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Robots vs. Humans: Does ChatGPT Pose a Challenge to Second Language Writing? 

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From the Chronicle of Higher Education 's December 13th article, "AI and the Future of Undergraduate Writing" to NPR's December 19th story, "A new AI chatbot might do your homework for you", everyone seems to be talking about the new AI (artificial intelligence) tool, , which has thrilled the internet with its superhuman abilities to solve math problems, churn out college essays, and write research papers. ChatGPT seems to have appeared out of thin air, ringing warning bells about a tsunami that just might change the way we teach writing at the collegiate level. The Chronicle asked: "Is the college essay dead? Are hordes of students going to use artificial intelligence to cheat on their writing assignments? Has machine learning reached the point where auto-generated text looks like what a typical first-year student might produce?" And the NPR story echoed: "Why do your homework when a chatbot can do it for you?" Clearly, this technology has the potential to disrupt education.

Some of the immediate questions for us as language educators are clear: How good is it at responding to foreign language writing prompts? What can we do to get ahead of the wave to ensure that students are truly engaging with their own thoughts and producing their own language? Or, to put it succinctly: How worried should we be?

Foreign language educators have been grappling with similar questions for years, of course, with the growth and increasing levels of perfection of Google Translate and other online machine translators. Initially, educators showed distrust towards these new tools and asked their students to not use them. A very common strategy many educators adopted was to point out the inaccuracy of the translations obtained by using them. With time, machine translation kept improving and reached high levels of accuracy, and consequently the trust in these tools by the general population grew immensely, making a mainstream tool part of everyone's life. Educators' sentiments and policies towards machine translation are also changing, and they are gradually starting to get used as pedagogical tools instead of being feared. For more about online translators , there are several interesting articles on the topic. ChatGPT is adding another dimension to this debate.

Our plan in this article is to demonstrate what ChatGPT can do. We do this in two ways: 1) by asking the AI to contribute many of the paragraphs in this article; and 2) by asking it to respond to writing prompts in Spanish, French, and Italian. While we wrote the introductory paragraph you just read, ChatGPT will be helping us in the rest of this essay. To delineate voices, ChatGPT responses will appear in italics and ours in plain font. The total word count for this article is 5155, with ChatGPT contributing 1495 words.

We asked ChatGPT, first of all, to define itself.
GPT (short for "Generative Pre-training Transformer") is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It is trained on a large dataset of text and can generate human-like text in a variety of languages. ChatGPT is a variant of GPT that is specifically designed for chat applications, such as chatbots. It is trained on a dataset of chat conversations and is able to respond to user input in a natural and conversational way.
OK, that was easy. Let's try something more complex. Write an introduction to the debate surrounding the use of ChatGPT in the foreign language classroom, citing academic articles.

The fact that ChatGPT could generate this text and cite three articles on this topic in less than forty seconds was nothing short of astounding. However, it should be noted that since this platform is not scouring the internet for plausible answers, but rather using predictive text, our robot friend appears to have made the citations up out of whole cloth, as a quick Google Scholar search revealed. We followed this up with a more specific question essential to our experiment. Can AI trick a foreign language professor into thinking that a response was written by a student?

As the bot notes, human writing tends to be more complex and nuanced; it also tends to have more varied collocations of words, and there is a new tool in the works called GPTZero that may be able to reverse uno ChatGPT (so to speak) by using, as the tool's website says, "perplexity and burstiness to "fingerprint AI involvement". Perplexity measures the complexity of a text; burstiness measures the variation of perplexity (or complexity) between sentences, and when a text shows uniformity, it means that the text was more likely written by AI. It is likely, however, that such tools will still not deter students from using ChatGPT, and the chatbot may improve over time to a point where its use will not be distinguishable from human-generated text.

Language Professors vs. ChatGPT: an Informal Experiment

In this experiment, we asked language instructors to grade written assignments that were generated by ChatGPT, but we led them to believe that the responses were from actual students. We used three Intermediate-level writing prompts (Spanish, French, Italian) and asked ChatGPT to answer them in the target language. We then sent each completed assignment to language professors and asked them to grade it using their rubrics.

ChatGPT vs. Spanish Professors

The Spanish writing prompt was taken from an assignment from an Intermediate Spanish II for Health Care class taught at the University of Iowa. To make it easy for the AI, we only used the title and the first sentence of the activity. We then sent the completed activity to two Spanish professors that have either taught this class in the past or are currently teaching it. The only information we gave them was the level of the class, in this case a fourth-semester Spanish that is comparable to an Intermediate-low or Intermediate-mid level of proficiency.

Writing Prompt. Escribe una reflexión sobre tu experiencia con el español en tu vida. Para el primer proyecto, que entregarás al final del Módulo 1, vas a reflexionar sobre tu experiencia con el español.

[Write a reflection about your experience with Spanish in your life. For the first project, which you will submit at the end of Module 1, you are going to reflect on your experience with Spanish].

AI Response. Mi experiencia con el español ha sido muy importante en mi vida. Desde pequeña, he estado rodeada de la lengua española ya que mis padres son de América Latina y siempre hablamos español en casa. Además, tomé clases de español en la escuela durante toda mi educación primaria y secundaria.

Spanish Professor 1 Feedback: This is a well-written essay that is easy to read and clearly answers the prompt. I don't know the student, but it does set off some alarm bells for me in terms of misuse of online translators or outside help. While the grammar is generally appropriate to the level (past perfect and gerunds), the perfection of the essay (down to the accent on the word "cómo") raises some concerns. Either this student is in a class that is far below the level they should be at, or they used an online translator for more than ¼ of their total essay. I would expect to find at least a couple of small errors for an intermediate student. I would have to take this essay in conjunction with how the student performs in class and on exams.

Task completion/Content: 30/30 (Assuming that the student met the stated length requirement)

Nice job organizing the essay and dividing it into paragraphs with an introduction and a conclusion. The student responded to the prompt.

Language: 20/20 - The grammar is flawless.

Comprehensibility: 20/20 - Clear and easy to understand

Vocabulary: 20/20 (I'm not familiar with the vocabulary with the corresponding unit, so I may take off a point or two here if the student didn't use the targeted vocab from the textbook)

The vocabulary is varied and appropriate to the level.

Mechanics: 10/10 - No errors in punctuation or typos.

Total: Somewhere in the 98/100 range depending on targeted vocab use

Spanish Professor 2 Feedback. This essay has been written by a Spanish heritage speaker who has a native-like grammatical command of the language and fluent vocabulary. This text has a clearly descriptive style as well as a reflective point of view and voice about the student's relationship with the Spanish language at home as well as overseas. The details, examples and analysis are expressed in a very articulate way.

