The comedian and television auteur Louis CK once observed that he didn’t let his kids onto social media, because social media lacks the immediate feedback that personal interactions provide. A kid that hurts another’s feelings face to face can instantly see that hurt and learn from it. A kid that does so on social media may not see it for a while, or may never see it. Thus, the socializing aspects of personal interaction are lost.
A recent article discussing the social implications of self-driving cars offers a parallel message of lost “socializing” and a caution for the future. The article, Humans Will Bully Mild-Mannered Autonomous Cars, discusses how the deference to safety that will, of necessity, be wired into autonomous vehicles’ behavior will be ripe for exploitation by humans, on foot, behind the wheel of their cars, and even on bicycles.
If you know that a car will automatically stop should you step in front of it, even if you’re jaywalking or crossing against the light, and you know that there isn’t a human driver who (a) might be certain to see you and stop and (b) will almost certainly lean on his horn, flip you the bird, and/or roll down his window to justifiably call you an asshole, aren’t you more likely to do so? Especially if you’re late or in a hurry or standing in the rain? And, once you’ve done that a few times with success, aren’t you slightly more likely to do so even when you don’t have exigent circumstances?
People behave politely towards others because they’ve been socialized to do so, because bad behavior is often met with some sort of negative feedback. Left to their own devices, with little risk of push-back or public admonishment, people are more likely to be less considerate. A political friend recently pointed out a classic example of people stretching the limits of acceptable social behavior: waiting to board an airplane. While everyone has an assigned seat, overhead storage space is often first-come-first-serve. Airlines seek to manage the entry of passengers onto an airplane, but people seek to circumvent that management as much as possible if they fear missing out on overhead bin space.
Imagine if the gatekeepers of our civilized behavior are machines, rather than fellow humans. We are already less interactive with each other on a personal level than we used to be. We have smart phones to rescue us from talking to each other, we can do almost all our shopping on line, we can order food from restaurants and fast food joints with smartphone apps or at touch-screen kiosks, we can text each other rather than actually speak to one another, and soon we can cross the street against the light without fear of injury OR pissing off drivers.
Science fiction is full of cautionary tales about robots turning against humans. Isaac Asimov saw the down-side possibilities decades ago, and wrote his Three Laws of Robotics to protect us. The Terminator movies are about Skynet, a computer program meant to protect us from war, turning against us. The Matrix movies are also about machines turning on humans. Countless other movies and television shows feature bad or rogue robots or malevolent artificial intelligence: HAL in 2001 turned on his astronauts. Westworld, both the original movie and the HBO remake, is about robots going rogue. Alien, Ex Machina, Robocop, Blade Runner, Dark Star’s Bomb No. 20, W.O.P.R., The Borg, the list goes on. Heck, there’s even a Wikipedia page about AI takeover.
But, as is so often the case, visionaries miss things. Rather than robotics and artificial intelligence technology producing sociopathic machines, it may very well be us that are turned into into sociopaths by technological advance.
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We have met the enemy and he is us.