business Archives - GWS Robotics

How do Social Robots Interact With Humans?

Philip Graves — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 11:31:00 +0000

5 Ways Social Robots Can Be Designed and Programmed to Interact With You

- Written by Philip Graves for GWS Robotics, 29th July 2019
- Edited and selectively amended by David Graves, 2nd August 2019

Modern social robots are designed to interact with humans by making use of a variety of sensors that are then converted into data their programming can meaningfully interpret.

We can broadly divide the tools of interactivity with which they are equipped into artificial senses and outwardly perceptible responses, with the latter being mediated by artificial intelligence, the sum of all protocols by which they are designed to process and respond to data received and memories stored.

Having summarised these, we shall go on to look at five strategic ways in which social robots can be designed and programmed to interact with humans.

Part 1: Artificial Senses

Just as any animal needs senses to detect what is present in and happening in its physical environment, so too do robots need artificial senses for the same purpose.

21st century social robots like Pepper have been equipped with artificial sight, hearing and touch, but generally have no artificial sense of taste or smell.

Why are social robots not made able to smell or taste?

Although it is possible for sophisticated drug-detection machinery used by customs officials to intercept illicit trafficking operations to be equipped with an ‘artificial nose’, there is no clear economic justification for equipping a social robot with such expensive technology as would be required to detect and recognise the presence of chemical vapours in the air.

Taste is another animal sense that depends on the detection of chemicals, generally in the presence of a water-based fluid called saliva that breaks down the food and releases its chemical constituents; and because of the electrically conductive properties of water, it would potentially be electrically unsafe for an electronic machine with moving parts like a robot to have any kind of fluid inserted into it to imitate this process.

1a. Artificial Vision

Robots are equipped with internal digital cameras by which they are able to receive digital images of their visual environments. This makes for a rich source of data for their programming to process into identifying what these environments consist of, the first step towards responding appropriately in a way that facilitates communication with nearby people.

1b. Artificial Hearing

Modern social robots are fitted with integral microphones, allowing them to receive analogue audio data. This is then converted into digital audio by on-board Analogue-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) and fed into their programs. In order for them to make sense of that digital data, they need to be programmed to interpret the sounds they are hearing with reference to their ADSR (attack, decay, sustain, release) envelopes and frequencies. Ideally they should be programmed in a sophisticated enough way to recognise words from the digital audio patterns of human speech, as well as making sense of background noises and not being distracted by them when people are speaking.

1c. Artificial Touch

Advanced robots can be fitted with an outer ‘skin’ of material that is made sensitive to pressure and / or electrical conductivity, thereby imitating the key ways by which humans perceive touch and also forces acting upon them.

Touch sensitivity can be useful in social robots’ interactions with humans for several reasons. It can allow them to detect when a human is placing a hand on them, opening the way to a host of programmed social responses. It can also allow them to detect the weight of an object if they are expected to carry it, and to respond defensively or self-protectively if subjected to heavy force such as a blow.

Where robots like Pepper are fitted with an internal tablet, they additionally use touch-sensitive screen technology as a direct interface with programs with which they are equipped.

Many robots like Pepper deploy various other sensors to inform their operating systems of the behaviour of their moving parts and joints - notably inertial sensors such as gyroscopes and accelerometers. Information from these sensors is mostly used programmatically to avoid or detect malfunction, or to avoid falling over.

Part 2: Perceptible Responses

It is the first job of the social robot programmer to devise sophisticated routines for the interpretation of the raw digital data from the robot’s visual, sonic and tactile sense mechanisms. The second job is then to devise further routines to determine how the robot should behave based on what its program now understands to be happening around it.

This can be approached in a number of ways, but to confer to a social robot an effective semblance of intelligence requires programming it to behave in ways that seem to its human companions to be appropriate responses to their behaviour and revealed wants and intentions.

Depending on the design of the robot, it is likely to have at its disposal a variety of forms of physical movement, as well as the ability to generate artificial speech and other sounds through its built-in loudspeakers. Both these classes of functionality can be fully exploited to make the robot behave in a lifelike interactive fashion.

2a. Mechanical and Electrical Movement

Social robots can be programmed to draw on their electrical power source to move the internal joints of their bodies and to move themselves across the surface on which they are standing. Some robots can also be made to apply force to third-party objects to achieve specific purposes such as opening a door or throwing an object, and others developed by research laboratories have been made to run or jump using leg-like appendages.

Robots can be made to rotate on the spot or wander around a room or hall. They can be made to turn and tilt their heads, and move their arms, wrists and fingers, whether for lifting and carrying objects, reaching out to touch a human, or simply gesticulating. They can even be made to dance. These abilities are at the disposal of programmers of modern social robots; but they need to be programmed to move in ways that are appropriate to the situation in which they are engaged.

Robots fitted with internal lights and screens can also be programmed to switch them on or off or change their colour in order to convey a sense of emotion. Many social robots are equipped with electronic image-based ‘eyes’ whose appearance can be made to change depending on what they perceive to be happening around them and the ‘emotional’ effect that has upon them. All these changing appearances can be classed collectively as electrical movement, since no mechanical motion is involved.

2b. Speech and sound

Almost all modern social robots are equipped with internal loudspeakers and virtual speech synthesis software so that they can be made to say anything they are programmed to say, comprehensibly to human beings around them. The notable exceptions would be social robots designed to behave more like dogs and other animals, with different kinds of vocalisations.

Most social robots can also be made to produce a variety of audible tones and noises that do not resemble speech but may be designed to indicate their ‘moods’ or to attract human attention.

Some social robots can also be used to play music and pre-recorded audio tracks.

Part 3: Strategy for successful robot-human interaction

Having covered the technical basics of how robots can be equipped with the tools allowing them to interact with humans, we should also consider what kinds of interaction with robots are subjectively appreciated the most by humans. Here are five areas of their design and programmable behaviour that can make the most difference to user perceptions.

3a. Design and visual styling of robot body and head

It’s commonly observed that humans are happiest to interact with social robots that have human-like qualities of behaviour and personality but do not physically resemble humans to the degree that they could be mistaken for them.

We have been inundated with apocalyptic science fiction dramas exploring the theme of robots integrating themselves into society in human disguise and then taking control. These themes in popular fiction and film play into fears of robots that are indistinguishable from humans.

However, Hanson Robotics is a notable example of an active company that has flown in the face of this conventional wisdom and set out to produce robots that look as similar to humans as possible, at least in the designs of their heads and faces, and has even modelled several of them after real individuals. These robots have mostly been used in show applications, such as stage appearances where they are used to answer questions. People may be more comfortable watching them from the safe distance of an auditorium as part of an entertaining stage show than they would be interacting with them closely in an enclosed private setting.

Softbank Robotics is an example of a company that has followed conventional thinking in making its humanoid-style robots appear distinct from human forms. Its robot Pepper resembles neither a male nor a female form, but has some aspects of both.

Other robots may be deliberately designed not to be of humanoid form at all. Some may resemble other creatures such as dogs, while others resemble shapes such as eggs and are seemingly designed to appeal to their audience with cute or childlike features.

The choice of physical form should take into consideration the desired mechanical functionality of the robot as well as the subjective dimension of its aesthetic appeal. For a robot to be socially popular, it probably needs to be aesthetically pleasing, and not purely functional like an industrial robot arm. But equally, to be called a robot at all, it would be expected by most people to be capable of movement.

3b. Manner of movement

The movement of a social robot will always be a mechanical response to an electrical current; but mechanical robotic technology is nowadays sophisticated enough for movements that appear relatively natural or even graceful to be possible.

A social robot that can vary the speed with which it moves in a fluid and responsive manner can be much more interesting for humans to interact with than one that operates at a fixed and predictable speed in all it does.

Ideally, a robot’s movements should not be too unpredictable or make the individuals with them nervous, but should be varied enough to appear to show some kind of social awareness and inner consciousness, even though this is essentially an illusion.

3c. Sound of voice

There are also different schools of thought regarding how a social robot should sound. Should it sound like a robot, or should its speech sound as natural as that of a real human?

Non-robotic interactive devices such as Amazon’s Echo have often seemingly compensated for the lack of humanoid or animal-like form and mechanical functionality of their devices by giving them a highly realistic human voice, and this is also a possibility for robots, but are people ready to hear robots sounding exactly like humans in their homes?

Softbank has given Pepper a very obviously robotic child-like voice, for instance, so when you hear it speak, there is no risk of mistaking its voice for that of a real live human. At the same time, Pepper’s range of vocal pitch and expression is fairly broad compared with the traditional monotone robotic voices ascribed to such robotic characters as the daleks in the British television series ‘Doctor Who?’ in the 20th century, or the robot in the celebrated computer game Exile for the BBC Micro (1988) that chases the player around and beyond the main cavern while firing bullets and repeatedly growling: “’Pare^[1] to die!”

