After mobile devices and touchscreens, personal assistants will be “the next big thing” in the tech industry. Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Home, Apple’s HomePod – all these voice-controlled systems come to your home, driven by artificial intelligence, ready for dialogues. Artificial intelligence currently works bests when provided with clear tasks, where clear goals are defined. That can be a goal defined by the user (“Please turn down the music, Alexa!”), but generally the goals of the companies offering personal assistants dominate: They want to sell. And there you find the differences between these personal assistants: Alexa sells the whole range of products marketed by Amazon, Cortana eases access to Microsoft’s soft- and hardware, Google Home has its strengths with smart home devices and the internet of things, and Apple’s HomePod … well, urges you into the hall of mirrors which has been created by Apple’s Genius and other flavour enhancers.
Beyond well-defined tasks, artificial intelligence is bad at chatting and assisting. If you are looking for a partner, for someone to talk to, the predefined goals are missing. AI lacks the world knowledge needed for such a task, nor is it capable to provide for the appropriateness of answers in a conversation or for the similarity of mindsets which is the basis of friendship.
But this is exactly what is promised by the emotion robot “Pepper”. This robot saves the emotions it collects from its human interaction partners on a shared server, a cloud. All of the existing Pepper robots are connected to this cloud. This way the robots, which are already autonomous, collectively “learn” how to improve their emotional reactions. Their developers also work with these data.
If you think through the idea of “Pepper”, you have to ask yourself to which end this robot should serve – as a replacement of a partner for human beings, caring for their emotional well-being? In which way is this conceived of? How does a robot know how to contribute to human well-being? Imagine of a human couple, where he is a choleric, and her role is to constantly quieten him down (contrapuntal approach). Or another couple which is constantly quarrelling, he shouts at her, and she yells back; this couple judges this to be the normal state and their quarrelling as an expression of well-being (homeopathic approach). Can a robot decide which ‘approach’ is the best? Simply imagine what would happen in a scenario where you have a person – we call him ‘Donald’ – who buys a new emotion robot – whom we call ‘Kim’. Certainly this is not the kind of world we’re looking for, isn’t it?
With personal assistants, it seems to be a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea: Either you are being reduced to a consumer; or you’ll be confronted with some strange product without openly defined goals, with which you can’t exchange at eye level. So the best choices we have is to either abstain from using these AIs; or to participate in civil society dialogues with tech companies on policy debates about the use of AI.
kplex-project.com 