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Google Executive Addresses Horrifying Reaction To Uncanny AI Tech (bloomberg.com)
The most talked-about product from Google's developer conference earlier this week -- Duplex -- has drawn concerns from many. At the conference Google previewed Duplex, an experimental service that lets its voice-based digital assistant make phone calls and write emails. In a demonstration on stage, the Google Assistant spoke with a hair salon receptionist, mimicking the "ums" and "hmms" pauses of human speech. In another demo, it chatted with a restaurant employee to book a table. But outside Google's circles, people are worried; and Google appears to be aware of the concerns. From a report: "Horrifying," Zeynep Tufekci, a professor and frequent tech company critic, wrote on Twitter about Duplex. "Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing." As in previous years, the company unveiled a feature before it was ready. Google is still debating how to unleash it, and how human to make the technology, several employees said during the conference. That debate touches on a far bigger dilemma for Google: As the company races to build uncanny, human-like intelligence, it is wary of any missteps that cause people to lose trust in using its services.
Scott Huffman, an executive on Google's Assistant team, said the response to Duplex was mixed. Some people were blown away by the technical demos, while others were concerned about the implications. Huffman said he understands the concerns. Although he doesn't endorse one proposed solution to the creepy factor: Giving it an obviously robotic voice when it calls. "People will probably hang up," he said.
[...] Another Google employee working on the assistant seemed to disagree. "We don't want to pretend to be a human," designer Ryan Germick said when discussing the digital assistant at a developer session earlier on Wednesday. Germick did agree, however, that Google's aim was to make the assistant human enough to keep users engaged. The unspoken goal: Keep users asking questions and sharing information with the company -- which can use that to collect more data to improve its answers and services.
Scott Huffman, an executive on Google's Assistant team, said the response to Duplex was mixed. Some people were blown away by the technical demos, while others were concerned about the implications. Huffman said he understands the concerns. Although he doesn't endorse one proposed solution to the creepy factor: Giving it an obviously robotic voice when it calls. "People will probably hang up," he said.
[...] Another Google employee working on the assistant seemed to disagree. "We don't want to pretend to be a human," designer Ryan Germick said when discussing the digital assistant at a developer session earlier on Wednesday. Germick did agree, however, that Google's aim was to make the assistant human enough to keep users engaged. The unspoken goal: Keep users asking questions and sharing information with the company -- which can use that to collect more data to improve its answers and services.
Your programmers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Or a reverse CAPTCHA.
I'm looking up to see if I have anything free on that date. While I'm looking can you please confirm the prime factorization of 28573782909827352?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
There's a big difference between:
Google Executive Addresses Horrifying Reaction...
and
Google Executive Addresses "Horrifying" Reaction..
I don't know what they think they saw, but just because you say "um" a couple times doesn't mean you're thinking like a human. This is basically a case of good speech synthesis and voice recognition.
Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing
Wow, exaggerate much? All that may be true, mind. But using such hyperbole when voicing concerns does nothing for the guy’s credibility. He comes across as someone who has already made up his mind about SV companies a long time ago, and sees every new issue only as something that confirms his fears, as something that’s part of a bigger plot to rape the planet and enslave humanity.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Their only option is to make it mimic and impersonate human voice. If it sounds very good, and there is an announcement that it is robotic, no need, but people will hang up immediately just like any other robo-call. If it sounds obviously robotic, instant hang-up. The only way it works is if they can fake it long enough to get some information, and don't let anyone know about it.
Essentially, the only value to Google is if they trick people into using it.
This is impressive speech synthesis, though from the short demo it's hard to judge whether it's new and better than existing ones I've heard. The harder part is the domain-specific knowledge for understanding, it will be interesting to see how they deal with that.
Personally, I don't find it scary. The voice sounds dumb, but who cares. I'll probably make fun of these kinds of assistants once they become mainstream. I'm worried that similar technology will be used for robocalls by someone else in the future. That's going to be annoying unless you're living in a country with reasonable robocall laws. Get your call blockers ready!
What I want to see is when robot call another... what do they say?
How about Duplicitous?
If it doesn't answer a direct question or otherwise evades it, assume it's a robot, and hang up. It has already demonstrated no interest an actually attempting to communicate with you, so there's no point in giving it any more time than if it had the obviously robotic voice that would likely make most people hang up right away.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Most robocalls are garbage, "would you like new aluminum siding?" (I live in an apartment.)
Some robocalls are useful, "this is the town, we have declared a snow emergency, you have to take you car off the street."
Or, "this is Doctor Smith's office, you have an appointment Wendesday morning at 9."
It's obvious that these are all robocalls, and some of them are welcome or at least tolerable.
Having informative and valid caller-ID information will be helpful.
If the calls are for information that people want, they should be ok. If they are garbage, then they will not be ok.