Perhaps it is indeed the necessity to move away from precisely these kinds of stereotypes of aggressive armed robots that makes it a more palatable move not to give today’s social robots monotonous voices.

3d. Interactivity with Visual Environment

Social robots built to have the appearance of eyes should be programmed to show engagement in a way that attracts the attention of those around but without making them too uncomfortable.

Sophisticated social robots can be programmed to recognise movement and to distinguish faces from inanimate objects, to read facial expressions, and to follow individuals around. They probably also ought to be programmed to vary their gaze so that they do not stare constantly at one individual for long periods, a behaviour that would be considered impolite and discomforting in most circumstances of human company.

They can also be programmed to respond to sudden and shocking movements by assuming defensive postures or frightened facial expressions as represented by their coloured lights.

When a human draws very close to a robot in a non-aggressive fashion, it may be programmed to adapt is behaviour by focusing closer attention on that individual, and possibly even by moving its arms into a position of readiness to gently embrace or to have its hand held – provided that the design of robot is robust enough to withstand this and that safeguards have been built in against pinched or trapped human fingers.

It is also within the scope of robotic programming to recognise and mirror certain human behaviours such as dancing and the adoption of certain postures or gestures.

3e. Interactivity with Sonic Environment

One of the primary modes by which social robots function is to seek to respond to cues that could be giving them permission to start a conversation – most especially, an individual greeting them. This can be managed by a combination of programming that recognises language and programming that infers from the orientation of the human speaker’s head and eyes that the robot is most likely to be the one being talked to at that time.

Social robots can also be programmed to recognise vocal expression and not just the content of language, as a means of trying to read the mood of their interlocutors; and they can be made to respond adaptively to such cues by varying their behaviour either to mirror or to respond in a fashion complementary to the manifest mood of the humans with them – whether this be cheerful and jolly, nervous and animated, sombre and morose, or calm and serious.

Sophisticated programming would combine the comprehension of language with non-verbal clues to mood in determining the most appropriate way to respond.

[1] i.e. ‘prepare’, reduced to monosyllabic form, presumably as a statement of the single-minded stupidity of the device and not as a result of a simple failure to program the BBC’s 8-bit sound chip with the first syllable

The post How do Social Robots Interact With Humans? appeared first on GWS Robotics.

Robots vs. Humans in the Workplace

Philip Graves — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 13:23:00 +0000

A summary and analysis of the findings of five major studies into the effects of robots on the displacement of jobs

Researched and written by Philip Graves for GWS Robotics, May 31st - June 5th, 2018

Introduction

The title of this article is deliberately provocative, playing on popular fears that the presence of robots in the workplace is mutually opposed to that of humans. Futurologists have lately been working overtime to speculate on the structural changes to the job market likely to be brought about by developments in robotics over the next fifty to one hundred years. Here we will argue with reference to some authoritative recent studies that robots and humans can work alongside each other in the workplace without the presence of robots displacing humans from the labour market altogether.

At the outset, it’s important to acknowledge that robotisation is not something entirely new, but rather a headline-grabbing current area of dramatic growth in the ongoing move towards more automated processes that began some three centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when inventions such as the steam engine (1713) and the automatic flour mill (1785) reduced the need for labour in mechanical and food production processes.

The Automation of Communications

To take a particular example, the automation of long-distance communications (previously dependent on mail couriers and messengers on foot or horseback) has benefitted over that time from a host of successive developments such as the development of the locomotive engine, the petrol-powered motor vehicle, analogue telephony, radio and television broadcasting, and ultimately the Internet and wireless mobile telecommunications. And yet, the number of jobs in the areas that service these communications probably equals or exceeds the number of those lost from the conventional mail service as it was in pre-industrial times, because the wealth of new technologies has vastly driven down the cost of long-distance communications at the same time as increasing the range of types of communications available, and has correspondingly raised the demand for them.

Automation drives up efficiency by reducing the need for labour in particular processes, which tends to increase productivity and the size of the economy as a whole, since more labour and more capital become available for other jobs and purchases (respectively) as a result of the savings made in each automated process.

The Automation of Mechanical Work

To take another example, mechanical jobs that involve mass-production have already been substantially automated and robotised. They are carried out in precisely controlled conditions and are therefore amenable to the use of robots. We see examples of this in the processed food manufacturing industry, the automotive industry and the electronics industry.

Jobs that require the application of more exacting skill to individual locations and projects, such as building and bricklaying, continue for now to be almost exclusively carried out by manual human operators albeit with the help of heavy machinery such as powered cranes on high-rise building projects.

That may be set to change to a degree, as robots designed to construct buildings such as houses according to preset plans are already under development, but they may be found to be economically viable only on substantial new housing developments where multiple homes are needed, and there could also be obstacles in terms of regulatory approval on grounds of health and safety and buildings regulations that will take decades to overcome.

Direct human input will continue to be the norm on interior decorating and finishing tasks, and all for which precision placement and drilling within a complex and individually variable three-dimensional environment are needed, such as electrical installations and plumbing installations, which are much more demanding to manage than readily robotised tasks like vacuum cleaning.

The Automation of Calculations and Writing

It is worth bearing in mind that numerous work processes have also already been automated and made more efficient by the use of computers. In the not-so-distant past, all arithmetic calculations and accounting tasks were manually carried out with writing instruments on paper. The commercial introduction of the electronic pocket calculator in 1970 paved the way to instant sums, saving countless time on operations at work that required arithmetic.

This was followed by the mass adoption of home computers and their successors such as Personal Computers in the 1980s and 1990s. While these, in connection with attached printers, initially displaced the typewriter as the tool of choice for the production of written content, vastly improving the efficiency of such processes, their ever-increasing power and storage space has since afforded almost limitless potential for gains in the efficiency with which complex operations from graphic design to music production are undertaken. Computers lack the obvious mechanical appendages of robots but are essentially saving time in very similar ways and have been doing so for the best part of half a century already.

Studies

Within the past five years, several high-profile studies have been published, attempting to gauge the impact of robotisation on changes to the labour market and the economy as a whole, including the displacement of jobs and the creation of others. We summarise and interpret the findings of a selection of five of the most important widely publicised ones in turn.

1. Oxford University Report ‘The Future of Employment’ (2013)

In September 2013, two academics from the University of Oxford, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne, published a report entitled ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?’

The report is a projection using a mathematical model of the probability of computerisation for jobs in 702 occupations in the United States only. The notion of computerisation implicitly encompasses the programming of robots as well as all other software, and includes autonomous driverless cars.

The authors, citing other academic research, state that employment particularly declines in ‘routine-intensive’ occupations as a result of computerisation.

They conclude (p. 37, Figure III) that 47% of jobs in the United States in 2010 carry at least a 70% risk of computerisation, with 19% of jobs carrying a risk of between 30 and 70%, and 33% carrying a risk in the range of 0-30%. The time period for computerisation is not specifically delimited, but the authors speculate ‘perhaps a decade or two’, while taking pains to point out that their projections are only of the share of employment that ‘can potentially be substituted by computer capital, from a technological capabilities point of view’ (p. 42) and are not an estimate of the true extent or speed of automation that will be achieved. Economic and regulatory hurdles (pp. 42-3) are cited as possible factors acting against the full realisation of the theoretically projected potential.

The industry sectors at greatest risk of computerisation in terms of the total absolute numbers of jobs affected are identified as office and administrative support, sales and related, service, transportation and material moving, and production, with some jobs in construction and extraction and in management, business and financial also at high risk of computerisation.

The authors project (p. 39) that computerisation will follow two waves separated by a period of relatively slow change while ‘engineering bottlenecks to computerisation’ are cleared.

They opine (p. 45) that there is evidence to suggest that jobs requiring a higher level of educational attainment and jobs paying higher wages are at lower risk of computerisation than those at the other end of the scale in each respect.

While the Oxford University report provides a thought-provoking projection of the theoretically possible upper limits for computerisation of jobs that were current in 2010, it is our view that the authors’ speculations that such rates of computerisation as they projected could be achieved in a decade or two from 2013 were wildly exaggerated in terms of the speed of change they would require.

It also fails to give substantive treatment to the issue of labour market flexibility and potential for retraining in other areas, or to the economic processes whereby jobs displaced by automation may be replaced by others.

In summary, the largely dry, theoretical and academic report by Frey and Osborne contributed to the ignition of plenty of important social and economic discussion, but has been largely superseded by other, more insightful and better-balanced reports since.

2. Bank of England study (2015)

In November 2015, Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane unveiled, in a speech delivered to the Trade Union Congress in London, the key findings of a study by the Bank into the risk and impact of job automation in the UK, opining (p. 12) that as many as 15 million UK jobs could be lost to automation within 20-30 years.

The B.o.E. study identified administrative, clerical and production-related tasks as those being at greatest risk of automation, and jobs with the lowest wages in general.

