During our discussion of the reading about cochlear implant, the word Deaf culture came up and I wanted to more about it. So what is Deaf culture? They are a group of Deaf (capital D) people who use their own language (in America it’s ASL-American sign language) which turned out to be a language that’s complex and unique and it’s not just English translated into signs. The Deaf community refuse using the word “Disabled” to describe themselves because they believe that it implies that they’re “less” than hearing people which isn’t true. They actually believe that their communication is more deep and meaningful since they don’t rely on hearing. I don’t fully understand the idea of meaningful communication but I think it has something to do with the fact that it’s because they’re interacting with someone like them who understands what they’re experiencing. Even if they’re signing to a hearing person, I think that the effort done itself creates that “meaningful” communication. A clear distinction must be set between deaf and Deaf. Deaf are the ones who are proud of being deaf and don’t want to be “fixed”, they believe they’ve been created like this for a reason and that they’re unique because there’s more to a person that just what they can hear. The Deaf community disagree on the idea of cochlear implants. Some believe that if you’d like being able to hear then it’s your choice and you should get an implant. Others however, believe that a child who’s born deaf or became deaf MUST learn ASL as it’s a basic human right and that he must accept who he is and not try to change his identity. Those people are probably the ones who enroll their children in residential schools where they have a sense of belonging. It’s been proven that Deaf children in residential schools showed enhanced social skills, leadership skills and and self-worth compared to deaf children in mainstream schools who are usually singled out and have no room for development because they don’t feel the same sense of belonging. In a way, Deaf culture is just like any other culture which consists of language, values, traditions, norms and identity. The individuals belonging to that culture consider themselves unique and are proud of who they are.
 “Deaf culture is lived on a daily basis – like breathing”

https://deafculturecentre.ca/what-is-deaf-culture/

https://www.healthyhearing.com/report/52285-The-importance-of-deaf-culture

Call of duty is one of the most successful first person shooters in the market today. Activision, the company behind the development of the game, releases a game every year and sells millions of copies annually. In 2014 and 2015, they released Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Black Ops 3, there was a radical change in the gameplay. The player was no longer a normal soldier with a gun. They changed it so that the player is either an augmented cyborg or a robot, and the player has some super human abilities, such as super strength and high jump. However, these two installments were considered two of the worst games in the series, which prompted Activision to release Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 in the following year, where the setting is WW2 and the players are technologically limited. This installment has achieved better sales than the former.

The reduction in sales was attributed to the unrealistic gameplay which did not appeal to the target audience. i.e. teenagers. This implies that teenagers do not identify with futuristic warfare (or more accurately identify more with conventional warfare) and find greater pleasure in conventional warfare. One possible reason for teenagers not identifying with cyborgs is fear. Fear from a future where cyborgs eliminate humans (part of the campaign plot) and computers taking over the world.

Another possible reason is that teenagers do not understand the idea of a cyborg and therefore do not identify with it.

Ever since our discussions about machines replacing humans in the workplace, i kept tracking most of the news sent on my email every morning about the new inventions and how do they are implemented in our lives. Two days ago i read this article that has the title “The Robots’ Latest Move”, honestly this was such any eye catching title; so after reading the first line of the article i found that Amazon started practically replacing order packers with machines as they are more efficient and to speed up delivery times. According to Reuters such job in particular employs about 2500 workers, so what about their future after such decision? are they financially secured to bare such inhumane decision? There are many aspects one could look at, however, the most important one is that all the plans and assumptions we were tackling in class are coming to reality and they are unstoppable. As we can see big companies care only about maximizing their profits and ensure their efficiency regardless of the consequences on labor. Based on such, i think that caring so much about reducing costs and maximizing profits could actually devastate our sentimental characteristics such as caring about others’ future. Moreover, i would consider that excelling in the robotic technology is a double edged weapon regarding the welfare of our global economy. Although its cheaper method to produce and much more faster, all this could collapse at any moment as any country regardless its size won’t bare a tremendous increase in its unemployment rate; and it could force this over developing technology to come to an end exactly as the Concorde plane coming to end although it was faster and it saved a lot of the time for many passengers, however, for the well being of the entire population it had to stop one day. i think that if robotic technology exceeded a specific limit it would face the same unfortunate ending as Concorde plane.

It is becoming widely accepted that technology is able to replace most of what humans can do now. Robots are replacing manual labor, AI is replacing data analytics, and driving your cars for you. However, it was usually thought that the capabilities of AI would be limited to the purpose it was programmed for by its designer. That is no longer the case, modern AI is now built using what is called deep learning; where a large neural network for the AI is trained by data supplied to it. The AI then takes the data and learns from it and modifies itself, it keeps exploring possibilities on its own and learning new things about what works and what doesn’t, similar to how a little child learns by experiencing the world around him. It was just a matter of time until an AI breaks loose and discovers something new, something that it wasn’t built to perform.

