes I was able to down­load the ver­sion of Mes­sen­ger that I’ve been using.

So should you, in the course of your research, come up with need to track down a pre­vi­ous soft­ware ver­sion, I’d start your search at Old Version.

Sept 26 – I must file for grad­u­a­tion
Oct 14 – My draft thesis is due
Nov 4 – Final thesis due
Nov 18 – All remain­ing grades are due
Dec 2 – Bound thesis due
Dec 9 – Pass go and col­lect diploma

I think I can do this!

Dre and I got back from Ver­mont last night. We took a brief vaca­tion there to visit law school friends of hers and the Ver­mont Raptor Center.

I’ve got a month to get my rough thesis draft in.

And I’ve yet to receive my back vac­tion pay from Kodak.