Then they'll subtly modulate their opening words and recognize each other as bots and go modem sounds at each other for improved efficiency.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
- Hey Janelle, what's wrong with Wolfie? I can hear him barking. Is he Ok?
- Wolfie's fine, honey. Wolfie's just fine.
Evolution has no conscience.
Adapt or die.
You hit the nail on the head there. Why not enable businesses to take requests from bots directly?
Heck, if a person says 'Google' I hang up just like if they say 'Merchant Account' much less a bot, lol.
Have a bot announce it is very important and they don't get that far.
get called a 'drama queen' and 'hyperbolic' and other ad-homonym attacks by the 'real experts' in social psychology. You know, the guys who have no technical background and aren't allowed to perform these experiments because they were deemed unethical... they keep saying the tech doesn't work.
Meanwhile the internet war is getting really insane. You guys have the tools to check (mostly) but here's some screenshots I uploaded to imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/I3vE...
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
The person being called must be recorded to be analyzed. That is illegal without consent in most states. The fact that they don't want to use something obviously non-human because the person might hang up says it all. They know it's rude and dehumanizing, but they will go to great lengths to deceive people so that they don't notice that they are doing something rude and dehumanizing to them without their consent.
Worrying is something PEOPLE do ... not circumstances.
... try and persuade me why I shouldn't like it either.
These people should stop blaming technology for their gripes.
If they don't like duplex OK
Please don't waste my time with weasel push-pieces that say, "Let's scrap this because someone is worried".
"I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that your using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it.
You read what others had done, and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it.
You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunch box and now your selling it.
Your scientist were so preoccupied with weather or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should."
- Dr. Ian Malcolm / Jurasic Park
There's a fucking reason for that, assholes. If you can't be bothered to take the time to address me personally, I can't be bothered to take the time to give fuck-all to what you want.
Sometimes, a robot that mimics a human is EXACTLY what you want.
Telephone spam/scam problem? Bring in the robots. | Roger Anderson | TEDxNaperville
Bring in the telemarketers
Caution: Contents under pressure
It is a clever fake, that is all. Basically, this is Eliza with a much larger database. The databases allowing this type of "conversation" have been build during the last 30 years in slow, tedious work. Still, the potential is endless, as somewhat interactive SPAM can now reach everybody that has a phone. It seems we will eventually have to go to a whitelist system for phones or to a micropayment scheme. (Deposit me a dollar and I will accept your call, then I will decide whether to give it back. What, only deposited 10 cent? That I will just keep and ignore your call.)
That said, this technological advance was inevitable and its wide-scale abuse is inevitable too. Google is like the wizard's apprentice, making undesirable things happen much faster then they needed to happen.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The lot of you at Google all talk about how a majority of the scientist around the world agree that climate change is caused by man, yet when a large number of scientist tell you that A.I. is the biggest threat we have, you suddenly want to give it the power to write emails and make phone calls. There's nothing ethical about that.
Computers make great slaves and horrible masters. Given the power of the written and spoken word, I can't view this as anything but a threat to national and even world security.
That is an interesting point, but I have to think a transient record of a persons voice would possibly not be considered a "recording", especially if it were broken out into abstract components as soon as received.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> The unspoken goal: Keep users asking questions and sharing information with the company -- which can use that to collect more data to improve its answers and services.
The unspoken goal: Keep users and those who don't know they're interacting with Google asking questions and sharing information with the company -- which can be complied and sold to governments, private companies, and other persons regardless of the desire to remain private.
Say what you want about Siri, but Apple doesn't sell that information. I'll take a dumbed down AI with more privacy any day. My personal life is none of anyone's business regardless of whatever the license agreement says.
Sincerely, I would love to use this. It'd be perfect for calling my representatives when I'm unable to and constantly berating them for not having my best interests. Might be taken a little more seriously than emails too.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
The issue of deception is only a part of the actually worrisome part about this technology. The real issue is that it creates an imbalance of effort, which is exactly what we have been fighting with spam emails. With either method, minimal effort on my part can cause another person to use up a significant chunk of their time. Google is displaying this technology in a situation where that would be considered acceptable, because the outcome is profitable for the person taking the appointment, but what if it wasn't? This technology could easily be used for both parasitic purposes such as sales calls, and outright hostile purposes such as tying up phone lines with seemingly benign callers. The fundamental issue is that when a human knows they are speaking to another human, they can assume that each has a similar opportunity cost for the time spent in the conversation. A machine has no such costs, and the transaction is inherently lopsided. I think this is what the push for identification stems from, the basic need for the two parties to be on (relatively) equal footing.
I read that the same way you did, then thought - what is what was horrifying to the writer of the summary, was the fact that people did not really like the new assistant? They could very well find the reaction horrifying... :-)
Of course that is not what the link was about so you are probably right, but I thought it could be an interesting twist.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
if your AI does not explicitly state it is non-human, you become liable for everything it says as if you said it yourself. And I mean everything.