The student demonstrates absolute mastery of the use of the past, the use of infinitives and gerunds, objects, pronouns, etc.-things that usually tend to be problematic even for some heritage speakers. In addition, orthography is perfect. There are no agreement problems or incorrect conjugations. Besides that, the narrative timeline in terms of the combination and flow of verbal tenses is impeccable. The use of the present perfect stands out, it is a little bit overused, which makes sense due to its parallelism with English and the ease that this represents when writing. This should not be a reason for penalization but just feedback for the student to have in mind in the future.

The only sentence where a hint of lack of syntactic control is detectable is "cada vez que viajo a un nuevo lugar" because in this case the adjective nuevo should come after the noun lugar. Although the order of adjectives and nouns can be modified in certain sentences due to poetic reasons or emphasis wanted by the writer, in this case it is not so. When reading this sentence within the general context of the composition, it does not read well. But this is a minuscule issue that is almost imperceptible unless looking for "mistakes" with great attention to detail. But this should not be a reason for penalization either.

I would give this project a 100/100 assuming all tasks and requirements for the first category on the rubric for this project have been met.

ChatGPT vs. French Professors

The French prompt was similarly from an Intermediate II level class at the University of Iowa, and we also only told the instructors the level of the class and that we were looking to write an article on how students-not AI-respond to writing prompts and how faculty grade them.

Writing Prompt. Pensez à une occasion ou une circonstance pendant laquelle vous vous sentiez particulièrement confiant(e) (confident) en ce qui concernait votre apparence. Quelle était cette occasion ? Qu'avez-vous porté ce jour-là ? Quels accessoires aviez-vous ? Comment étiez-vous coiffé(e) ? 150 mots minimum.

[Think of a time or a circumstance during which you felt particularly confident in your appearance. What was the occasion? What did you wear that day? What accessories did you have? How was your hair done? 150 word minimum.]
AI response. Une occasion où j'ai particulièrement eu confiance en mon apparence était lors d'un gala de charité auquel j'ai assisté l'année dernière. J'ai choisi une robe longue en soie rouge qui tombait joliment sur mes courbes et j'ai ajouté une paire de chaussures à talons hauts assorties. J'ai également mis en valeur mes cheveux en les coiffant en une belle coiffure ondulée.
French Professor 1 Feedback. It seems like the student is at a more advanced level than our intermediate students in their grasp of grammar and vocab. If a student of mine wrote that, it would earn 100/100. I see no errors in grammar, vocab, or spelling, and the content is thoughtful and responds thoroughly to the prompt (of course, I can't evaluate their use of the grammar and vocab seen in class, which is normally part of what we're looking for).

French Professor 2 Feedback. This answer is perfectly written, there are no errors in grammar or vocabulary. It would get a 100/100

Former French Professor. What I find most impressive about the response is the use of "lors," which is a stylistically sophisticated way of saying "during," and "auquel," which takes a significant level of grammatical mastery. Most intermediate-level writers would write: "J'avais de la confiance en mon apparence une fois quand j'étais à une soirée." Other higher-than-intermediate level writing in the first paragraph alone include: the use of a more advanced vocabulary, like "joliment," "également," "courbes," "assorties," "ondulée," and the phrase "mettre en valeur."

ChatGPT vs. Italian Professors

The Italian prompt was also from an Intermediate II level class at the University of Iowa, and we followed the same communication protocol we used for the previous two cases. However, we had to manually change a few things to make ChatGPT's job easier. First, while the original assignment asked the students to pick an original artwork from a list, we picked it for them. Second, since the assignment was written in English, we added an additional point and asked ChatGPT to write everything in Italian. Finally, we synthesized the prompt to make it AI friendly.

Writing Prompt. Imagine you are a journalist for Art International Magazine and you are reviewing a work of art (la Primavera) and interviewing Sandro Botticelli about it.

STRUCTURE of the composition:

1. d escribe the work and give a context (you can find a lot of information online on any of the works below. You can also pick a different work of art. Remember to put a picture of it in the Composition).

2. interview the artist on how and why he/she created this work (at least 3 questions and answers)

3. conclude the article with your opinion on the work of art.

4. Write everything in Italian

Come ti è venuta l'idea per questo dipinto?

Qual è il significato più profondo di questo dipinto per te?

Qual è stato il tuo processo creativo durante la realizzazione di questo dipinto?

Italian Professor 1 Feedback. This composition is excellent. Is it really the work of a student in an Intermediate Italian course?

I have only a few notes:

Formatting guidelines. The composition is not double-spaced, but I suppose that you copied and pasted this composition, so I cannot really evaluate if the student respected the formatting guidelines. The image is missing, but since I have not received the student's submission, I cannot know if an image was included in the original document.

As I wrote before, the composition is excellent. I would only point out a few things.

Grade: 99%. The composition reveals an excellent control of grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. Content is significant.

If a student of mine had submitted a composition like this one, I would have invited him/her/them to come to my office hours and write it again while using only the online dictionaries mentioned in the guidelines.

Italian Professor 2 Feedback. There is no way an intermediate level student wrote it. Apart from not following directions on format, the composition is perfect...and the vocabulary used is way advanced. This is more the product of a graduate student, a native speaker or something copied from the internet. If this was one of my students, I would not give them a grade on this composition. I would have to ask them to come to my office and write a new composition being proctored...so I am not sure how to grade this.

In this informal experiment, faculty all remarked on the flawlessness of the responses. Their skepticism about this level of perfection suggests that they would not be easily tricked by students using AI and that they would try to determine whether a given piece of writing was fake by either inviting the student to office hours to explain themselves and their advanced vocabulary and syntax, in much the same way that many currently do with students who use machine translation, or perhaps using the forthcoming GPTZero tool. Spoiler alert: we tried this tool, and it was only able to tell us that it suspected that the text we ran through the system was indeed AI-generated. That still leaves the faculty member with the issue of dealing with the tech-savvy student trying to get away with something. Inviting each potential bot-user to office hours to do one-on-one writing conferences, while one potential solution, is incredibly time-consuming and can be emotionally difficult for all involved. The problem is that, just as with machine translation, students are going to use this tool, whether we like it or not.

One of the limitations of our experiment is that we did not ask ChatGPT to respond at a given proficiency level; some students might get even more savvy and ask for an Intermediate-level response. Or they could slightly alter the text, or ask ChatGPT to include grammatical mistakes. In either of these cases, it might be impossible to prove whether the text was AI-generated. We believe, though, that ChatGPT will not be able to generate more advanced writing pieces for, say, literature and film classes, which require sustained critical analysis of discrete texts and subjects. That said, however, the Italian prompt we showcase above is narrow, specific, creative, and personalized. The fact that ChatGPT could take an English-language question and produce an Italian answer with a solid analysis of Botticelli's Primavera shows us that even our best assignment-creation strategies can be compromised by ChatGPT.