Haldane qualified the figures as a ‘broad brush estimate of the number of jobs potentially automatable’.

We were unable to locate a transcript of the study itself at the time of going to press, nor can we ascertain that it has even been made public, and we are therefore unable to comment in detail on its claims.

3. UK Government Report ‘Made Smarter Review’ (2017)

In October 2017, a UK government-commissioned independent review of the future adaptation of the British industrial sector to new digital technology developments, led by Professor Juergen Maier, the CEO of Siemens, was published under the title ‘Made Smarter Review’. The review was originally announced as the Industrial Digitalisation review in the government’s Industrial Strategy Green Paper in January 2017.

This report focuses on the identification and strategic pursuit of the opportunities for British business in the light of a broad spectrum of developments in digital technology. Over 200 UK-based organisations, including university departments and businesses, were consulted in its preparation (p. 4).

Key recommendations include creating a national ‘digital ecosystem’ under the leadership of a national ‘Made Smarter UK (MSUK) Commission’, that will ‘accelerate the innovation and diffusion of industrial digital technologies’. To this end, twelve ‘digital innovation hubs’ and five ‘digital research centres focused on developing new technologies (including robotics and automation) are to be set up.

The review also specifically recommends retraining a million industrial workers with the skills needed to use digital technologies.

More detailed coverage of its specific recommendations is given on tables from pp. 13-16.

The stated aim is to increase the prosperity of the country by taking a lead in increasing productivity (p. 5). The report projects (p. 8) that harnessing new technology to increase productivity faster than other countries will significantly boost the manufacturing industry in the UK as well as the digital technology development industry.

Our view at GWS is that adopting this strategy of embracing new digital technology in a concerted way rather than resisting or fearing it will indeed be good for the UK economy and therefore ultimately create and conserve more jobs than the alternative approach of protectionism towards current jobs or (as espoused by some) the taxation of robots (a proposal we reject as explained here).

4. McKinsey Global Institute report ‘Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained’ (2017)

In December 2017, a research foundation called the McKinsey Global Institute published a report entitled ‘Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation’. Our page references here refer to the visible pagination in the executive summary, whose text is also found in the main report.

The report is primarily interested in labour market change projections for a time point based in the relatively near future, just 12 years away in 2030. It is based on a study of 46 countries and attempts to model the net employment changes by 2030 for over 800 occupations.

The authors argue (p. [1]) that a ‘growing and dynamic economy’ partly ‘fuelled by technology itself and its contributions to productivity’ should create enough job growth to ‘more than offset the jobs lost to automation’ provided that governments make appropriate interventions. This argument is supported by their examination of the historical effects of automation on employment levels (Box E1, pp. 4-5, and p. 12), which closely agrees with our similar assessment made in January 2017 in our article ‘Are Robots Going to Steal All Our Jobs?’

They conclude (p. [1]) that ‘societal choices will determine…. whether… these coming workforce transitions are smooth, or whether unemployment and income inequality rise’.

The report quantifies (p. 2) the percentage of work to be displaced by automation by 2030 with an estimate of 15% on average globally, or up to 30% if adoption of new automated technologies proves much faster than expected; but they add that only about 3% of employees would be forced to change their occupational category completely as a result of this, extending to a maximum of 14% in the fastest-case adoption scenario.

The Institute’s projections vary widely by country (p. 3), with work in emerging economies such as Kenya (5.5%) and India (9.5%) generally being perceived as at lower estimated risk of automation by 2030 than that in highly developed economies such as Japan (26.5%), Germany (24%) and the UK (20%).

We presume that this differential projection is a result of more developed economies being expected to be in a greater state of preparedness to adopt and utilise new digital automation technologies in the relatively near future, whether in terms of affordability or in terms of established skillsets and access to training.

We can also perhaps usefully interpret the authors’ fastest-case scenario projections as a more plausible projection for a considerably more distant time-point than 2030, for example somewhere in the range of 2050-2070.

The authors identify (p. 6) ‘physical [activities] in predictable environments’ and the ‘collecting and processing of data’ as being among the areas of work most likely to be automated.

Areas of work where they conversely expect to see net growth in employment to 2030 (pp. 9-10) include health-care, childcare and other care-giving roles, education, engineering, scientific research, accountancy, information technology, executive and managerial roles, building and related professions, gardening, cleaning, and the creative and performance arts.

5. OECD Report 'Automation, Skills and Training' (2018)

In March 2018, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released a paper entitled ‘Automation, Skills Use and Training’, which concluded (p. 7) that about 14% of jobs in countries participating in a survey carry a probability of automation of 70% or higher, and a further 32% of jobs carry a risk of automation in the 50-70% bracket.

The OECD’s report found that the risk of automation varied widely between countries, with Nordic countries and the UK tending to be among the least affected on a global scale. The major reason for this was deduced as being that within equivalent industrial sectors, jobs are assigned differently across different countries. The effective implication here is that within each industrial sector, efficiency savings have already been implemented to a more advanced degree in some countries than others.

The risk of automation also understandably differs widely according to the type of work being carried out (p. 8), with manufacturing and agriculture found to be at highest risk, while postal services, road haulage and food services are also identified as being highly automatable.

The report also found that the risk of automation closely negatively correlates with the level of educational attainment and skill needed to undertake the job. This stands to reason, since it’s easier to program robots to carry out tasks that do not require vast knowledge or independent thinking.

A conclusion drawn (p. 9) is that workers in automatable jobs will need to be provided for with retraining. The authors caution in effect that since those holding the most automatable jobs tend to have the lowest levels of educational attainment and the least likelihood of participating in formal education, adult education schemes to retrain them will need to be carefully adapted to their needs.

General Conclusion:

Within the space of five years, the projections of future job displacements by robots and other forms of digitally driven automation have matured from sketchy outlines of maximum theoretical potential to exhaustively discussed studies of likely economic effects and opportunities.

We find ourselves in general agreement with the well-balanced reasoning of the authors of the more recent studies 3, 4 and 5.

Robots and self-driving transportation will be integral parts of the coming chapter in automation, and we can expect them to further drive up the efficiency of the economy without detriment to net employment rates, provided that at government policy level we have the foresight to smooth the wheels of change and provide the necessary retraining infrastructure and other appropriate forms of support where needed for those members of the national workforce whose existing jobs are set to be displaced.

The post Robots vs. Humans in the Workplace appeared first on GWS Robotics.

Robot Ethics and Pepper: Twenty Questions

Philip Graves — Sat, 26 May 2018 13:13:00 +0000

Twenty Questions On the Ethics of Robotics and Pepper Robot

Journalist Eithne Dodd interviewed Philip Graves of GWS Robotics on May 26th, 2018

In early June, parts of the interview were used in her article for Decode Magazine on the use of Pepper Robot in assisting patients with autism and dementia.

With her kind permission, we now publish the full unedited transcript of her thought-provoking interview

1. If an AI machine has no pain receptors, is it ethical to kick it?

No. While causing pain to life-forms that can experience it is infinitely more unethical, kicking an artificially intelligent machine is still unethical.

There are two main reasons I can think of for believing this.

The first is that the wanton destructiveness of, or infliction of deliberate damage upon, useful non-destructive objects is generally unethical from the standpoint that once damaged and deformed, they are less likely to be useful to anyone. If an artificially intelligent device is no longer wanted, a more ethical way to dispose of it would be to give or sell it to someone who wants it.

This is partly an environmental argument but could also be a purely economic one from the standpoint of the efficient use of limited resources.

If the device is obsolete technology for which there is no market any more, or has broken down irreparably, then there are ethical procedures for seeing about the recycling of its parts, which deforming it with a sharp kick will do nothing to assist and may hinder.

The environmental cost of producing a sophisticated artificially intelligent device in the first place is a considerable one, and it would be recklessly irresponsible to then take actions to destroy it if it is working properly and could deliver continuing value to others.

The second reason has to do with the impulse to kick or otherwise aggressively attack an apparently intelligent object, even if this appearance is known to be an illusion, being an unethical one to act upon, because in so doing, one would be giving free rein to one's appetite to hurt or destroy apparently living entities out of anger or spite.

While there are many who would feel that even damaging obviously inanimate property, such as by kicking in a metal garage door or smashing a glass, is a recklessly destructive application of aggressive impulses (and may even be criminal if the property belongs to someone else), targeting a machine that is designed to behave in a lifelike fashion could be seen as an aggravated offence. At the very least, it sets a very bad example and could be mentally training the one carrying out this act to feel more confident about or at ease with attacking real live creatures in the future.

It is important to note, however, that the point encapsulated in this second reason does not imply that artificially intelligent machines have rights. They are still machines, but it is nonetheless demonstrably unethical with regard to the aforementioned considerations to kick or otherwise aggressively attack them.

2. If you were to kick one of the robots at your work, would disciplinary action be taken against you? If so, on what grounds would that disciplinary action be?