Facebook started an initiative of adding chatbots to it messenger to help pages automate their responses to the users. In an attempt by them to improve their chatbot’s negotiation skills, Facebook’s AI department pitted its 2 bots “Bob” & “Alice” into a bargaining challenge; where each bot would negotiate over a trade switching items such as balls, hats, books, etc. Bob and Alice started negotiating normally trying to improve their negotiating skills but after some time their chats started to take a left turn. Their chats started developing linguistic mistakes where it seemed as if a glitch has occurred, later on it turned into incomprehensive gibberish to the supervisors, yet Bob and Alice could understand each other and were still conducting trades. It turns out that Bob and Alice have developed their own language which can only be understood by them. What exactly are they saying and what are they communicating about remains completely unknown of us, humans, their creators. Which raises many question marks about the hidden strength embedded within AIs, or rather the hidden dangers. How can we trust technology anymore when it has actually happened that it surpassed us and turned into something that we can no longer understand nor control? Facebook’s researchers were intimidated by the incidence and decided to shutdown the project and put an end to Bob & Alice.

However, I believe that we should not be intimidated by such incidents, there remains a great power to be uncovered in the field of AI, one that can solve a lot of the world’s problems that are unsolvable otherwise; for example, it can develop better optimization ways for logistics which costs business millions of dollars. But with great power comes great responsibility, as such we should be proceeding with caution taking all possible measures such as proper testing in a controlled environment and careful developing with safety nets in case anything goes wrong.

References

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/openai-builds-bots-learn-speak-language/

https://www.cnet.com/news/what-happens-when-ai-bots-invent-their-own-language/

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatbot-new-language-research-openai-google-a7869706.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-chat-bots-created-their-own-language-2017-6

The series call “Love, Death & Robots” is an anthology series that explores alternative possibilities in the future. Episode two, “Three Robots”, takes place in a post-apocalyptic city on earth, where all humans are dead. Three robots are exploring it and they are supposedly on vacation. The most interesting thing about the episode was the robots’ views on humans, and how stupid they thought they were. They saw many things that humans did as anticlimactic and just plain dumb. For example, they thought that human digestion is illogical and that there is no need for it, because they think the only source of power should be a fusion battery. They saw that human digestion took too much work and unnecessary. They were even surprised that humans did not have a code, which is very interesting because even though the humans are their creators, the robots thought very less of them and considered themselves superior to them. Later on the episode we find out that the robots’ ancestors, as one of them came from an xbox, the other from a baby monitor, and the third from a metronome. They then say how the humans got extinct by stating that humans thought they were the pinnacle of creation and slowly destroyed their environment till they all died. The scary thing about the episode is that it is believable and that it could actually be the future of the human race, because humans could be the ones that destroy themselves in the end

One of the readings that stopped me and made me think more about the dignity of humanity was the article “HUMAN RIGHTS VS. ROBOT RIGHTS: Forecasts from Japan”. Simply this article displays how automata is overtaking basic human rights in our today’s modern world, and that governments and institutions started issuing protective laws to ensure the safety of these robots. Taking the Japanese case for instance, the government accepted giving the citizenship for a robot ,however, foreigners who spent most of their lives working and building up an efficient Japanese economy were not granted this privilege and they are not allowed to have it by “law”. Such case draws anyone’s attention and makes us look thoroughly about the situation we are placed in, are our rights really coming to an end? Are we over developing automata to the extent that we overlooked the future of humanity? All these questions need to be answered before a drastic wake up call occurs.

I think that if we kept excelling in robotic technology with such pace neglecting the consequences, one day human beings will categorize such actions as discrimination between humans and robots and this will structure our society in a new unusual way, and since robotic costs are considered to be much less and more efficient than humans in many aspects especially from an economic perspective, our rights will continue to diminish over time until robots will be more superior than us.

Finally, since humans are the source of emotions, robotic creators should take that into consideration and draw this virtual line between the importance of humans and the importance of robots before our species takes a unified stand against violating their rights and overlooking their effort in building a prosperous life in many countries.

Humans usually view robots are something that is less than them, but that is not the case as they are extremely similar to the point that they may be the same. Humans think that what defines them is their “superior” logical reasoning and how they have free will, but that is not the case. Humans and robots are almost identical in terms of thinking, they both have logical reasoning based on their experiences and their biological features. The only difference is that the logic humans use is way more complex than a robot’s, but robots are becoming more and more complex day by day, getting closer to being like humans. The reason why the human mind is so complex is because it had thousands of years of evolution for it to be so advanced, so it is only a matter of time for the robot’s mind to be as complex as a human’s because the humans are doing evolution’s work by making advancements on robots. The robots biological features are for example their intelligence and the exterior appearance that the humans give them, and these affect their experiences. Same goes for humans, all their decisions are based on their genetics (intelligence and appearance) and what they went through (experiences), just like the robots. So this reaches the conclusion that humans and robots are basically the same at their core, only that humans are currently more complex.