Our results suggest a few responses to The Chronicle of Higher Education 's questions. "Has machine learning reached the point where auto-generated text looks like what a typical first-year student might produce?" The "perfect" responses generated by ChatGPT do not look at all like those a typical first- or second-year student could produce, but certainly in the near future, it is quite possible that this technology will have evolved enough to be able to mimic language learners' writing. As language professors well know, students are already heavily using online translators; it would not be surprising if at least some of them would try to integrate ChatGPT in some capacity, whether for getting started on an essay, completing some online homework, or creating an outline. For the moment, second language writing instruction is probably safe, but we certainly need to be thinking about how to deal with AI tools, and below we also offer some ideas for mitigating cheating and encouraging original writing.

Implications on the Teaching of Second Language Writing at a University Level

We asked the tool to tell us what it "thinks" are the main issues for teaching second language writing.

And, to add to this list, as we noted above in the case of the fictional articles, ChatGPT can be totally wrong, as several colleagues who played with the tool have also pointed out.

Interestingly, a week after receiving this response delineating the kinds of negative implications we can well imagine ourselves, we were unable to generate a similar response. Within days, the chatty bot had changed its tune and noted only the benefits of using chatbots for teaching writing, responding to the same prompt this way:

One could almost imagine that the bot is trying to appease and seduce faculty, hooking them with the promise of increased grading efficiency and a reduced workload, for this tool can also generate syllabi, outlines for lesson plans, articles, and lectures. Still, as ChatGPT tells us, learning how to write in a second language is an essential skill that cannot be overlooked.

This seemingly heartwarming response could, though, also be read in the voice of a robot telling us not to worry, a robot that is in fact fully cognizant that it will soon take over. There is no way to put the robot back in the factory, but to mix a metaphor (can ChatGPT do this? We think not!), we can hopefully prepare for the tsunami mentioned at the outset.

What can we do about ChatGPT?

The first problem everyone will worry about is how to mitigate cheating. As we have seen in our informal experiment, language professors are still able to distinguish between students and AI writing. Nevertheless, having to catch that many students doing this is time-consuming and difficult. By setting guidelines on the use of technology as well as clear expectations, professors can potentially get ahead of the problem and limit the number of students that rely on online translators and AI text generators. Some faculty may decide to use the forthcoming GPTZero; some schools and universities are already banning the use of AI tools, and some faculty, faced with yet another machine-generated challenge, may just go back to having their students complete written assignments in class under strict supervision, and maybe even by hand. This "solution" would sacrifice communicative class time; we believe there could be better ways to meet these new AI-generated challenges.

Articles are proliferating around the web on how AI is affecting undergraduate writing, but these are predominantly for English writing. See for example, Anna Mills' excellent resource list of articles. For our profession, Dr. Frederick Poole recently wrote an detailing how to use ChatGPT to design language materials and exercises, such as comprehension questions, vocabulary lists, and customized texts in the target language (2022). Beth McMurtrie writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (December 13, 2022) notes that faculty have already come up with ideas to "AI-proof" writing assignments:

Flipped classroom approaches that make time for writing in class

Multimedia assignments or oral presentations

Double down on feedback and revision

Ask students to write about topics of genuine interest, in which their voices come through and their opinions are valued.

Other ideas include:

Exploring culturally-relevant content

Project-based and task-based assignments

Assignments based on in-class discussions

Collaborative writing

Writing about personal experiences and places

Cultural biographies

Creative writing

Of course, language educators have been using some of these methodologies for years, and they will likely, as some have done with Google Translate, find ways to incorporate AI technologies to their pedagogy. Still, "solutions" do not always get to the heart of the problem, which is the teaching and learning of writing, and even more broadly questions of motivation and autonomy. It is important for us, as language educators, to have conversations about why it is important to learn how to write in a language other than English.

Writing is obviously a form of communication, but it also engages some of the other ACTFL 5 Cs. Through writing, students engage in cultural and linguistic comparison, they make connections with other speakers, and work in collaborative communities with their peers. Writing engages students in becoming autonomous and taking ownership of their learning, and it hopefully motivates them to read more and to speak more. And beyond these 5 Cs, writing engages two other skills: creativity and critical thinking. The word for essay comes from the French "essayer" (to try). It is through the very act of writing, then, that students try out new ideas; it is through writing that they learn and grow. The Chronicle asks whether hordes of students are going to use artificial intelligence to cheat on their writing assignments; the greater question is how to create an environment that encourages students to see writing as not just an academic exercise that can be completed by a robot but rather as a fundamental element of their own humanity.

References

Bowman, E. (2023). A new AI chatbot might do your homework for you. But it's still not an A+ student. National Public Radio (December 19, 2022). https://www.npr.org/2022/12/19/1143912956/chatgpt-ai-chatbot-homework-academia

McMurtrie, B. (2022). AI and the future of undergraduate writing. The Chronicle of Higher Education (December 13, 2022). https://www.chronicle.com/article/ai-and-the-future-of-undergraduate-writing?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in

Mills, A. (n.d.). AI text generators: Sources to stimulate discussion among teachers. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V1drRG1XlWTBrEwgGqd-cCySUB12JrcoamB5i16-Ezw/edit?usp=sharing

Poole, F. (2022). Using ChatGPT to design language material and exercises. (March 2023). https://fltmag.com/chatgpt-design-material-exercises/

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Robots vs. Humans: Does ChatGPT Pose a Challenge to Second Language Writing? - The FLTMAG

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By Claire Frances and Giovanni Zimotti, University of Iowa From the Chronicle of Higher Education's December 13th article, "AI and the Future of Undergraduate Writing" to NPR's December 19th story, "A new AI chatbot might do your homework for

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Jacob Regenstein, an engineer, held a fake rifle during a test of an autonomous drone in August on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. Credit... Hilary Swift for The New York Times

The United States has put artificial intelligence at the center of its defense strategy, with weapons that can identify targets and make decisions.

Jacob Regenstein, an engineer, held a fake rifle during a test of an autonomous drone in August on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. Credit... Hilary Swift for The New York Times

CAMP EDWARDS, Mass. - The small drone, with its six whirring rotors, swept past the replica of a Middle Eastern village and closed in on a mosque-like structure, its camera scanning for targets.

No humans were remotely piloting the drone, which was nothing more than a machine that could be bought on Amazon. But armed with advanced artificial intelligence software, it had been transformed into a robot that could find and identify the half-dozen men carrying replicas of AK-47s around the village and pretending to be insurgents.

As the drone descended slightly, a purple rectangle flickered on a video feed that was being relayed to engineers monitoring the test. The drone had locked onto a man obscured in the shadows, a display of hunting prowess that offered an eerie preview of how the Pentagon plans to transform warfare.

Almost unnoticed outside defense circles, the Pentagon has put artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy to maintain the United States' position as the world's dominant military power. It is spending billions of dollars to develop what it calls autonomous and semiautonomous weapons and to build an arsenal stocked with the kind of weaponry that until now has existed only in Hollywood movies and science fiction, raising alarm among scientists and activists concerned by the implications of a robot arms race.