I would very much hope and expect that disciplinary action would be taken against me in that circumstance! In fact, I would hope and deserve to be sacked. There would be at least two grounds for this - one is that I would have caused criminal damage to my employer's property, and the other is that I would have behaved in an unacceptably aggressive fashion in the workplace, not befitting of my status as an employee.

As an ardent pacifist who has never punched or kicked a soul - not even when on the receiving end of such treatment by other boys in my schooldays, I would be astonished and shocked at myself if I were ever to find myself in this situation.

3a. Does GWS Robotics have a code of conduct for how to treat your fellow human workers?

I'm not aware of an explicit one. It's a small, family-run business, and the directors (my elder brother David and father Richard) generally make an intuitive personality assessment of prospective employees as well as assessing the fitness of their technical skills and training to do the job before offering them a role.

Personality assessment at the time of interview is to a large degree a subjective process, but the general unspoken assumption is that anyone who passes the initial screening process by the directors is presumed of 'good character' (or at least, willing and able to abide by standards that would generally be considered to constitute this while on duty in the workplace) until proven otherwise.

If a newly hired employee began to show previously unsuspected signs of problematically aggressive or bullying behaviour to other members of staff, the directors would move fairly swiftly to terminate their employment.

3b. Does it have one for AI machines? If not, do you think it is likely to develop one?

There is again no explicit code of conduct for the treatment of AI machines at GWS Robotics, but the unwritten assumption is that such devices should not be abused. Whether the individual employee understands this simply in terms of the belonging of the devices to the employer, or further takes a view that it is generally wrong to abusively treat such devices, is perhaps a moot point, provided that respectful and non-destructive standards of behaviour are maintained.

It is possible that the company may develop an explicit code in the future. This would be more likely if it grew in size to the point where it became important to codify the otherwise merely generally understood reasonable expectations of employee conduct.

4. What is your job role?

Within GWS Robotics, I am officially a copywriter and digital marketer. This entails that I write text for the pages of the company website, optimise the website for visibility in search engines, and write articles about topics of general interest in the domain of robotics for the website.

In practice, I also participate in promotional opportunities by liaising with the press and with organisations who want to arrange for a visit by our robot, for example schools; operate the robot at expos and shows where it is interacting with the public, and contribute specific ideas to the core programming team for the development of applications, behaviours and lines of speech for use by the robot in particular settings.

5. Do you help to build artificially intelligent machines?

No. GWS Robotics does not construct robot hardware. We custom-program hardware produced by much larger corporations such as Softbank Robotics, the company that owns Pepper robot. The development of robot hardware requires a particular set of skills in mechanical engineering. This is not our collective interest, which lies much more in the software (programming) side. Others produce robots; we envision creative uses for them and program them accordingly.

6. Are computers smarter than us?

That depends on one's understanding of 'smart', but, even taking it for granted that the intended meaning of 'smart' here is the American sense of 'intelligent' and not the traditional British or Irish one of 'well-dressed', I would generally say 'no' in answer to this question.

The two areas of relevance in which computers excel and already win over humans are the power to process calculations and the exact, lossless storage and recall of memory.

Already in the 1980s, the former attribute (processing power) was being demonstrated effectively by chess computers and chess software that was difficult for players of ordinary club-level abilities to defeat. And by 1997, a chess computer had managed to defeat a reigning chess world champion in Garry Kasparov. Since 1997, computer processing power has increased many times, and with it the advantage of computers over humans in terms of raw mathematical processing power.

Similarly, the memory and quickly retrievable data storage capacities of computers have vastly increased since 1997, when a typical hard drive on a well-specified new PC would fit 2 Gb of data, compared with 2 Tb 20 years later, an increase of 1000 times in two decades alone.

Humans are no match for advanced computers in these attributes because computers are precision-built from solid materials continuously powered by an even stream of electricity, and are designed to detect, process and store nothing but digital binary code, whereas humans are organic life-forms made from cells that depend on a regular supply of a host of vital nutrients, have evolved to put their own needs for survival and companionship before mathematical operations, and are designed to detect, process and store analogue signals from the complex physical world. In short, humans are equipped to live and to experience their environments, computers merely to process. Computers are, after all, machines.

But our deficiencies in comparison to computers in the specific areas outlined above do not make us less intelligent than computers. The stem of the word 'intelligent' is the Latin verb intellegere, which means 'to understand'. Computers can process a lot of binary code, and quickly deliver informative appropriate outputs reflecting that processing when they have been programmed to deliver processing for a particular purpose. But they understand absolutely nothing, because they are not conscious entities, and have no brain, nervous system, feelings or soul.

Any outputs from computers that might appear to us to show intelligence are merely the product of how they were programmed by intelligent human programmers. And the same is true of robots. It doesn't really matter whether we dress them in desktop cases or in robotic bodies - they are still digital processors without consciousness. In the final analysis, they are programmable arrays of logic gates and nothing more.

Humans have the quality of true consciousness that gives them vastly superior intellectual potential to any machine. We are able to interpret our environment based on continuous experience and learning at very subtle levels, conscious and subconscious, and to understand from the predictably replicable patterns in the behaviour of the external world that it is real and that it interacts with us. We also understand that we have limited lifespan and fragile bodies and health, and can draw behavioural and moral lessons from this. Not all of us are able to solve complex equations that to a well-programmed computer would be easy, but that again is not a deficiency in true intelligence, which lies more in the wisdom of intelligent adaptation to reality in all its facets, personal and material. Some of us can even theorise and philosophise on open-ended questions of the nature, meaning or value of life and existence in ways that would be completely incomprehensible to a computer.

7. How do we know artificial intelligence from human (organic?) intelligence?

A fair test of this would require blindness on the part of the beholder as to whether he or she was interacting with a human or a computer. To achieve this blindness, the interaction would have to be mediated by digital or electronic means that prevented the obvious signatures of human behaviour such as the ebb and flow of a continuous human voice or the appearance of a real human face from giving the game away.

If you ask a series of questions to a hypothetical digital interface that may be responded to by either an unseen human or a computer at a distance, it should ordinarily be possible for you to distinguish the human from the computer after a while, as a result of the computer delivering obviously repetitive or stock answers.

However, it is worth remembering that artificial intelligence is designed to give the illusion of true intelligence and, if programmed by a thoughtful human programmer with a thorough repertoire of answers in response to all manner of possible questions, an artificially intelligent device accessed blind through a digital interface could deliver a fairly convincing illusion of being intelligent.

This is ultimately because the original programmer's intelligence is being experienced by the one receiving the answers from the artificially intelligent device. It may then take considerable probing to shatter the illusion by exposing unnatural patterns of responses.

Fortunately, in most situations where we interact with either people or A.I. machines, we are exposed to plenty of other cues by which to differentiate their nature. In social situations where interactions are conducted in situ rather than through electronic means of communication, for example, there are numerous additional signals by which people communicate, including movements, facial expression, patterns of eye contact, variations in tone and amplitude of voice, and energy or vibrations, that we may register at a subconscious level, and that allow us to understand a lot about the other person and what he or she is thinking or feeling on various levels.

Social robots are nowadays being programmed to read some of these cues and respond to them, but this is not an organic process, unlike the one that humans experience, so at best it can give a fairly crude set of data that feed into the interaction with the human onlooker.

8. Do you think we will always be able to tell the difference between the two kinds of intelligence?

As the self-learning capabilities built into artificially intelligent devices become ever more sophisticated, we can expect them to deliver ever more sophisticated illusions of intelligence that could trick onlookers blinded as to their true nature into imagining them to possess a form of consciousness. However, the subtleties of real human communication are very sophisticated, and the volatile sentimental and emotional nature of organic human beings as reflected in their attachments to each other and to pets and other life-forms would be extremely difficult for any programmed artificially intelligent device to pull off entirely persuasively.

Actors are trained in effect to lie, from a strictly literal point of view, but can do so in a persuasive way because they are humans playing the roles of other humans using the human form and while interacting in real time with those around them. Even then, we can tell the difference between people acting and being themselves most of the time.

Computers and robots don't have the resources by which to act. They simply process inputs and respond with outputs, exactly as they have been programmed to do by their human programmers.

9. Do you work with robot Pepper? What kind of intelligence and intelligence level does Pepper have?

Yes, I do. Pepper I would assess to be a stepping stone in the evolution of artificially intelligent social robots. Its level of artificial intelligence is moderate in absolute terms and a lot more limited than we can expect to be exhibited by state-of-the-art social robots in another thirty to fifty years from now, but enough to make for some entertaining experiences for those who seek to interact with it.

Pepper is able to use visual sensors and a microphone to draw information about its immediate environment, and is programmed to respond in a fairly natural-looking manner, for example by turning to face the source of the loudest human voice in its vicinity, or following the human standing closest to it within its field of vision with its eyes. It is programmed with voice recognition and language interpretation capabilities, but these are relatively rudimentary out of the box, and custom programming is needed to develop them. It is also programmed to detect some signs of basic emotions such as sadness and anger and to adjust its behavioural outputs accordingly.

