The case for empathetic AI
three years ago
i was cleaning my room on a saturday
afternoon
when i heard the tv switch on in the
living room with a very noisy cartoon
it was quite unusual especially at 3 p.m
in the afternoon considering i am the
kind of dad who tried to limit screen’s
exposition for my young children
so i moved to the living room and i saw
my two boys two and three years old
nicely sitted on the sofa watching
paw patrol so i first
turned back to my wife and asked her why
she had turned on the tv
but it was not her so i went back to the
living room and i asked my son
how i turned on the tv knowing he never
did it before
and to top it off he was watching a
youtube video which represents quite a
complex process
and he replied i asked google papa
clever but it was to my surprise
that my son three years old was simply
able to order
to google ok google can you play paul
patrol
and get something he would never get
from me
especially at 3 p.m on the afternoon but
also
without being polite i’m french and you
know how important it is to be polite
for french people
at that time i asked myself
should i teach my kids to be polite to
does google need to learn some manners
and ask for my permission
some things started to be crystal clear
google like many others was
at my home as part of our lives in
forgetting
some fundamental family rules
google’s intelligence assisting and
easing our life
functionally entertaining our family
may slowly influence our kids behaviors
from the youngest age when they start
getting their personalities
shaped we think we create human-centric
ai
but we create machines that are not
entirely serving on mankind
and that generates a much larger
impact on our lives than the one we
expected
and not the most positive one
for instance social media platform we
are using
almost every day sometimes 10 hours a
day
generates a polarization of all society
in influencing and exacerbating all
beliefs
and they are deliberately designed to
make us
addicted and such addiction
generated by those algorithm has
unfortunately been linked with feeling
of unhappiness
depression and mental health issues in
compulsive users
such platforms supposed to serve our
humanity
isolating us are finally not considering
the social element
the social power for human element
and this provokes bad human behavior
change
and ai is even worsening exploiting
our human weaknesses and by relying too
much on technology
sometimes things can go really wrong
like this woman in canada who just drive
drove into the lake stupidly and
following a gps
but the reason i’m actually showing you
this news
is such a similar story is happening to
each of us
almost every day let me explain you
how such dependence and machine affect
our health
and or cognition this is where i live in
singapore
i am living on the 29e of this straight
which naturally comes after the 29a
29bcnd
further down the road before reaching my
home
most of the time i order a taxi the gps
indicates to the taxi driver
to stop at the level of the 29a instead
of 29e
and i can guarantee you taxi driver will
always stop at the level of 29a
and never look around if someone is
waiting a few meters away
i could see on your face it has already
happened to you right
and half of the time the taxi driver
unfortunately missed my street
certainly because the gps algorithm is
not accurate enough
but what worries me is this could happen
two or three times before the driver
even realized something is wrong
have you ever realized a taxi driver can
go around in circle in your neighborhood
for 20 minutes without finding your
street
without realizing is lost but also
without getting informed by the machine
that something is not right
such utter dependence on machine creates
a definite problem
in fact it is affecting all cognition
and studies have proven that habitual
use of gps could pose
long-term health issues such as a higher
risk of alzheimer
as just described ai is embedded in our
daily lives
making multiple decision a longer human
journey
taking some of the most advanced example
facial recognition
is now used to pay at the cashier or
open a gate
health diagnostic are entirely proposed
by machine intelligence
and alone approval would be very soon
entirely in the ends of an algorithm
and these algorithms are walking days
and night 24 hours today and we
don’t see them these
shadow walkers govern a substantial part
of our existence
influence our behaviors potentially
affect our cognition
they often constitute a threat to our
privacy
and this without offering us the
possibility of interacting with them
with a note explaining their choice or
their decision
and without asking for our permission
are we not missing here a two-ways
communication between human and machine
a kind of homogeneous interaction
protocol
to freely define ourselves in relation
to it
and act better accept them as part of
our life
what are we really missing
human are working hard on ai
but ai is not being designed to work
hard enough
for human look ai
system focus essentially on servicing
our human functional needs
however even if they are trained to
detect any addictive
human behavior they are not trained to
prevent
them which can affect our relationship
or health
and have a broader impact on our society
and its organization
ai seeks to understand how our human
cognition
works by creating cognitive processes
that emulate those of human beings
and yes in doing so ai improve the speed