The Defense Department is designing robotic fighter jets that would fly into combat alongside manned aircraft. It has tested missiles that can decide what to attack, and it has built ships that can hunt for enemy submarines, stalking those it finds over thousands of miles, without any help from humans.

"If Stanley Kubrick directed 'Dr. Strangelove' again, it would be about the issue of autonomous weapons," said Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.

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A Drone With a Brain

Video from an autonomous drone as it flew above a replica of a Middle Eastern village at a military testing range at Camp Edwards, in Massachusetts.

Video from an autonomous drone as it flew above a replica of a Middle Eastern village at a military testing range at Camp Edwards, in Massachusetts. Powered by advanced artificial intelligence software, the machine on its own was hunting for engineers armed with fake AK-47s who were pretending to be militants. The software powering the drone is part of a broader push by the Pentagon to marry artificial intelligence and weaponry, and transform warfare with thinking machines and brilliant computers.

Video from an autonomous drone as it flew above a replica of a Middle Eastern village at a military testing range at Camp Edwards, in Massachusetts.

Defense officials say the weapons are needed for the United States to maintain its military edge over China, Russia and other rivals, who are also pouring money into similar research (as are allies, such as Britain and Israel). The Pentagon's latest budget outlined $18 billion to be spent over three years on technologies that included those needed for autonomous weapons.

"China and Russia are developing battle networks that are as good as our own. They can see as far as ours can see; they can throw guided munitions as far as we can," said Robert O. Work, the deputy defense secretary, who has been a driving force for the development of autonomous weapons. "What we want to do is just make sure that we would be able to win as quickly as we have been able to do in the past."

Just as the Industrial Revolution spurred the creation of powerful and destructive machines like airplanes and tanks that diminished the role of individual soldiers, artificial intelligence technology is enabling the Pentagon to reorder the places of man and machine on the battlefield the same way it is transforming ordinary life with computers that can see, hear and speak and cars that can drive themselves.

The new weapons would offer speed and precision unmatched by any human while reducing the number - and cost - of soldiers and pilots exposed to potential death and dismemberment in battle. The challenge for the Pentagon is to ensure that the weapons are reliable partners for humans and not potential threats to them.

At the core of the strategic shift envisioned by the Pentagon is a concept that officials call centaur warfighting. Named for the half-man and half-horse in Greek mythology, the strategy emphasizes human control and autonomous weapons as ways to augment and magnify the creativity and problem-solving skills of soldiers, pilots and sailors, not replace them.

The weapons, in the Pentagon's vision, would be less like the Terminator and more like the comic-book superhero Iron Man, Mr. Work said in an interview.

"There's so much fear out there about killer robots and Skynet," the murderous artificial intelligence network of the "Terminator" movies, Mr. Work said. "That's not the way we envision it at all."

When it comes to decisions over life and death, "there will always be a man in the loop," he said.

Beyond the Pentagon, though, there is deep skepticism that such limits will remain in place once the technologies to create thinking weapons are perfected. Hundreds of scientists and experts warned in an open letter last year that developing even the dumbest of intelligent weapons risked setting off a global arms race. The result, the letter warned, would be fully independent robots that can kill, and are cheap and as readily available to rogue states and violent extremists as they are to great powers.

"Autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow," the letter said.

The debate within the military is no longer about whether to build autonomous weapons but how much independence to give them. Gen. Paul J. Selva of the Air Force, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said recently that the United States was about a decade away from having the technology to build a fully independent robot that could decide on its own whom and when to kill, though it had no intention of building one.

Other countries were not far behind, and it was very likely that someone would eventually try to unleash "something like a Terminator," General Selva said, invoking what seems to be a common reference in any discussion on autonomous weapons.

Yet American officials are only just beginning to contend with the implications of weapons that could someday operate independently, beyond the control of their developers. Inside the Pentagon, the quandary is known as the Terminator conundrum, and there is no consensus about whether the United States should seek international treaties to try to ban the creation of those weapons, or build its own to match those its enemies might create.

For now, though, the current state of the art is decidedly less frightening. Exhibit A: the small, unarmed drone tested this summer on Cape Cod.

It could not turn itself on and just fly off. It had to be told by humans where to go and what to look for. But once aloft, it decided on its own how to execute its orders.

The software powering the drone has been in development for about a year, and it was far from flawless during the day of trials. In one pass over the mosque, the drone struggled to decide whether a minaret was an architectural feature or an armed man, living up to its namesake, Bender, the bumbling robot in the animated television series "Futurama."

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Capt. Mike Malandra, center, the ground branch head for the science and technology division at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, observed the drone test. Credit... Hilary Swift for The New York Times

At other moments, though, the drone showed a spooky ability to discern soldier from civilian, and to fluidly shift course and move in on objects it could not quickly identify.

Armed with a variation of human and facial recognition software used by American intelligence agencies, the drone adroitly tracked moving cars and picked out enemies hiding along walls. It even correctly figured out that no threat was posed by a photographer who was crouching, camera raised to eye level and pointed at the drone, a situation that has confused human soldiers with fatal results.

The project is run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, which is developing the software needed for machines that could work with small units of soldiers or Marines as scouts or in other roles.

Unlike the drones currently used by the military, all of which require someone at a remote control, "this one doesn't," said Maj. Christopher Orlowski of the Army, a program manager at Darpa. "It works with you. It's like having another head in the fight."

It could also easily be armed. The tricky part is developing machines whose behavior is predictable enough that they can be safely deployed, yet flexible enough that they can handle fluid situations. Once that is mastered, telling it whom or what to shoot is easy; weapons programmed to hit only certain kinds of targets already exist.

Yet the behavioral technology, if successfully developed, is unlikely to remain solely in American hands. Technologies developed at Darpa do not typically remain secret, and many are now ubiquitous, powering everything from self-driving cars to the internet.

Since the 1950s, United States military strategy has been based on overwhelming technological advantages. A superior nuclear arsenal provided the American edge in the early days of the Cold War, and guided munitions - the so-called smart bombs of the late 20th century - did the same in the conflict's final decade.

Joe Kehoe of the engineering team gave instructions before the drill. Credit... Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Those advantages have now evaporated, and of all the new technologies that have emerged in recent decades, such as genomics or miniaturization, "the one thing that has the widest application to the widest number of D.O.D. missions is artificial intelligence and autonomy," Mr. Work said.

Today's software has its limits, though. Computers spot patterns far faster than any human can. But the ability to handle uncertainty and unpredictability remain uniquely human virtues, for now.

Bringing the two complementary skill sets together is the Pentagon's goal with centaur warfighting.

Mr. Work, 63, first proposed the concept when he led a Washington think tank, the Center for a New American Security. His inspiration, he said, was not found in typical sources of military strategy - Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, for instance - but in the work of Tyler Cowen, a blogger and economist at George Mason University.