People tend to find interacting with Pepper to be a lot of fun, but it is very obviously a robot, and no-one interacting with it could reasonably be expected to mistake it for a human. It is however possible for human operators observing Pepper's interactions with a human to remotely type in speech that directly and appropriately responds to the human and is spoken by Pepper. This kind of manual intervention can provide an entertaining illusion, much as a magic trick would, if the human interacting with the robot is not aware of the presence of the operator. It can be a useful standby at shows and exhibitions where the background noise is too great for Pepper to hear and respond to what is being said to it effectively. But it is not true artificial intelligence of course.

10. Should one refer to Pepper as 'he' or 'she'? Is Pepper male or female?

Overall, Pepper has somewhat androgynous features, with a head that looks more obviously robotic than possessed of a gender, a relatively flat upper body that might more often be assumed a hallmark of a male than a female, but a hip-to-waist area ratio that usually creates a more feminine impression.

The men in our office used to commonly refer to Pepper as 'he' and 'him', but the external consensus seems to be that, as one of our Twitter followers insisted, 'Pepper is a girl'.

Ultimately, Pepper is a machine, and therefore a dispassionate scientist would probably prefer 'it', a practice to which I am adhering for the purposes of this interview. But since the whole idea of social robotics is to program robots to interact with humans in a way that creates a pleasant social experience, and people are prone to divide up their social worlds into genders, it is understandable that most prefer to use either the male or the female pronouns, depending on their perceptions.

11. Can one observe Pepper or other robots you work with getting smarter / accumulating knowledge?

One can observe Pepper tracking its environment, and it can permanently learn the layout of the location where it is kept by moving around it and detecting obstacles, then committing a map of the environment to memory. However, its self-learning abilities from interactions with humans are relatively limited, and by and large to improve either the apparent intelligence of its behaviour or its knowledge base requires improvements in custom programming.

12. What characteristics does Pepper have? Does he have them or does he display them? How do you know the difference?

I think I covered many of Pepper's behavioural characteristics in outline under question 9. above.

I think it is reasonable to say that even a machine can have characteristics. A characteristic is merely a defining feature. You know the difference between a possessed characteristic and a displayed characteristic according to whether or not there are outwardly manifest signs of it. Some characteristics of a robot will be manifestly displayed through its behaviour, while others may be highly technical ones that are outwardly invisible to the general public or the end-user but known to the hardware and software developers that have worked on the device. I would contend that a displayed characteristic is still a characteristic, even if it is designed to convey an illusion of autonomous intelligence that is not really there.

It may be worth mentioning Pepper's mechanical characteristics at this juncture. Pepper contains many joints. It has fingers with multiple separately angled imitation finger bones, so it can curl up its hands and uncurl them again in quite a human-like manner. It can tilt its waist at different angles, and is especially good at moving its arms and neck. However, it does not have feet, and when it 'decides' to move, it simply speeds off on its wheeled base, either until it detects a risk of collision, or until it 'decides' to stop again for some other reason. Its motors allow it to move in four different directions.

13. Can Pepper display a social intelligence?

Yes, but only within limited parameters. It can for instance flash its eyes in different colours to represent emotions, and respond to the proximity of people in ways that appear reasonably natural, for example by avoiding hazardous collisions but accepting gentle contact by people who are not behaving aggressively. However, if you compared a robot like Pepper with a real, live pet like a dog or cat in comparable situations, the social intelligence of the real pet would be observed to be vastly superior to that of the robot.

14. Do you think we will ever live in a world where robots can do anything a human can do?

If by 'anything' is meant 'at least one thing', then we already got there in the earliest days of the development of robotics. But if by 'anything' is meant 'everything', then no, we will never live in such a world. There will always be aspects of human experience that depend on our nature as organic life-forms.

15. Do you think the Turing test is still a reliable way to determine the intelligence level of AI?

I referred to a hypothetical test akin to the traditional Turing test in my response to 7. above. I think that generically this kind of blind user experience test is an important kind of test for determining the subjectively perceived sophistication of artificial intelligence. But the devil is in the detail, and a great many tests of this character are likely to fail to differentiate as effectively as a human would in a natural situation.

If the Turing test requires a particular, pre-scripted set of questions devised by an assessor to be asked, then it is only as good or as useful as that set of questions, and should be relatively easy to 'game' by a programming team with the time and budget to devise answers to every conceivable common human question.

If, however, the blind user charged with the task of trying to determine which of the two devices being interacted with is operated by a live human and which is not is permitted to ask a different set of questions to each, and to build from one question to the next in an entirely natural way depending on the previous answers given, or to jump on a whim to a different kind of question altogether, at will, it should be more likely that the A. I. device will exhibit unnatural behaviour in its patterns of response than that the human operator will - provided that the human operator is not obtuse or unusually socially stilted in manners, which might tend to a false positive impression that he / she is in fact an A. I. device.

So overall, Turing-type tests are a generically useful methodology, but a huge amount of careful thought and planning needs to go into the detail of their design, execution and interpretation in order for the data they generate to be reliably meaningful in the ways that it is supposed to be. Much the same is arguably true of virtually any experiment in psychology.

L-R: former GWS developer Tom Bellew; Pepper Robot; GWS director David Graves
Pictured in August 2016

16. If a robot such as Pepper were destroyed, would that result in an emotional loss for you or any of the people that Pepper works with?

That would probably depend on the manner and spirit of the act of destruction. We actually had this happen once already in a way, as did all other registered owners of Pepper, about a year ago. Softbank Robotics announced a recall for a hardware upgrade of all Pepper units. In practice, this entailed the one we had being collected by a courier and returned to Softbank Robotics for recycling and disposal, while an entirely new unit was sent in its place just days after it was collected. So the Pepper we have now is not the same Pepper we began with. Physically, it's a completely different object. It just looks roughly the same, and has most of the same characteristics. It's certainly faster to respond and to move than the original Pepper was, so it's a clear upgrade, but it is not the same device.

I don't recall anyone in the office getting at all upset over the loss of the original Pepper and its replacement with a new one. It would be a bit like getting upset by a familiar computer or telephone giving up working and needing to be replaced.

People can get attached to electronic devices that they interact with a lot, just as children can get attached to their toys in which they invest imaginary personalities, or grown-ups can get attached to their furniture, houses, or objets d'art. But replacing one machine with another of the same basic design that looks and behaves in almost exactly the same way does not seem to upset people so much as the loss of a belonging felt to be unique (at least to their life experience).

People who work with robots have to be logical in their approach to them in order to get good results from them, and that same quality of logic probably tends to an unsentimental manner when faced with the replacement of one robot by another.

If, however, a robot such as our Pepper were destroyed by malice or violence, the reactions of our team would conceivably be quite different because of the spirit of the act of destruction being a malign one, whereas with the Pepper upgrade programme this clearly was not the case.

Ultimately, it is reasonable for people to feel emotional loss when they are abandoned by loved ones or when loved ones die, but love is best reserved for truly sentient beings such as humans and other animals, which benefit from and arguably deserve it.

Dispassionately viewed, attachment to robots, cuddly toys and other inanimate objects invested with personalities by their owners and keepers is purely a function of projection.

17. Do you believe people have good reason to fear AI machines going rogue?

Yes, to the degree that AI machines can be developed and programmed by irresponsibly negligent or criminally rogue humans.

In the absence of sufficient regulatory oversight, robots could be designed or programmed as killing machines. It is really of paramount importance that lawmakers legislate to prevent these scenarios from becoming commonplace in the future.

The related risk of robots being negligently allowed to turn rogue by being given too free a rein to learn and act on destructive impulses (albeit ones ultimately driven by their programming) is one of the reasons why I'm an outspoken opponent of the idea promoted by a working committee of the E.U. Parliament in 2016-17 that robots should be granted electronic personhood.

The establishment in law of any kind of legal get-out clause that could exonerate the makers and programmers of robots from responsibility for the damages they may cause to humans by shifting the responsibility to the robot itself on the pretext that it is an autonomous person would be a colossal mistake.

By requiring the manufacturers and programmers of robots to build in safeguards that prevent them from causing harm to others, and making these parties legally liable for any harm caused to a human by a robot they have worked on, lawmakers can play a valuable role in guiding the ethical development of AI far into the future.

Unfortunately, the temptation of some governments and terrorist groups around the world to develop sophisticated lethal autonomous weapons capable of using artificial intelligence to select and launch fire at targets is a danger that looms large across the future and, if allowed to prevail, will undoubtedly blight the wider public image of robotics, which in itself is an ethically neutral bank of technical knowledge that can equally be used for good or evil. It is incumbent on us to lobby politicians at all levels of government to help to ensure that robotics and A.I. are only used for good.