accuracy and efficiency of how people
think and work however
it seems as well its prolonged used
weakens or human cognitive abilities
over time
ai governed lots of our life’s decision
whether personally or
professionally and is unfortunately very
often
not able to explain the reason of such
decision
and properly interact with us to help us
better accept
its choice and what it is offering
current ai design is simply not
taking enough into consideration what
make us truly human
and different from the machine
or behaviors or cognition or emotion
or social interaction
look we rely every day on ai
and ai is even not able to recognize
when we are wearing a mask
while we human continue to recognize
ourself
amongst each other and this is due to
our unique
cognition and social interaction
abilities
we have built these things so it is our
responsibility to change it
in reconsidering our human uniqueness
succeeded in human machine cohabitation
is what is the most complicated used to
say
dominic volton head of research at the
french national center for scientific
research
the for such cohabitation to happen
efficiently
we need to give more space to human in
the design of ai
product and services and foster more
human machine
interaction this will help us to create
real human centric ai
how to proceed first
we need to reassess our ai impact our
lives
behaviors and cognition whether it is on
the short term
or in the long term and we need to
leverage the power
of the data gathered by those ai
products and services to do so
why do we not have a gps based product
or transportation platform
frequently proposing to their drivers
cognition test for instance
the richness of this platform in terms
of data
may really help in detecting any kind of
bad human behavior or addiction
detecting social media addiction might
also be very simple
facebook capturing enough data
should be able to send a signal when a
very addictive behavior
is detected and the strengths of its
algorithm and machine learning
already very much used to detect fake
news
may also be used to analyze how such
addiction could be linked
to any mental health issue as a support
to our healthcare professional
but this would require to be in the
mindset of
maybe opening a bit more this knowledge
and data set to our physician
and maybe slightly changed the business
model of this platform
highly based on our addiction
second we need to redesign ai products
and services
in reconsidering our human and machine
complementarity
and a very good example is the mine nai
process that has been proposed by the
liquid news
center for innovative cities at sutd
here in singapore their team
conducted some applied research on the
design of a gps 2.0
envisioning what a future of the gps
could look like
and instead of a turn-by-turn
instruction drivers
might be given
visual and special cues to help them
navigate in the city
like turn right at the red building or
turn left
after the petrol station at the level of
the bridge
thus protecting the drivers cognitive
and spatial sense of the city
why do we not ask also google to give us
the option to train its algorithm to
some of our
essential social family roles and
eventually allow google to
recognize how we may be polite to each
others
last but not least we need to rescue ai
from its lack of interaction with human
for ai to be truly accepted it should
not be designed
as a trojan horse but offer more human
interaction
and if we want to make a step forward
towards social acceptability of ai
it is a responsibility to pull them out
of the shadow
allow us to see them and interact with
them
let’s push any machine in the social
interaction space to better communicate
with human
by interacting with the taxi driver
in adjusting you know the car
temperature to his mood or playing a
song he likes or even
asking him a question at the end of the
day to know how is he feeling
an algorithm would both work out its
accessibility
and eventually get access to really even
data point
related to the driver’s behaviors and
emotional status
let’s also enhance such interaction
with the maximum of transparency
i would personally value very much that
an
algorithm could give me the reason i
have been rejected from alone
such transparency would help remove
the high reluctance we human have
towards those
shadow walkers and their ambiguity
ai is everyone’s concern
and if we want machine to adapt to all
human needs
each of us would need to assist
them in their adaptive process assess if
they are doing well
and delivering what we are considering
is a human-centric
outcome for each of us
what if we could rate more how machine
fulfill our human and social needs
when we give a five stars to a taxi
driver we are not always
assessing how punctual he was but
sometimes how nice to us he was right
so let’s do systematize such behaviors
and
guide algorithm in delivering a better
and more personal human-centric outcome
and
reward them when they take care of us as
human
let’s reimagine a world where we will
assess more how human
are the artificial intelligence let’s
re-imagine a world
designed around our coexistence with
machine
let’s re-imagine a world in
reconsidering our human uniqueness
and re-empowering any human in guiding
machine
to deliver the right outcome
i am very positive towards such world
and i do hope my kids will be very soon
rewarded by google
with the free perpetual episode but only
when they have been polite thank you