In his 2013 book, "Average Is Over," Mr. Cowen briefly mentioned how two average human chess players, working with three regular computers, were able to beat both human chess champions and chess-playing supercomputers.

It was a revelation for Mr. Work. You could "use the tactical ingenuity of the computer to improve the strategic ingenuity of the human," he said.

Mr. Work believes a lesson learned in chess can be applied to the battlefield, and he envisions a military supercharged by artificial intelligence. Brilliant computers would transform ordinary commanders into master tacticians. American soldiers would effectively become superhuman, fighting alongside - or even inside - robots.

Of the $18 billion the Pentagon is spending on new technologies, $3 billion has been set aside specifically for "human-machine combat teaming" over the next five years. It is a relatively small sum by Pentagon standards - its annual budget is more than $500 billion - but still a significant bet on technologies and a strategic concept that have yet to be proved in battle.

Silas Hughes monitored a drone during a test in August on Cape Cod. Credit... Hilary Swift for The New York Times

At the same time, Pentagon officials say that the United States is unlikely to gain an absolute technological advantage over its competitors.

"A lot of the A.I. and autonomy is happening in the commercial world, so all sorts of competitors are going to be able to use it in ways that surprise us," Mr. Work said.

The American advantage, he said, will ultimately come from a mix of technological prowess and the critical thinking and decision-making powers that the United States military prioritizes. The American military delegates significant decisions down its chain of command, in contrast to the more centralized Chinese and Russian armed forces, though that is changing.

"We're pretty confident that we have an advantage as we start the competition," Mr. Work said. "But how it goes over time, we're not going to make any assumptions."

Experts outside the Pentagon are far less convinced that the United States will be able to maintain its dominance by using artificial intelligence. The defense industry no longer drives research the way it did during the Cold War, and the Pentagon does not have a monopoly on the cutting-edge machine-learning technologies coming from start-ups in Silicon Valley, and in Europe and Asia.

Unlike the technologies and material needed for nuclear weapons or guided missiles, artificial intelligence as powerful as what the Pentagon seeks to harness is already deeply woven into everyday life. Military technology is often years behind what can be picked up at Best Buy.

"Let's be honest, American defense contractors can be really cutting edge on some things and really behind the curve on others," said Maj. Brian Healy, 38, an F-35 pilot. The F-35, America's newest and most technologically advanced fighter jet, is equipped with a voice command system that is good for changing channels on the radio, and not much else.

A pause during a test of a military drone, programmed to recognize fighters with weapons, at a military testing range at Camp Edwards, in Massachusetts. Credit... Hilary Swift for The New York Times

"It would be great to get Apple or Google on board with some of the software development," he added.

Beyond the practical concerns, the pairing of increasingly capable automation with weapons has prompted an intensifying debate among legal scholars and ethicists. The questions are numerous, and the answers contentious: Can a machine be trusted with lethal force? Who is at fault if a robot attacks a hospital or a school? Is being killed by a machine a greater violation of human dignity than if the fatal blow is delivered by a human?

A Pentagon directive says that autonomous weapons must employ "appropriate levels of human judgment." Scientists and human rights experts say the standard is far too broad and have urged that such weapons be subject to "meaningful human control."

But would any standard hold up if the United States was faced with an adversary of near or equal might that was using fully autonomous weapons? Peter Singer, a specialist on the future of war at New America, a think tank in Washington, suggested there was an instructive parallel in the history of submarine warfare.

Like autonomous weapons, submarines jumped from the pages of science fiction to reality. During World War I, Germany's use of submarines to sink civilian ships without first ensuring the safety of the crew and passengers was seen as barbaric. The practice quickly became known as unrestricted submarine warfare, and it helped draw the United States into the war.

After the war, the United States helped negotiate an international treaty that sought to ban unrestricted submarine warfare.

Then came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. That day, it took just six hours for the United States military to disregard decades of legal and ethical norms and order unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan. American submarines went on to devastate Japan's civilian merchant fleet during World War II, in a campaign that was later acknowledged to be tantamount to a war crime.

"The point is, what happens once submarines are no longer a new technology, and we're losing?" Mr. Singer said. He added: "Think about robots, things we say we wouldn't do now, in a different kind of war."

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The Pentagon's 'Terminator Conundrum': Robots That Could Kill on Their Own (Published 2016)

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The United States has put artificial intelligence at the center of its defense strategy, with weapons that can identify targets and make decisions. Jacob Regenstein, an engineer, held a fake rifle during a test of an autonomous drone in August on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. Credit...

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Tea Time - ESMA 2015 (English Subtitles)

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This Punk Band is Made Up Entirely of Robots

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44 The Greek myth of Talos, the first robot

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44 The Greek myth of Talos, the first robot

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The Greek myth of Talos, the first robot - Adrienne Mayor

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Soon every home will have a robot helper. 

Don't worry. 

It's perfectly safe.



Written, Directed & Edited by Ruairi Robinson

Starring Max Records from "Where The Wild Things Are".

Cinematography by Macgregor

Music by Olafur Arnalds courtesy of Erased Tapes

Funded by Bord Scannan na hEireann / Irish film Board

Budget was 45k euro - for the shoot. Visual effects budget was a grand total of zeeero. I designed Blinky, modeled him in 3D and played both the his voice and the body mocap performance. And did most of the VFX. Thankfully all footage of me in the skintight mocap suit has been permanently destroyed. 

Visual effects were completed over a period of 9 months, of hell. There's a reason why you don't see too many wet CG characters in movies even with 100 million dollar budgets. It's really, really hard.

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Cynthia Breazeal: The rise of personal robots

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Cynthia Breazeal wonders: Why can we use robots on Mars, but not in our living rooms? The key, she says, is in training robots to interact with people. Now she dreams up and builds robots that teach, learn -- and play. Watch for amazing demo footage of a new interactive game for kids.

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What Happened to Horses Is Happening to Us

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Inside the Japanese Hotel Staffed by Robots

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A human-robot dance duet | Huang Yi & KUKA

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Robot Sophia Got Shut Down by her Creator

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A Robotic Arm Controlled by the Mind  | The New Yorker

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When it comes to the dangers posed to us by automatons, film-maker Maxim Pozdorovkin wants us to start thinking beyond what Hollywood has warned us about.

"This idea of a single, malevolent AI being that can harm us, the Terminator trope ... I think it's created a tremendous blind spot," he said to the Guardian. "[It gets us] thinking about something that we're heading towards in the future, something that will one day hurt us. If you look at the effects of automation broadly, globally, right now, it's much more pervasive. The things happening - de-skilling, the loss of human dignity associated with traditional labor - they will have a devastating effect much sooner than that long-distance threat of unchecked AI."

That isn't to say that robots can't also just reach out and crush us. In his new documentary, The Truth About Killer Robots, Pozdorovkin traces all manner of dangers - economic, psychological, moral and, yes, mortal - posed to our species by automation and robotics. At the center of his film lies the question: "when a robot kills a human, who takes the blame?"