18. Do you believe it would be ethical for an AI machine to pose as a human?

No, if the intention was truly to deceive people into believing that the AI machine was human, that would be profoundly unethical, just as it is unethical for one human to pose as another human in order to deceive.

This does not, however, mean that it is unethical to develop robots with a physical likeness to humans, as has already been done to a remarkable degree by Hanson Robotics with its creations such as Sophia. Context is all-important. Robots like Sophia are extremely impressive exponents of state-of-the-art mechanical and material robotics design, and artificial intelligence. But they are used to entertain and not to deceive, and there is nothing wrong with entertaining in a good spirit.

19. Is it right to turn off forever, or otherwise destroy, an artificially intelligent machine when it can no longer function as it was designed to?

It is neither wrong nor necessarily the only option. It is not wrong because it is still a machine and not a life-form. We should be much more concerned about animals held in captivity for scientific experiments and product research being involuntarily killed, or 'euthanised', than we should about broken robots being dismantled and recycled. Such animals may have reached the point in their lives when they can no longer provide useful data to scientists, but that doesn't make it right to kill them - they should be set free or retired to a wildlife park that will take reasonable care of them.

It is not necessarily the only option because the machine could be reworked with new parts, just as old cars with worn-out parts can usually be got on the road again by the selective replacement of worn-out parts, as an alternative to being consigned to the scrap metal yard.

20. Do you think it is right to turn off forever or otherwise destroy an artificially intelligent machine when it has outlived its usefulness to its owner?

I think I covered this largely in my answer to question 1. above. While there is nothing particularly right about this, there is nothing inherently wrong with turning off an artificially intelligent machine either. What is more problematic is the potential waste of materials and the resources that went into producing them. If the machine is still useful, it would preferably be passed on to someone else who would gain value from using it. If not, then its parts should be recycled.

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Should we tax robots? Response to Robert Shiller article in The Guardian

Philip Graves — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 13:55:00 +0000

Response to Robert Shiller's call for the taxation of robots

Written by Philip Graves, GWS Robotics, March 31st, 2017

This article has been selectively edited by David Graves, Creative Director of GWS Robotics

In The Guardian, Wednesday 22^nd March, 2017, U.S. economist Robert Shiller argues for the taxation of robots on the grounds that they are a ‘labor-displacing innovation’ that will lead to job losses.

Acknowledging that ‘retraining programs for displaced workers’ may be essential public policy, Shiller sensibly goes on to invoke the human and community importance of maintaining paid work.

However, we tend to disagree with the proposition that the use of robots should be taxed in order to restrict job losses in particular market sectors.

In the fluid, internationally competitive globalised 21^st century economy, structural changes to the job market are driven by market forces, and attempting to intervene with those market forces to artificially stop job losses in a particular sector, while it may provide short-term personal income security and vocational continuity for the workers at risk of redundancy, is unfortunately a recipe for longer-term economic damage to the national economy that takes such measures.

Among the market forces at work in today’s globalised economy is the internationally competitive drive to produce products and services as efficiently as possible. The more efficient producers of the same products and services will tend to succeed in the international marketplace, while the less efficient ones will fail because of their need to charge higher prices to meet the higher costs of production, or if they cannot be profitable at the lower prices set by the competition.

For over 500 years, advances in automation, from printing presses replacing the laborious hand-written reproduction of manuscripts, through automated telephone exchanges replacing the previous manually operated switchboards, to continuously editable computerised databases replacing hand-typed documents, have continually driven up the efficiency of production in business.

The economic effects of increased efficiency of production are mostly positive ones. These include lower consumer prices for each product or service as a proportion of average income, thereby bringing more services and products within the reach of each individual. They also include reduced working hours to create the same output; and, where manual labour is concerned, a trend towards less harsh physical labour.

Robotisation is a relatively recent chapter in this long-standing trend of using machinery and technology to drive up the efficiencies of production and lower the costs of goods and services. But it is nonetheless comparable, and we think it will be similar in its economic effects to previous advances in automation.

Where automation leads to a reduced need for workers in a particular market sector, the money saved by industry on salaries will be retained in and ultimately cycled back within the economy as expenditure on other products or services. In economics parlance, this is called the conservation of a constant total value of economic resources per head of population, such as average spending power and available worker hours.

More money will be retained by consumers of the products and services whose production has been automated, as a result of reduced purchase costs for those products and services, leaving those consumers more money to spend on other products and services; or it will be retained by the owners or shareholders of the businesses producing them and recycled partly through greater government tax receipts from personal incomes and business profits, and partly through greater expenditure and investment by the beneficiaries of higher incomes and profits. Where the saved money ends up being redistributed within the economy, there is the potential for new jobs to be created, replacing those that have been lost.

Shiller also quotes Edmund S Phelps in according great personal importance to the ‘calling’ of the individual. Yet the notion that everyone should be able to choose where and how to work in response to personal vocation is economically unrealistic because the supply of willing labour for certain types of employment exceeds the demand for labour in these fields. In the fields of entertainment and creative arts, where the number of willing producers and performers of music, performing arts, fine art and literature exceeds the market capacity, many aspiring musicians, writers, artists and other performers cannot make a living from their calling. Those market forces are essentially similar to the market forces at work when jobs are lost in particular sectors and job opportunities created in others. In the free-market economy, the onus is on labour to adapt to the opportunities available, and not on industry to adapt to the desires of labour for jobs in particular areas whether or not there is money available to make those jobs viable. Demand dictates where labour opportunities are available.

Shiller’s desire to reduce income inequality is laudable. But selectively taxing robots, which are to a greater or lesser degree a part of the means of production in certain industrial sectors only, is not an equitable means to this end, and we doubt it would be an economically effective one.

It is not equitable because automation that increases the efficiency of production and reduces the need for labour to achieve a given level of production does not consist exclusively or even mainly in the use of robots. In fact, automation exists in degrees on a continuous spectrum from hand-operated weaving machines serving as aids to the efficiency of clothing producers, through to fully automated production line assemblies, with computerised data flows and telecommunications also serving to automate communications that would previously have required a great deal more labour. It would be impossible to meaningfully and reliably quantify the amount of labour saved by automation of all kinds; and selectively taxing only certain types of automation responding to narrowly defined parameters would be arbitrary and lead to economic injustice, with limits being set to the forms of automation that are being taxed based on emotion.

It is unlikely to be economically effective because it is very hard to conceive of the implementation of a global international consensus on the taxation of robots. Unlike environmental policy, for which there is a well-established framework of international co-operation and agreement, tax policy remains a matter for national or regional supranational governments. If robots are taxed only in the UK, or only in the EU, or only in the USA, for example, but not in South East Asia, the businesses operating in the territories that have taxed their use will be put at a disadvantage in the international marketplace, their prices undercut by those operating in countries that do not tax the use of robots. As a consequence, jobs in the industrial sectors where robots are in use will in any case be lost in the countries where robots have been taxed. Taxing the means of production could spell disaster for international competitiveness.

Another reason why it is unlikely to be economically effective in the countries where it is implemented is that it will be slowing down the economic development of those countries by artificially propping up the labour market in certain industrial sectors or companies that are no longer viable, at the expense of job creation in other areas, and at the expense of overall economic growth and prosperity.

There are tried and tested means to address economic inequality that do not involve the introduction of economic distortions and inequities such as those that would result from a selective tax on robots or other means of production. For example, the use of properly calibrated progressive personal income tax rates with a tax-free personal allowance; a zero-tolerance policy towards corporate tax evasion and offshore tax havens; fair national living wage regulations; and a social security net to protect those excluded from adequately remunerative employment by market forces. It is ultimately up to each country to decide where the right economic balance lies in all those areas and to legislate accordingly.

This decision-making process belongs to the domain of politics. But whatever decisions are taken should be applied fairly and impartially across the board. Singling out certain arbitrarily delimited means of production such as forms of automation meeting a particular definition of ‘robots’ for special penalties would be retrogressive, not progressive, from the standpoint of the desire to build a fairer society.

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Are robots going to steal all our jobs?

Philip Graves — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 14:01:45 +0000

Thoughts on whether robots will ‘take human jobs’

Written by Philip Graves, GWS Robotics, January 27th, 2017

The original text of this article has been selectively edited for ease of reading by David Graves, Creative Director of GWS Robotics.
It was further slightly edited for clarity by the original author on March 22nd, 2017.

There is something of a panic in some quarters about the risk of human jobs being taken by robots in the future.

So perhaps we should stop to consider what kinds of jobs may be at risk, and how economies have adapted previously to moves away from labour-intensive production processes.

In all areas of primary and secondary industry - from agriculture, mining, cable-laying and construction, to manufacturing, fabric-making and food processing – machinery for automated production and operations has been under continual development since the dawn of the industrial revolution in the 19^th century. Over the past two centuries, its capabilities and efficiencies have improved in leaps and bounds. The number of worker-hours required to achieve a given level of productivity has markedly declined, at the same time as the total scale of industrial production and operations per person has enormously increased.

