Are there hidden dangers in robots that look like us?

[upbeat music] Hi, I’m Ryan Jenkins, a philosophy professor at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. It’s easy to think that technologies are basically just neutral tools. But an overlooked aspect of technology is the way that it can reflect and in turn, distort our perceptions of the world. Sometimes, even when trying to be objective we can end up importing our unconscious biases into the way we create ‘neutral’ tools. And some of these ways might not be so innocent because they might reinforce social injustices. Designers sometimes use what’s called “framing” when creating robots or artificial assistants – that is, they design these technologies such that they imitate human behavior or animal behaviors. Users feel more comfortable interacting with robots and AI if they can understand our “natural language,” if they have human-sounding voices and human names, if they can make facial expressions, and so on. Children enjoy playing with robots that look like animals, like puppies. Could there be anything wrong with this kind of framing? Let’s take a look at a few examples. Think of the voice assistants, powered by artificial intelligence, that are common nowadays, on every smartphone, smart speaker and in many new cars. Google, Apple, and Amazon all offer such assistants, and all of them, Google’s Assistant, Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa — are female by default. It took years for those companies to even make a male voice an option. This is important because voice is an increasingly common way we interact with our devices. But as these examples show, AI voice assistants also provide an opportunity to reinforce the idea of women as servants, as if we’re calling upon our secretaries in the typing pool back in the 1960s. We see this not justin voice assistants but also in robots — whether they’re products that help keep our house clean or robots on the big screen in movies. Female robots tend to be overly sexualized and subservient, with names like Rosie, Cherry, Lenore, and so on. In the early days of Siri, users who asked the assistant questions that were sexually explicit were met with coy and cutesy responses like, “I would blush, if I could.” Meanwhile, robots that have male names more often reflect a sense of mastery, domination, or virility: Ulysses, Gigantor, Optimus Prime, and so on. Consider another stark example in robot design — not concerning gender, but race. In the 2009 movie Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the pair of robots Skids and Mudflap provide comic relief — but they also end up reinforcing some pretty awful stereotypes about African Americans. They’re the only robots, we’re told, that can’t read. They use tone deaf "street slang.” One of them has a gold tooth. But then again, they’re just robots, right? We have to be careful when designing these depictions. Even without the deliberate framing that technologists can build into their products, human users have a tendency to “anthropomorphize” the objects they interact with. They project human qualities onto them, like personalities, feelings, beliefs, and so on. We name our boats and planes. We say that it’s “bad for” our car to be driven without oil, in the same way that too much sugar might be bad for a growing child. This is true even though, of course, our artifacts are inanimate: they don’t have thoughts or feelings. Still, engineers must understand that the products they design play into this process and can nurture these kinds of associations and invite anthropomorphic projections from their users. What’s the point of all of this? In general, we should try to avoid sustaining these kinds of harmful stereotypes that can marginalize historically underrepresented groups, lead to denied opportunities for education or employment and significantly harm their self-esteem. And rather than seeing their end product as neutral or inocent, engineers have responsibilities to resist stereotypes, too. One of the best solutions to this is to ensure the diversity of the people working on these projects. For example, it’s hard to imagine that Siri’s 'blushing’ responses to sexually explicit chatter wouldn’t have raised eyebrows among women engineers… that is, if there were any in the room. Ironically, though, the more common these representations become, the more likely it is that they will discourage women or minorities from entering STEM. This is a hard problem, since subconscious biases are everywhere and especially persistent. The philosopher Immanuel Kant said that “from the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever fashioned.” How persistent should we be in trying to uncover and redress moral problems in our allegedly “neutral” design decisions when we know that human bias is ultimately inescapable? And after all, aren’t we just talking about imaginary robots? What do you think?