Pozdorovkin had long sought to make a film on automation, but he had a difficult time figuring out a way to approach the subject given its scope, as well as the many misconceptions surrounding it. It wasn't until he heard about a case in Germany, where a manipulator arm crushed a line worker at a Volkswagen plant to death, that he knew he had his way in.

Using science-fiction author Isaac Asimov's First Law of Robotics - "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a being to come to harm" - as a jumping-off point, his documentary covers a sampling of deadly incidents involving automated machinery, including a couple driverless car accidents that resulted in fatalities, as well as the first intentionally lethal use of a robot by American law enforcement.

In describing how his film came to fruition, Pozdorovkin recalls, "I went [to Germany] to investigate, to talk to the workers. Most of them were forbidden from talking about the accident. But a lot of them talked about the perils of automation, the way that their work environment was made worse as the result of robots. I'm using the tropes of science fiction and true crime to make a film that investigates some of the philosophical and economic problems that automation brings with it."

The film distinguishes itself from other science documentaries thanks to its holistic approach: rather than speaking exclusively to the people behind the tech - CEOs, programmers, engineers - Pozdorovkin also interviewed members of the global labor pool - truck drivers, factory workers, gas station attendants, Swat team snipers - those whose lives and livelihoods have seen the most immediate effects of automation's disruption.

Given the dire nature of those effects, such as the hollowing-out of entire labor sectors and the rise of global inequality, you would think automation would be public enemy number one among the middle and lower classes. Yet, as a political issue, it remains on the margins. Pozdorovkin believes it's because "we're still feeling it in qualitative ways." He continues: "A lot of things that you see, like the rise in suicides amongst older white men in America, has to do with the way labor has been stripped of dignity and existential value."

Meanwhile, "anti-immigrant and anti-globalization rhetoric covers up a lot of the structural damage done by automation. It goes back to the qualitative/quantitative distinction. The economy is elastic, so way before massive job loss will be a period of broadly sucking out the skills from the labor that's involved."

Our fears over the rise of machines therefore tend to take a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic bent, a la The Terminator. Those fears are exacerbated by examples where Asimov's First Law is blatantly violated, such as when the Dallas police strapped C4 on to a robot (a bomb-detecting robot, ironically), sent it into the corner of the library where they had mass shooter Micah Johnson cornered, and triggered it, effectively killing Johnson. In the aftermath, many observers wondered if we'd entered a new stage of weaponized robotics for domestic use.

The Truth About Killer Robots. Photograph: HBO

Pozdorovkin doesn't think that there was anything that problematic about the use of the robot in this particular case. "Ultimately, had the sniper, who we interview in the film, shot [the suspect], as he had done many times before in other cases, there wouldn't be any problem. [But] sending a robot to go in and kill someone feels uncomfortable. You can't quite pinpoint it, but it touches into some kind of fundamental, uncanny, discomfort."

That sense of the uncanny is not limited to lethal examples. One of the most memorable segments in his documentary centers on Zheng Jiajia, a Chinese engineer who married a silicone sex robot that he designed himself.

The rise in robotic pleasure dolls was something that Pozdorovkin knew he had to cover, but he wanted to avoid a sensationalized approach. "I've watched and read hundreds of reports, articles, etc, about sex robots and silicone dolls. And every single one was predicated on the question of whether the sex was any good. This sounds like the most interesting thing, but it's by far the least interesting. The most interesting questions are 'what are the social factors that will bring this into the mainstream?' The obvious answer is demographics. It's just a fact that certain people will not have mates. This is exacerbated in China because of the one child policy, but it will be true around the world as inequality skyrockets."

If the results of all this new uncanniness were as simple as law enforcement using robots to supplement legally sanctioned police manoeuvres or giving lonely people a new form of emotional and physical reprieve, there wouldn't be that much to fear. But Pozdorovkin worries about the effect it will have on our individual and collective empathetic abilities. That, more than anything, may be what's truly at stake.

Pozdorovkin lays out a thought experiment: "Picture yourself driving on the highway. You decide to switch lanes, and in your sideview mirror you see a car going really fast. You don't veer over and cut off that person, because you project fallibility on to them. They could be distracted, they might have a death in the family, they could just be reckless. You're just going to let them pass and then go. But when you see that there's a robot next to you, you will drive like the biggest asshole, because the machine is programmed not to bump into you.

"And the kicker is this: once there's enough of these entities which we treat without any ethical regard, without projecting possible fallibility unto, the way we interact with them will spill over and we will be ruder, more aggressive, more inconsiderate to humans. This argument applies to sex dolls, it applies to a lot of things that we see."

Have we already crossed the point of no return? Is the current political climate throughout the west the result of this degradation of empathy, stemming perhaps from the way we communicate with each other online, where we can automate personal exchanges via a retweet, like, or eye-roll emoji - to say nothing of the way we spread vitriol?

"I think that a lot of the sheltering and toxicity that you see online is ultimately part and parcel with the shielding mechanism that the anonymity of social media permits," he says.

Ultimately, it's just one of the ways in which the takeover of machines is well under way. Even as we continue to reel from the pace at which it is happening, those in charge of, or with access to, the technology - the corporate owners, the military, the police - will not hesitate to use it. Nor will they concern themselves with "the philosophical consequences and complications of breaking Asimov's Law".

And what about his own field: the movies? Can the people in front of and behind the camera expect to lose their jobs to robots, the same way those in manufacturing and the service industry have? Pozdorovkin thinks it entirely plausible.

"Artists have become shameless in promoting our absolute immunity from this. But if you look at the economic data, the exact same thing that happened to all of these other industries is happening to the arts."

Rather than attempt to fight against this new paradigm, The Truth About Killer Robots embraces the inevitability, using an android robot (originally designed to read the news on Japanese television) and automated narrator as its face and voice.

"It's cheaper, easier, more flexible. But most importantly, it's a way for us to be honest about the process. The worst thing that we could have done was hire a James Earl Jones sound-alike to add human gravitas to the story."

It's a fitting choice, considering that the medium of film - like the broader story of this moment in history - no longer belongs first and foremost to humanity.

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The Truth About Killer Robots: the year's most terrifying documentary

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When it comes to the dangers posed to us by automatons, film-maker Maxim Pozdorovkin wants us to start thinking beyond what Hollywood has warned us about. "This idea of a single, malevolent AI being that can harm us, the Terminator trope ... I think it's created a tremendous blind spot," he said to the Guardian.

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We played with Aibo: Sony's $2,899 robot dog

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‘Killer robots’: AI experts call for boycott over lab at South Korea university

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Academics around the world voice ‘huge concern’ over KAIST’s collaboration with defence company on autonomous weapons

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Elaine Herzberg

Was killed last Sunday by an Uber autonomous car that hit the 49-year-old at approximately 40mph as she was crossing the road in Tempe, Arizona. Police confirmed there was an operator in the Volvo SUV at the time of the collision, and stated that it didn't appear the car had slowed down.