In the twentieth century, operational efficiencies and automation improved faster than demand for production increased, so there was a progressive decline in the proportion of the British workforce that needed to be employed in primary and secondary industries in order to meet all the production demands. Allied to the increasing globalisation of the industrial economy and the lower costs of production in poorer countries, this led to significant shedding of jobs in industrial sectors in the United Kingdom. But the jobs lost from these industries have been replaced with new ones in other sectors, chiefly in the service economy.

A certain level of unemployment is an almost universal feature of the modern, capital-intensive post-industrial economy. But another twentieth century trend, and one that is entirely to be lauded and welcomed by society as a move in the direction of greater economic fairness between the sexes (though inequalities remain to this day), has been the movement of most adult women into the labour market, as compared with only a minority at the beginning of the century. The national census of 1911 records that women accounted for only 29% of the British workforce at that time, with 5.85 million women ‘occupied’ as compared with 14.3 million men^[1]. The rate of employment among married women in 1911 was just 10%.

The trend to fuller female employment has continued into the 21^st century. The Office for National Statistics records that in the summer of 2016, economic inactivity among British women aged 16-64 had reached a record low of 26.8%, compared with 44.5% when records began in early 1971. This reduction in female working-age unemployment over the past 45 years has more than counterbalanced the moderate increase in male working-age unemployment over the same period (it rose from from 4.9% to 16.5%). So in 2016, the overall proportion of British working-age adults in paid employment was marginally higher than it had been back in 1971 despite advances in automation and reduced demand for labour in traditional industrial sectors.

This history shows that when advances in automation take away jobs in some areas, the labour economy is adaptable enough to rebalance itself in the medium-to-long term. New economic sectors that demand personnel open up. The service, leisure, travel and entertainment economies are among the areas that have benefitted from increasingly automated industrial processes. In terms of gross domestic product per head, the economy has grown with automation. And in terms of jobs, it has remained stable in the national and longer-term view despite regional and sector-level declines.

As more and more robots are used in industry, we can expect a continuation of these pre-existing trends. Robots will of course directly replace some existing jobs, but they will also free those parts of the workforce up to work in other areas, though this process may be painful. Money saved by automation in industry should find its way back into the economy as spending and investment power in other sectors, allowing them to employ more people.

It is also likely that some futurologists have been promoting an exaggerated picture of just how many of the jobs undertaken by humans today can satisfactorily and fully be replaced by robots in the next fifty years. From a customer service perspective, for instance, robots will chiefly be creating added value by providing additional information and entertainment, just as home computers and Internet services do today. They will not by themselves satisfy the keenly-felt human demand for service with a smile from a congenial real person.

Robots will always be most useful doing the most boring, repetitive, mechanical and dangerous jobs. We believe that deploying robots in these areas will be of real human benefit, freeing a great many employees from drudgery and unpleasant working conditions. When the economy rebalances in due course, it is likely that new jobs will be the result.

Robots will require development, programming, servicing and monitoring, all of which jobs have to be done by people. So each robot deployed will not in fact be replacing a whole person’s job, even before the economic rebalancing that occurs after jobs are lost in any particular industrial sector.

On a personal and local community level, job cuts and factory closures can of course be a great shock and a tragedy for people where they occur. Such changes seem to be an inevitable part of a modern economy run on competitive free-market principles, and in this respect, increased automation may have a similar effect to competition from companies based abroad. Both central and local government social policy should, however, be ready to step in to make sure that the needs of individuals and communities affected by loss of employment in particular industrial sectors are met. Investment in retraining schemes for individuals and economic regeneration programmes for urban areas that have suffered from the loss of major employers are among the tools that should be used to facilitate the process of adaptation to sectoral job losses as painlessly as possible.

How does the economy rebalance itself after sectoral job losses?

How do we demonstrate that jobs lost to machinery are eventually replaced with new ones in other sectors, mainly the service economy? Economies naturally self-balance in that way over time because of there being certain economic constants such as the total amount of spending power and labour time per head in the economy as a whole. These constants dictate that economic savings in one area translate into opportunities for expenditure in another.

So, if the advent of automated processes leads to 50% of jobs being lost in a particular industry, either the prices of that industry’s output will fall in line with the savings on labour costs, as a result of which the people who habitually buy that output will find they have more money left to make purchases of other things (e.g. services), or, if the prices stay the same, the money saved on production will, as profit, find its way back into the economy sooner or later in the form of expenditure by the owners, directors and shareholders, and (provided that fiscal policy is properly configured by central government) as tax. This saved money is then available sooner or later for the purchase of other products and services. What dictates the kinds of products and services that are bought when money is saved on the labour costs of industrial production will vary hugely according to the tastes and habits of the times, but the sectors where there is demand will be the ones that grow and create new jobs.

There is generally no simple and direct migration of jobs from one particular industry into another. But historically we have seen the services sector collectively being the main beneficiary of the decline of employment in traditional primary and secondary industries.

See for example the publication in June 2013 by the Office for National Statistics of the document ‘170 Years of Industrial Change across England and Wales’.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/170-years-of-industry/170-years-of-industrial-changeponent.html

This states that in 1841, 36% of jobs were in manufacturing, 22% were in agriculture and fishing, and 33% in services, whereas by 2011, only 9% of jobs were in manufacturing, 1% were in agriculture and fishing, and 81% were in services.

In short, as food and industrial production becomes more efficient in terms of labour, there is more money to go round for expenditure on services, and as a result, demand for employment in service industries increases.

[1] Hogg, Sallie Heller ‘The Employment of Women in Great Britain 1891-1921’ (1967)

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Electronic Person Status for Robots – Response to the EU Proposal

Philip Graves — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 14:05:00 +0000

A Response to the EU Proposal on Electronic Person Status for Robots, January 2017

On 12th January 2017, the European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs moved by 17 votes to 2 to approve a draft report published in May 2016 by Luxembourg MEP Mady Delvaux with recommendations to the Commission on Civil Law Rules on Robotics.

The report called for the establishment of electronic person status for robots and implicitly for the incorporation of Asimov's Laws into European Law governing robotics. It has now been put forward for a forthcoming vote by the whole of the European Parliament.

On 13th January, GWS Robotics were approached by a journalist for comment.

That same afternoon, our copywriter Philip Graves and programmer Tom Bellew held an intensive discussion on the points raised, and together drafted responses to the journalist's questions.

The following day, the text of our responses was edited and selectively amended by our creative director, David Graves.

Here we publish the full text of David's edit of our responses.

1. Do robots need legal status, such as 'electronic persons'?

In our opinion they do not, for several reasons.

The first is that they are essentially digital processors in a non-living shell, not conscious beings or animals able to experience physical pain or emotional distress. This means that they cannot possess rights equivalent to animal rights or human rights.

The second is that the granting of ‘electronic person’ status to robots carries serious ethical risks, diminishing the responsibilities of the humans who program and operate them.

In my view robots should remain the responsibility of those who have programmed and operate them. This is a necessary ethical safeguard to deter and prevent irresponsible programming or operation that might allow actions harmful to human or other sentient life to be taken by robots.

Because there are multiple levels of program running in typical modern robots, starting with the programming with which they are pre-configured by the original developers, and continuing with custom programming added in by secondary programmers and / or end-users, there are discussions to be had surrounding the division of legal responsibility for robots’ behaviours and actions from the standpoint of the division of responsibility between the original developer, the programmers and the operator.

There is a case for saying that the original developer should be responsible for creating a framework whereby the potential for further custom programming to cause robots to behave harmfully is limited.

The secondary responsibility will be with the programmer who customises what the robot does, in case he or she causes the robot to do something harmful. The actions of the operator are also important. In future robots may be ‘trained’ to perform certain tasks and a trainer might be responsible for the results of bad training.

2. Is a 'kill switch' necessary? Could the likes of Pepper be a threat?

A ‘kill switch’ is a rather sensationalist way of describing an ‘off switch’. Since robots are machines, just like vacuum cleaners, industrial machinery and cars, there must be a way to switch them off quickly whether in an emergency or in the course of normal use.

We don’t need to scare people into thinking that motor cars need a ‘kill switch’ to prevent them from causing death on the roads, and talk of a ‘kill switch’ for the current generation of robots is rather over the top.

If we were talking about military autonomous robots, and robots designed to physically coerce, disable or kill, then this would become more relevant.

Pepper and other social robots are no more of a threat than any other machine with limited mobility, limited autonomy and intelligence, and limited physical ability to cause harm. The average dog would probably be more dangerous.

Machines will only be as dangerous as they are designed to be in the first place. The responsibility for keeping them safe will be in the hands of the designers, programmers and operators.