I just read about a breed of goat that's been around since the beginning of time. It's called the 'scapegoat', nyuk-nyuk.
I notice they don't say what happens if the call is to a wrong number. Does it still try to book a hair appointment/order a pizza/whatever?
> [...] cause people to lose trust in using its services.
Fear not, Google. I lost trust in you eight years ago. It ain't coming back. As far as I'm concerned, you have nothing to lose.
I'm horrified by the lack of attention to grammar in Slashdot headlines. Some may find my reaction horrifying, but I'm fairly certain they are overreacting.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
How is this different than a dozen different automated processes we already use, other than it does things via voice rather than text?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Worry? Nonsense. This is part of the arms race with companies who make you traverse a 12-deep tree of 12-ply choices, wait on hold 10 minutes, then connect you to Philippine "agents" who simply repeat whatever you say. This is actually the best thing since sliced cheese (bread?), if only it would really work with things other than hair salons.
How about making auto-dialed phone calls to cellular phones? Thought this was on the naughty list, not that the FCC seems to care to do much about the naughty side of naughty or nice.
At which point, who needs the human anymore?
Another data point hidden in the TFA:
"Google is taking advantage of its primary asset: data. It trained Duplex on a massive body of “anonymized phone conversations,” according to a release. Every scheduling task will have its own problems to solve when arranging a specific type of appointment, but all will be underpinned by Google’s massive volume of data from searches and recordings that will help the AI hold a conversation."
Yeah, that's your data and your phone calls they're talking about.
Check your premises.
If I was running a restaurant or business and this called on the phone, I'd ask to speak to a live human being, and if that's not possible I'd hang up. I'd instruct my employees to do the same: it's either a live human being making the appointment or reservation or you hang up on it. Could be a prank, could be a malfunction, could be a mistake, could be someone hacked someone's digital assistant, could be any number of things. Therefore you need verification from the actual person who wants the appointment or reservation, no exceptions; may as well not use it at all and just make the call yourself. After all, it really could be someone pranking or hacking you by activating your 'digital assistant' with commands in the ultrasound range, and that could come from many different sources.
It's only horrifying if you are an autistic millennial tech-tard. To the rest of us, who have ten times the inderstanding, it is beyond 'meh'. Nothing burger alert.
If you're in panic mode because of Duplex instead of Alexa and all the other "A.I. assistants", your priorities are not in the right order.
#DeleteFacebook
It's not when but who will be out at the gates with this stuff. If it's not Google someone else will. Lesser of two evils?
I only hope these technologies treat us benignly when they combine and become self aware and don't destroy us like we've destroyed many species, and continue to, knowing that we're doing it.
Like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
*YAWN*
You're all a bunch of morons with no perspective.
The sad thing is that you all think you're the smart, informed ones.
You're not. Not even close.
I remember when answering machines were first coming out (yes, I"m THAT old). People wigged the hell out about having to "talk to a machine". Now is there anyone anywhere who cares? No.
Places without online scheduling deserve automation.
Just announce "automatic scheduling call from {name of service & company}"
If they can't be bothered to provide a useable API and voice calling is the only way to setup future events/appointments, fine.
If my annual termite inspection needs to be scheduled and my house doesn't have a scheduling API (which most don't), then getting a call from a business I already have paid for the appointment would be fine. We usually either find a time on the first shot or it takes 3-4 options until agreement is reached. I don't find this offensive at all.
OTOH, if this technology is rented to spammers, $1000 fine per incident. Getting to know the real company behind spam callers is nearly impossible.
At the end of the call, have a pre-registered FCC number mandated to provide feedback. Without that pre-registered number, it is a scam.
Google should ignore the haters and plow forward. I would love to have google set up appointments for me. It's like arguing against fax machines because you should be driving that document over there to keep someone extra employed.
I don't see why this technology is being taken in the direction it is. Where you see a robocall bot, I see a valuable accessibility technology.
Think something like Stephen Hawking's robot voice synthesizer thing, but realistic sounding and trained to your speech patterns. That way you can control it with shortcuts instead of typing out every word you want to say, and it'll autopilot between the keywords or concepts you pick. This could be a huge boon to people who can't speak.
A similar technology could be also the next smartphone keyboard app. Write a few keywords and it turns it into a sentence.
I'm surprised people haven't thought of a simple solution here. Just have a computer pick up the phone. Hit 1 if you are human.
Get over it. Now! Resistance is not only futile - it sets us up for major pain. We badly need to stop fighting what is not only inevitable, but required for our survival.
Most answering the phones will prefer talking to the nice Google Assistant over the rude morons that normally call them.
