Bots Mind the Social-technical Gap

2013

In order to understand agency and interagency in virtual and hybrid constellations a concept of multi-dimensional, gradual agency is introduced. It offers a classification framework for the observation and interpretation of scenarios where humans and nonhumans interact. It may be applied to the analysis of the potential of social computing systems and their virtual and real actualizations. The approach may also be used to describe situations where options to act are delegated to technical agents. Ethically relevant scenarios where solely humans act can be compared to test-bed simulations and hybrid constellations. The state of the art in proto-ethical behaviour, social interaction and social autonomy of current social computing systems is presented.

In 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, an experimental artificial intelligence chat bot. Learning from interactions with Twitter users, Tay was shut down after one day because of its obscene and inflammatory tweets. This article uses the case of Tay to re-examine theories of agency. How did users view the personality and actions of an artificial intelligence chat bot when interacting with Tay on Twitter? Using phenomenological research methods and pragmatic approaches to agency, we look at what people said about Tay to study how they imagine and interact with emerging technologies and to show the limitations of our current theories of agency for describing communication in these settings. We show how different qualities of agency, different expectations for technologies, and different capacities for affordance emerge in the interactions between people and artificial intelligence. We argue that a perspective of “symbiotic agency”—informed by the imagined affordances of emerging technology—is required to really understand the collapse of Tay.

Etikk i praksis, 2010

Of the many opportunities and affordances that mobile technologies bring to our day-to-day lives, the ability to cheat physical separation and remain accessible to each other-in an instant-also brings pressure to bear on well-established social conventions as to how we should act when we are engaged with others in shared spaces. In this paper we explore some ethical dimensions of mobile communication by considering the manner in which individuals in everyday contexts balance interpretations of emergent social conventions with personal desires to connect in the moment. As we later discuss, the decisions made in response to a ringing mobile phone or flashing text message emerge from consequential versus deontological ethical frames used to determine what to do versus what we ought to do. This is particularly true in western and North American cultural contexts from which our data are collected. Using Goffman's dramaturgy, we suggest that these conflicts occurring on an individual level provide evidence of social structure, and are simultaneously entwined with our less obvious ruminations on the maintenance of social order.

This chapter argues that the most interesting question is not whether smart technology is positively or negatively affecting individual moral sensitivity, but whether it is changing its scope. As machine intelligence continues to become more pervasive and naturalistic, do they, in fact, take over much of our everyday moral territory where human sensitivity has traditionally operated alone? Reflection on moral sensitivity has generally assumed that the moral agent is human: sensing, thinking, and acting on morally salient information within the human-affected environment. This chapter argues that there are good reasons to question this assumption in the unfolding digital world, a world increasingly mapped, surveilled, and shaped by context-aware sensors, trackers, AI devices, and information connectivity. Making this case will require that we rethink both technology and moral sensitivity. Doing so may illuminate that we are increasingly living in a world in which the human morally sensitive agent is extended through technology, and joined in its agency by new morally sensitive machines.

Biomedical Informatics Insights, 2019

Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of digital interventions that aim to either supplement or replace face-to-face mental health services. More recently, a number of automated conversational agents have also been made available, which respond to users in ways that mirror a real-life interaction. What are the social and ethical concerns that arise from these advances? In this article, we discuss, from a young person's perspective, the strengths and limitations of using chatbots in mental health support. We also outline what we consider to be minimum ethical standards for these platforms, including issues surrounding privacy and confidentiality, efficacy, and safety, and review three existing platforms (Woebot, Joy, and Wysa) according to our proposed framework. It is our hope that this article will stimulate ethical debate among app developers, practitioners, young people, and other stakeholders, and inspire ethically responsible practice in digital mental health.

Human-Machine Communication

In this manuscript we discuss the increasing use of machine agents as potential sources of support for humans. Continued examination of the use of machine agents, particularly chatbots (or “bots”) for support is crucial as more supportive interactions occur with these technologies. Building off extant research on supportive communication, this manuscript reviews research that has implications for bots as support providers. At the culmination of the literature review, several propositions regarding how factors of technological efficacy, problem severity, perceived stigma, and humanness affect the process of support are proposed. By reviewing relevant studies, we integrate research on human-machine and supportive communication to organize, extend, and provide a foundation for the growing body of work on machine agents for support.

Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2021

Moral status can be understood along two dimensions: moral agency [capacities to be and do good (or bad)] and moral patiency (extents to which entities are objects of moral concern), where the latter especially has implications for how humans accept or reject machine agents into human social spheres. As there is currently limited understanding of how people innately understand and imagine the moral patiency of social robots, this study inductively explores key themes in how robots may be subject to humans' (im)moral action across 12 valenced foundations in the moral matrix: care/harm, fairness/unfairness, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, purity/degradation, liberty/oppression. Findings indicate that people can imagine clear dynamics by which anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and mechanomorphic robots may benefit and suffer at the hands of humans (e.g., affirmations of personhood, compromising bodily integrity, veneration as gods, corruption by physical or information interventions). Patterns across the matrix are interpreted to suggest that moral patiency may be a function of whether people diminish or uphold the ontological boundary between humans and machines, though even moral upholdings bare notes of utilitarianism.

Moral critiques of computational algorithms seem divided between two paradigms. One seeks to demonstrate how an opaque and unruly algorithmic power violates moral values and harms users’ autonomy; the other underlines the systematicity of such power, deflating concerns about opacity and unruliness. While the second paradigm makes it possible to think of end users of algorithmic systems as moral agents, the consequences of this possibility remain unexplored. This article proposes one way of tackling this problem. Employing Michel Foucault’s version of virtue ethics, I examine how perceptions of Facebook’s normative regulation of visibility have transformed non-expert end users’ ethical selves (i.e., their character) in the current political crisis in Brazil. The article builds on this analysis to advance algorithmic ethical subjectivation as a concept to make sense of these processes of ethical becoming. I define them as plural (encompassing various types of actions and values, and resulting in no determinate subject), contextual (demanding not only sociomaterial but also epistemological and ethical conditions), and potentially harmful (eventually structuring harms that are not externally inflicted by algorithms, but by users, upon themselves and others, in response to how they perceive the normativity of algorithmic decisions). By researching which model(s) of ethical subjectivation specific algorithmic social platforms instantiate, critical scholars might be able to better understand the normative consequences of these platforms’ power.

CHI '19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019

Can a chatbot enable us to change our conceptions, to be critically reflective? To what extent can interaction with a technologically 'minimal' medium such as a chatbot evoke emotional engagement in ways that can challenge us to act on the world? In this paper, we discuss the design of a provocative bot, a 'bot of conviction', aimed at triggering conversations on complex topics (e.g. death, wealth distribution, gender equality, privacy) and, ultimately, soliciting specific actions from the user it converses with. We instantiate our design with a use case in the cultural sector, specifically a Neolithic archaeological site that acts as a stage of conversation on such hard themes. Our larger contributions include an interaction framework for bots of conviction, insights gained from an iterative process of participatory design and evaluation, and a vision for bot interaction mechanisms that can apply to the HCI community more widely.