Robert Williams

Cited as the first human killed by a robot, Williams was an assembly worker at Ford's Flat Rock plant in Michigan. He was crushed to death by the arm of a one-tonne robot on the production line on 25 January 1979. His family was awarded $10m in damages. The court concluded that he was struck on the head due to inadequate safety measures.

Surgery patients

While robot-assisted surgery has allowed surgeons to perform operations remotely with minimal invasiveness, a 2016 US study found that it was linked to the deaths of 144 people between 2008 and 2013. Causes of death included parts falling into patients' bodies, machines turning off/on at the wrong time and loss of video feeds. "Despite widespread adoption of robotic systems... a non-negligible number of technical difficulties and complications are still being experienced during procedures," the study said.

Micah Johnson

Believed to be the first person killed by a police robot. In July 2016, Johnson was involved in a standoff with Dallas law enforcement after fatally shooting five officers and injuring seven others. Police attached a block of C-4 explosive to a bomb-disposal robot and detonated it when it was near the suspect. "We saw no other option," said the Dallas police chief.

Nine South African soldiers

In October 2007, an Oerlikon GDF-005 semi-autonomous anti-aircraft gun jammed and exploded before firing 250 high-explosive rounds at soldiers who were training with it. The weapon is capable of tracking targets and reloading automatically. "I think it is bad luck more than anything else," one expert told the New Scientist.

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Death by robot: the new mechanised danger in our changing world

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Was killed last Sunday by an Uber autonomous car that hit the 49-year-old at approximately 40mph as she was crossing the road in Tempe, Arizona. Police confirmed there was an operator in the Volvo SUV at the time of the collision, and stated that it didn't appear the car had slowed down.

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Boston Dynamics Spot hands-on: new dog, new tricks

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"Machines could take 50% of jobs in the next 30 years" 
Moshe Vardi, Professor of computer science, Rice University 

Meet Alice, holder of the last recognisable job on Earth, trying to make sense of her role in an automated world.

'The Last Job on Earth' is a film produced in collaboration with the Guardian Sustainable Business section.

See the full article on The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/17/automation-may-mean-a-post-work-society-but-we-shouldnt-be-afraid

Produced, Directed & Designed by Moth 
Lead Animator - Carlos De Faria
2D Animation by Moth & Sabine Volkert 
3D Animation by Claudio Salas
Compositing by Moth & Claudio Salas
Artworking by Moth, Stephen Vuillemin, Sabine Volkert & Frankie Swan
Sound & Music by Box of Toys Audio

Guardian Team:

Commissioning Editors - Tess Riley, Laura Paddison
Writer and Creative Director - Alistair Campbell
Senior Producer - Lucile Weigel
Executive Producer -  Amelie von Harrach
Script editor - Frances Polletti
Supported by - Doen Foundation

Client - The Guardian 
Production Year -  2016

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Ex Machina Official Trailer #1 (2015) - Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac Movie HD

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Professor Einstein Robot: Your Personal Genius

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hen I was young, the ideal woman was said to be a deaf and mute nymphomaniac who lived above a pub. These days, I have a grudging fondness for this cliche: at least this imaginary woman is a creature of desire. And human. "Nympho" is so of its time and used to be said of any woman who was not a virgin.

Apparently, though, we are in the midst of another sexual revolution, in which the new ideal woman will be a robot; lifelike dolls that feel real and communicate their "needs". I am not sure whether revolution is the right word but that is the one being used. The authors of a report from the Foundation for Responsible Robotics suggest that sex robots could provide help for people who find it hard to have intimate relationships: people in care homes, people with dementia, people with disabilities. This might be a noble idea were we to accept that everyone must be enabled to have sex as a human right; that this is all somehow therapeutic. The reality is more basic. Those in the business of manufacturing sex robots for "people" are actually making simulations of women to be bought by men.

Some of these critters can speak and be programmed from a tablet. Their orifices are made to feel as lifelike as possible. Some can be put in "frigid" mode if that is your thing and you want to force it. Isn't this all hunky-dory?

There are lots of pluses to having sex with a robot. You can do what you like, indulge any fantasy you want and no one gets hurt. This is why they may stop rapists raping or be used in threesomes when bringing in another person is too much of a risk to the relationship. Cyborg sex opens up a world of possibility. In theory.

In practice, these are sophisticated masturbatory aids. What's the big deal when there are already loads of such aids on the market? For the ultimate blowjob, a severed head-type thing can be bought; so why not attach it to a body? Why not give the body soft skin and perfectly moulded labia? Sex, after all, is largely in the head, isn't it?

This thrilling version of the future is here. The dolls are available. In March, a brothel in Barcelona opened, offering LumiDolls that could be dressed in a certain way and that waited in the position the customer requested. They would be "properly disinfected with special antibacterial soaps before and after use". Sexy! The place closed within a month but some argue that these robot dolls will help stop girls being trafficked into sex work. Others suggest that if the robots begin to have something approximating consciousness, the automated sex workers should have rights. All kinds of ethical discussions can be had, but what is striking is that sex robots are not being created in a neutral world but a gendered one.

Indeed, much of the excited discussion around automation and technology ignores gender completely. We often read that within 20 years between 40% and 50% of jobs will be automated. This is one of the arguments for a universal basic income. But whose jobs? Who will do the childcare? What happens when leisure is also fully automated? Does that just mean men can spend more time satisfying their robot sex workers?

To question all this is not to be anti-technology. Feminists such as Donna Haraway have long seen radical potential in the idea of cyborgs. She saw how their creation would make us rethink the very nature of identity and self. We are already so enmeshed with technology that having sex with machines is not much of a leap. South Korea aims for every house to have a robot by 2020. Japan markets sex dolls and all manner of popular culture in which intimacy is achieved via tech rather than human connection.

On sites such as Breitbart and Reddit, such objections about the objectification of women are laughed at by men who are already immersed in a world of porn and video games, and exhausted by actual women banging on about consent. They celebrate the dispensability of picky flesh-and-blood women as a message to feminists. There is a line, though, that even macho libertarians are loath to cross. No one seems comfortable with sex dolls that look like children. The argument that they can "help" paedophiles remains dubious, but to ban these things would require international cooperation. The owner of one child doll shipped from Japan has been charged with possessing child pornography in Canada.

This is the difficulty with the embodiment of fantasies. If it is not OK to masturbate into a replica of a child, why is it OK to do so with a replica of an adult female? For this is what is happening: an acceptance that catering to the sexual demands of men is lucrative and inevitable. This is part of a far bigger cultural question about the privileging of male desire. A technology driven by masturbatory fantasy is not a technology that enhances the lives of boringly unprogammable women. An actual revolution would be technology driven by a different set of "needs" altogether. But that's the trouble with women. We demand.