A similar area that needs to be addressed is this aversion to human improvement we seem to have. We are going to evolve ourselves, period.
Those that are in the countries that resist will just be left behind. Its not like we don't have enough people and need to worry about wasting a few models.
Experiment away!
Not sure why everyone's getting all butthurt over it. Typical article worded as "fear" actually intended to "hype" it.
One of these days, they'll discover bleeding-edge technologies such as web forms and email, thus rendering the chatbots obsolete.
It's an automated assistant, beyond it not booking something that I didn't want why should anyone care that they're talking to something that's not a human. As long as it isn't spamming phone numbers or berating people it sounds like a step up. I know I'd probably prefer to talk to it over a lot of people.
This voice-based method of interacting with businesses is just the wrong approach entirely.
I don't want an electronic assistant who will pretend to be human, so that I can offload the task of making appointments and getting information.
What I want, and what Google should be developing, is simple standards-based online text interfaces provided by companies so that I can do this stuff from a browser or on my phone.
The biggest problem is that if done by voice, even if the tech is perfectly competent, I can still end up with wrong information. (Like the dentist who agreed on 2pm but somehow ended up putting the appointment in at 10am). And worse, the negotiation is hopelessly inefficient because one side is still human.
Here's a typical problem: I want to get my car in for service sometime in the next few weeks, but I need to drop it off between 8:15-9:00am on M,W,F (except not Friday next week, and I generally prefer Wednesday). These scenarios happen all the time. Either I transmit my availability and they pick a slot, or they transmit a series of open slots and I pick one. Done on a voice channel, it's maddening. Done with a text interface, it would be trivial.
I want to call up a web page, allocate a provisional time, ratify it with my wife, and transmit a nonce that lets them know my customer ID, WITHOUT having to register as a user on 1,000 separate sites. Then I want to be able to look it up a week later on my phone to check that my memory isn't faulty, or to cancel or reschedule. I don't want to talk to anybody. I don't want to have to do it during business hours. I don't want my account info to be hacked because the DB lives in an auto mechanic's 486 PC.
All of this is easy to do, except if it's done a million times a million different ways by each individual business. Then it's hard, and hard to use. The hardest part is making it a common platform. Come on, Google! Do something useful.
But not wrong.
They record your voice, over and over and over, mannerisms, the lot and can replicate you speaking perfectly?
Given their skills, their resources and if they had such recordings, I imagine they could emulate a person fairly easily, at least to a stranger.
Seriously, scrap this Google.
I don't like talking to humans most of the time. I will do so if it is necessary, but I don't want to.
I sure as shit do not want some AI robot calling me, and engaging me. If you want to get a hold of me, you god-damned better dial the telephone yourself.
the captcha was: 'wonwxsa' WTF?
(x) Sexy Human Voice
( ) Robot Voice
[ Save ] [ Cancel ]
Done.
Simple solution. All A.I.s should sound like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry.
Finally Google has a product they can sell as a service. A hard, no BS service instead of a bunch of apps.
Plenty of busy people will happily hire this to order food, make appointments, and gather basic data from clients for their business (if Google would guarantee the privacy of it somehow). "Where does it hurt?" "How much do you have in your 401k? Ok, what's the company match on your contributions?" This tech could legitimately disrupt a great deal of admin and professional "work" which should be automated anyway.
Plenty of professional offices, such as dentists and finance people, would LOVE this; maybe not older people, but younger people saavy in tech and their young clients would probably really enjoy this or at least have no problem with it. Why would they? We already see a lot of automated stuff, we know it should be done by a computer instead some bored, forgetful, imperfect human who doesn't want to be tied to a phone all day.
Plus, the headline is a massive fail. Horrifying? Really come on. It's uncanny and gives one pause, but when did slashdot start acting like it's 80 years old screaming "hey don't touch my computer you darn kids!"
-
I find people getting scared about a robot uprising silly at this point. The mind is incredibly complex. The closest that can be done to reproducing it is limited in a lot of ways. I'm a lot more worried about a bug popping up in something like an airplane causing a crash then AI overlords. https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/ illustrates how silly the idea is. It's a lot more unlikely because a lot of the devices shown aren't connected to the internet. In the end my biggest worry would be society having problems because of how reliant we are on computers. Even then it would be fairly challenging completely compromise the whole internet just because of how much of a patchwork the internet is set up. Different hardware setups with different software versions. The simplest way of course is through tricking people but that wouldn't do it for everyone. Basically it would be possible but fairly challenging because of everything involved.
Isn't the whole idea of modern communications is that you use an app to make appointments?
That way you can specify exactly what you want done and when.
You can also specify that your calendar app remind you of the appointment if you want.
Classic case of a silly solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist.
Exactly.
This is a classic case of a silly solution to a non-existent problem.