3. The report said AI could surpass human intellect in a few decades? What implications does this have?

In our view, in terms of raw processing power, microchips have already surpassed human abilities. We saw the chess computer Deep Blue defeat grandmaster Garry Kasparov twenty years ago in 1997. That, however, is a reflection on the sophisticated development of artificial intelligence within narrowly defined structured contexts such as a game of chess, which has a mathematically limited range of possibilities for each move. Chess computers make use of probability calculations to determine the moves with the greatest chance of leading to an ultimate victory. This can be programmed using logic alone.

Human intelligence is more multi-faceted, going beyond logic, and is applied to very much more open-ended contexts than games of chess or other conventional applications for artificial intelligence.

While it seems likely that artificial intelligence programming will become ever more sophisticated as ways are found to artificially replicate brain structures, and microchip processing power will continue to increase, there is a case for thinking that artificial intelligence can only ever be as good as the intelligence that goes into its design.

If an artificially intelligent machine of the future (such as a robot) is programmed in such a way that it acquires improved judgement from experiences held in memory, it will be behaving much as conscious animals do when it comes to learning behaviour.

However, human intelligence is based on an open-ended consciousness not only of a particular situation but also on its context within everything else that is known or understood to be happening and in the life experience of the individual as well as their physical needs and drives. Other than the need for a power supply and the drives that it is programmed to have, it is hard to see how drives would develop that might cause a robot to behave in ways that would endanger people.

Other features of human consciousness such as emotions and responses to biological hormones further vary our experience and our drives from that of any artificial intelligence currently in production or likely to be produced in the forseeable future.

While artificial intelligence programmers will attempt to replicate more and more features of human consciousness in their designs over time, the question is how useful or effective that will actually be.

Will a conscious, moody, disobedient robot be any use to mankind? If as seems likely it is not, then presumably companies will strive to create AI that, while it can cope with and ‘understand’ our moods and needs, is not conscious and does not have moods, needs and drives of its own, as that would reduce its usefulness to us.

At the same time, as the sophistication of artificial intelligence development continues to increase, the ethical and technological requirements for keeping robots from acting in ways injurious to other life-forms will become increasingly important. It may be sensible to draft legislation that sets out the responsibilities of developers and programmers of robots and other artificial intelligence to help address this.

4. Will the 'rules' suggested by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, for how robots should act if and when they become self-aware, be applicable?

These rules state:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
A robot must obey the orders given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws

We agree partially with Asimov’s first rule, and more particularly with the part relating to robots not being allowed or able to injure human beings.

The provision that through inaction a robot may not allow a human being to come to harm is more controversial, however, and would be more difficult to codify or justify from a legal standpoint. There are many situations in which humans in the vicinity of robots may come to harm that have nothing to do with the robots. Are robots going to be sophisticated enough to intervene to protect humans in their vicinity from all manner of threats? What if they misperceive the aggressor and the victim?

It may be necessary to restrict Asimov’s provision to instances in which the threat of harm is directly caused by the robot itself. Otherwise a robot might try to protect a criminal from a policeman trying to apprehend that criminal, which would seem to be prohibited by the first rule when there is the possibility of harm to the criminal.

Asimov’s second rule should in my view be subject to careful definition and interpretation. There should not necessarily be a responsibility for robots to obey any human who issues instruction to them. They could in the future be programmed to recognise who is giving them instructions, and only obey authorised personnel, and also to recognise which instructions would be counter-productive to known goals, tasks or guidelines, and to raise objections. But they would need to be programmed to respond in this more sophisticated way.

While I agree that robots should not generally be allowed to obey orders that cause harm to human beings, there are many contexts in which it would be sensible for them not to respond to instructions from anyone, and times when it would be sensible to refuse orders from human operators.

Asimov’s third rule is in our view unjustified by ethical considerations. Since robots do not possess true consciousness or the ability to feel pain and distress of a living creature, there should not be any cause to confer to them the right to life and self-preservation in the manner that is legally conferred to human beings in the modern world. It seems to us that this rule reflects a rather romantic view Asimov was taking of robots as similar to living beings.

5. Finally, what do you think of calls for the creation of a European agency for robotics and artificial intelligence that can provide technical, ethical and regulatory expertise?

This may ultimately be a matter of politics rather than ethics, depending on where you stand on supranational regulation and European bodies and laws against the demand for national independence.

International cooperation on scientific research is well-established and very important to progress. Law and technology can be uncomfortable bedfellows, with the law being used as a blunt instrument by vested interests to prevent or impede technological progress, and the legal system can struggle to keep up with changes in technology.

However an agency like this would help to set out parameters and best practice for AI developers and programmers worldwide, so I think it would be valuable.

The post Electronic Person Status for Robots – Response to the EU Proposal appeared first on GWS Robotics.

Virtual Reality and Amazon Echo at Samsung event Inspire Bristol

Philip Graves — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 14:18:00 +0000

Samsung presents Virtual Reality Developments in Bristol

Report by David Graves and Philip Graves, GWS Robotics

Samsung hosted an event entitled 'Inspire:Bristol 16' at the Bristol Science Centre in Anchor Road on November 21st, 2016.

The first show of its kind put on by the South Korean multinational conglomerate anywhere in the UK, it was billed as an evening of ‘Ideas and innovation for small business’. We went along to check it out.

While one aim of the evening for Samsung was clearly to raise awareness of some of Samsung’s product ranges for business, the scope of the evening was much wider than this, and should boost Samsung’s visibility locally as well as promoting good public relations.

Virtual Reality Developments

A notable speaker at the event was Ian Betteridge, the Editorial Director at Alphr.com, an online tech-focused magazine launched by Dennis Publishing in May 2015. Ian’s speech, entitled ‘The Future of Technology for Business’, was concerned with changes in technology that are set to transform business, including training and retail, notably:

VR (virtual reality);
Voice recognition technology and Artificial Intelligence.

Ian said that these technologies would change everything in business over the next five years, and that it was very important for forward-thinking businesses to start using these now. His examples of real-world applications under development included:

3D walkthroughs of upmarket properties offered at Sothebys International Realty, an estate agent that specialises in exclusive properties;
A 3D view of the interior of a car (aimed at dealers who cannot fit every model into their showrooms);
A virtual reality simulation of a car test drive;
An advertisement produced by a toiletries company that used VR;
A virtual view from a front row seat at a fashion show (aimed at luxury fashion retail stores like Harvey Nichols of London);
Training which is more immersive and emotionally engaging, and consequently much harder to forget (a current example of this would be the use of VR glasses by the army for combat training).

Ian also showed a graph predicting that the market penetration of VR devices (especially glasses) would hit around 80% within the next five years. While a part of this figure is put down to uses associated with games consoles, it also projects increased usage in connection with mobile phones.

Our own view is that the main application of VR glasses is actually in games consoles, and that for business / public use, glasses which will offer a less immersive experience may work better – people won’t feel strange wearing them, or seem cut off from those around them”.

Google Glass, a product that was marketed for just eight months before being pulled in January 2015, arguably suffered in the marketplace from making people look a bit strange when they wore it.

Amazon Echo

Betteridge also talked about the Amazon Echo (a recently launched interactive AI device that uses voice recognition and virtual speech) and the conversations that it is possible to have with it. He envisaged future directions for the development of this technology in the line of marketing, imagining for example:

A sales-related conversation in which someone asks the Echo for recommendations for a television set and it replies: ‘Based on your normal price range and the ones your friends have bought, as well as reviews, we recommend the XYZ.’ (Ian pointed out that the Echo can access all this data because Amazon already has all that data about its customers.)
A delivery-related conversation in which the Echo says: ‘Based on your calendar, I have arranged delivery for a Wednesday when you should be at home.’

While the Echo cannot yet hold conversations of this level of sophistication, it does have the underlying data that it would need to do this in the future.

A key problem in the development of AI for the Echo that Ian reflected on is that presently each conversational interaction is largely discrete, with the responses given by the Echo reflecting the question asked immediately prior in isolation, rather than taking into consideration previous remarks in the same conversation. Real conversations typically consist of a chain in which every component remark develops and builds off all those before it and not just the most recent one.

Hi-tech payment tools

Another interesting speaker at Samsung’s event was Björn Lindberg, Senior Vice President at iZettle, a payment tools development company based in Stockholm. Lindberg’s talk was entitled ‘The Evolution of Smart Payments’

In the course of his speech, Björn discussed the wide range of services his company is offering, and the challenges involved in becoming a ‘multi-product’ company and managing those in different geographic locations. He also showed off their main products, and a small TV advert aimed at smaller businesses who want to take card payments.

Goal motivation

A star attraction at the event was British rower Helen Glover MBE, the reigning two-time Olympic gold medallist and former world No. 1 (now ranked at No. 2). Helen gave a motivating talk about dedication to personal goals, relating how she and her rowing partner and coach had achieved two golds despite only starting to row four years before the London Olympics.

We hope that this will herald the start of a series of interesting events in Bristol.

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