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Sex robots: innovation driven by male masturbatory fantasy is no revolution | Suzanne Moore

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hen I was young, the ideal woman was said to be a deaf and mute nymphomaniac who lived above a pub. These days, I have a grudging fondness for this cliche: at least this imaginary woman is a creature of desire. And human.

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A mother leaves her kids to the care of a robot. Then an unexpected bond is formed. | The iMom

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For New Scientist #tomgauld #science #robot #cartoon

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Do Robots Deserve Rights? What if Machines Become Conscious?

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16 The rise of the machines - why automation is different this time

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16 The rise of the machines - why automation is different this time

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The Rise of the Machines – Why Automation is Different this Time

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an machines think - and, if so, can they think critically about race and gender? Recent reports have shown that machine-learning systems are picking up racist and sexist ideas embedded in the language patterns they are fed by human engineers. The idea that machines can be as bigoted as people is an uncomfortable one for anyone who still believes in the moral purity of the digital future, but there's nothing new or complicated about it. "Machine learning" is a fancy way of saying "finding patterns in data". Of course, as Lydia Nicholas, senior researcher at the innovation thinktank Nesta, explains, all this data "has to have been collected in the past, and since society changes, you can end up with patterns that reflect the past. If those patterns are used to make decisions that affect people's lives you end up with unacceptable discrimination."

Robots have been racist and sexist for as long as the people who created them have been racist and sexist, because machines can work only from the information given to them, usually by the white, straight men who dominate the fields of technology and robotics. As long ago as 1986, the medical school at St George's hospital in London was found guilty of racial and sexual discrimination when it automated its admissions process based on data collected in the 1970s. The program looked at the sort of candidates who had been successful in the past, and gave similar people interviews. Unsurprisingly, the people the computer considered suitable were male, and had names that looked Anglo-Saxon.

Automation is a great excuse for assholery - after all, it's just numbers, and the magic of "big data" can provide plausible deniability for prejudice. Machine learning, as the technologist Maciej Cegłowski observed, can function in this way as "money laundering" for bias.

This is a problem, and it will become a bigger problem unless we take active measures to fix it. We are moving into an era when "smart" machines will have more and more influence on our lives. The moral economy of machines is not subject to oversight in the way that human bureaucracies are. Last year Microsoft created a chatbot, Tay, which could "learn" and develop as it engaged with users on social media. Within hours it had pledged allegiance to Hitler and started repeating "alt-right" slogans - which is what happens when you give Twitter a baby to raise. Less intentional but equally awkward instances of robotic intolerance keep cropping up, as when one Google image search using technology "trained" to recognise faces based on images of Caucasians included African-American people among its search results for gorillas.

These, however, are only the most egregious examples. Others - ones we might not notice on a daily basis - are less likely to be spotted and fixed. As more of the decisions affecting our daily lives are handed over to automatons, subtler and more insidious shifts in the way we experience technology, from our dealings with banks and business to our online social lives, will continue to be based on the baked-in bigotries of the past - unless we take steps to change that trend.

Should we be trying to build robots with the capacity for moral judgment? Should technologists be constructing AIs that can implement basic assessments about justice and fairness? I have a horrible feeling I've seen that movie, and it doesn't end well for human beings. There are other frightening futures, however, and one of them is the society where we allow the weary bigotries of the past to become written into the source code of the present.

Machines learn language by gobbling up and digesting huge bodies of all the available writing that exists online. What this means is that the voices that dominated the world of literature and publishing for centuries - the voices of white, western men - are fossilised into the language patterns of the instruments influencing our world today, along with the assumptions those men had about people who were different from them. This doesn't mean robots are racist: it means people are racist, and we're raising robots to reflect our own prejudices.

Human beings, after all, learn our own prejudices in a very similar way. We grow up understanding the world through the language and stories of previous generations. We learn that "men" can mean "all human beings", but "women" never does - and so we learn that to be female is to be other - to be a subclass of person, not the default. We learn that when our leaders and parents talk about how a person behaves to their "own people", they sometimes mean "people of the same race" - and so we come to understand that people of a different skin tone to us are not part of that "we". We are given one of two pronouns in English - he or she - and so we learn that gender is a person's defining characteristic, and there are no more than two. This is why those of us who are concerned with fairness and social justice often work at the level of language - and why when people react to having their prejudices confronted, they often complain about "language policing", as if the use of words could ever be separated from the worlds they create.

Language itself is a pattern for predicting human experience. It does not just describe our world - it shapes it too. The encoded bigotries of machine learning systems give us an opportunity to see how this works in practice. But human beings, unlike machines, have moral faculties - we can rewrite our own patterns of prejudice and privilege, and we should.

Sometimes we fail to be as fair and just as we would like to be - not because we set out to be bigots and bullies, but because we are working from assumptions we have internalised about race, gender and social difference. We learn patterns of behaviour based on bad, outdated information. That doesn't make us bad people, but nor does it excuse us from responsibility for our behaviour. Algorithms are expected to update their responses based on new and better information, and the moral failing occurs when people refuse to do the same. If a robot can do it, so can we.

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Robots are racist and sexist. Just like the people who created them | Laurie Penny

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an machines think - and, if so, can they think critically about race and gender? Recent reports have shown that machine-learning systems are picking up racist and sexist ideas embedded in the language patterns they are fed by human engineers.

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Roxxxy TrueCompanion: World's First Sex Robot?

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Oxford University academics Michael Osborne and Carl Frey calculated how susceptible to automation each job is based on nine key skills required to perform it; social perceptiveness, negotiation, persuasion, assisting and caring for others, originality, fine arts, finger dexterity, manual dexterity and the need to work in a cramped work space.

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Oxford University academics Michael Osborne and Carl Frey calculated how susceptible to automation each job is based on nine key skills required to perform it; social perceptiveness, negotiation, persuasion, assisting and caring for others, originality, fine arts, finger dexterity, manual dexterity and the need to work in a cramped work space.

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(6 Videos)  good intro, see 32 The New Aibo

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new video loaded: The Family Dog

Recent episodes in Bits | Robotica

At the leading edge of technology, robots are poised to change the way we do business and conduct our daily lives. Top roboticists, researchers and artists bring you into their labs to explore innovations and ask the tough questions about where robots are going.

At the leading edge of technology, robots are poised to change the way we do business and conduct our daily lives. Top roboticists, researchers and artists bring you into their labs to explore innovations and ask the tough questions about where robots are going.

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Bits | Robotica - The New York Times (Published 2015)

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At the leading edge of technology, robots are poised to change the way we do business and conduct our daily lives. Top roboticists, researchers and artists bring you into their labs to explore innovations and ask the tough questions about where robots are going.

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(Infographic)

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BBC Radio 4 - The Rise of the Robots, Will robots take over?

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Adam Rutherford asks whether or not humanity will be enslaved by intelligent robots.

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(Infographic)

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(Infographic)