After discussing the videos we watched in class regarding the creation of sex robots and how they are planning to replace women in brothels by literally sex automata; i started wandering about the future of our natural intimate relationships such as making love with a human being who shares all needed emotions we are born with. First of all, by focusing on looking for robotic spouses this could be a bit creepy, however, this is the upcoming plan for many creator companies. So i think that men looking for automata to share their Psychological and physiological needs with, are not really into a complete commitment like in any relationships; they just want to treat these supposedly “partners” like slaves who obey their orders and fulfill their unlimited wants without any objections. The other possible scenario would be that men usually want to share their fantasies with an exceptional women that resembles perfection especially their physical appearance, they want to “own” the perfect model in everything without any defects; i believe that humanity is used to such demands and this goes back for many centuries, for instance, in the greek mythology Pygmalion’s artifacts were described as idealized women, more perfect than any real female.

There are any concepts that rise from such behavior, such as domination for instance. Men usually have the tendency to be dominant in their relationships and this might trigger countless number of problems with their partners which drives gives them the opportunity of resorting to having a robot that would just say want they want to hear to feel this inner satisfaction. Unfortunately, the concept of gender plays here a great role as all companies are working on producing mainly female sex robots and they display them in their factories in a dehumanizing image as if they are products that are shaped to meet the market needs. Based on such i think that women one day will call for male sex robots for the exact same reasons men desired, and this will be the beginning of the end of our human species as the human factor and and emotions will be stripped away from our interrelations.

Roman and Eugenia were two software engineers from Russia who came to USA. Roman was extremely popular and had a large social circle and was loved by many people, but unfortunately he died in a car crash. Many of his friends wanted immortalize his memory so some created a web archive and others wrote a book about his life.

However Eugenia had a different idea on how to keep his memory alive. She decided to finish a project they were working on. A program that you can input your text messages to and it learns your style of texting and your interests so you can then chat with it. When Eugenia showed the app to their friends, they were astonished by the applications accuracy in mimicking Roman. But some people thought that this was an insult to Roman’s memory and they refused to use the app. However, for some people (including Roman’s mom) the app was therapeutic as it allowed people (among other reasons) who regretted not spending enough time Roman to say their final good byes.

Eugenia released the app for public use. It’s called “Replika”.
https://replika.ai/

Parallel could be drawn from how people reacted to the app and how people would react to robots being integrated in the society. Perhaps those against the robots would be a minority like those against the application. Nevertheless, we could safely assume that no matter the public consensus on robots, people who want to create robots companions will find a way even if they were not properly funded.

Edit: Link for the full story:
https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot

Ex-Machina is a sci-fi movie produced in 2014 that revolves around the idea of human and robot interaction and whether we can produce humanoid robots that are identical to humans in every way. The main characters in the movie are Caleb, a programmer who works for a company run by Nathan who is interested in building humanoids and Ava, the most advanced humanoid that Nathan built. Caleb wins a company contest and gets invited to Nathan private retreat in a remote place where he can study Ava carefully. Nathan asks Caleb to interact with Ava daily to find out whether he could mistake her for a human being as she had already passed a simple Turing test but he still needs to know whether she has a conscious. Ava is built in the form of seductive female who has a regular human face. Caleb starts to interact with Ava daily and begins to feel as if she is a regular human being and he falls in love with her. Caleb starts to spend more time with Ava and she shuts off the power so that she and Caleb could talk without Nathan listening.She starts warning him about Nathan’s actual intentions and that he actually abuses robots and that his mission isn’t what it appears to be. Ava asks Caleb to hack into Nathan’s computer and let her out of her cell so Caleb gets Nathan drunk and does so. Ava escapes, kills Nathan and abandons Caleb on the island.

The movie addresses several points which we’ve discussed in class. Mainly using automata for deception and the whole idea of gendering robots for the same purpose. It turned out that Nathan specifically created Ava’s appearance to attract Caleb. He used Caleb’s porn history to construct Ava’s appearance based on his favorite porn star. This is what mainly attracted Caleb to Ava at first. Nathan could’ve used this to affect Caleb’s decision on judging Ava’s AI which is a sort of manipulation. It later turns out that Nathan already knew Ava’s capabilities and that she was already conscious and his actual aim was to find out whether she could trick and manipulate Caleb to help escape. She did so by making Caleb think she actually loved him which wasn’t true. We’ve read about the Robotic doll which tricked an Asian artist and seduced him just for its creator’s amusement. This seems to be the same case here after all that time, we still use automata for manipulation. We can also relate to Laodamia who fell in love with a wax statue resembling her dead husband. This is similar to Caleb falling in love with Ava who was not a human being. The fact that Ava killed Nathan is also worrying since it warns us about what our creations could do to us in the future.