fooled by computers. Several years ago a friend asked me how the self-service checkout could recognize different fruit and vegetables. I hypothesized a classification algorithm, based on color and shape. But then my friend pointed out the CCTV display behind me with a human operator doing the classification. The boundary between machine and man is quickly blurring. Even experts in the field can be mistaken. A Turing Red Flag law will help keep this boundary sharp. Third, humans are often quick to assign computers with more capabilities than they actually possess. The last example illustrates this. As another example, I let some students play with an Aibo robot dog, and they quickly started to ascribe the Aibo with emotions and feelings, neither of which the Aibo has. Autonomous systems will be fooling us as human long before they actually are capable to act like humans. Fourth, one of the most dangerous times for any new technological is when the technology is first being adopted, and society has not yet adjusted to it. It may well be, as with motor cars today, society decides to repeal any Turing Red Flag laws once AI systems become the norm. But while they are rare, we might well choose to act a little more cautiously.

In many U.S. states, as well as many countries of the world including Australia, Canada, and Germany, you must be informed if your telephone conversation is about to be recorded. Perhaps in the future it will be routine to hear, “You are about to interact with an AI bot. If you do not wish to do so, please press 1 and a real person will come on the line shortly.”

 

References

1. Colford, P. A leap forward in quarterly earnings stories. Associated Press blog announcement, 2014; https://blog.ap.org/announcements/a-leap-forward-in-quarterly-earnings-stories.

2. Turing, A. Computing machinery and intelligence.

MIND: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 59, 236 (1950), 433–460.

3. Wallace, R., Melton, H., and Schlesinger, R. Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs, from Communism to al-Qaeda. Dutton Adult, 2008.

4. Weizenbaum, J. Eliza—A computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Commun. ACM 9, 1 (Jan. 1966), 36–45.

 

Toby Walsh ( [e-mail]) is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales, and Data61, Sydney, Australia. He was recently elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences.

Copyright held by author.

therapeutic tool to help such patients. Again, some people find it troubling that a robot seal can be mistaken for real. Imagine then how much more troubling society is going to find it when such patients mistake AI systems for humans?

Let’s move onto a third example, online poker. This is a multibillion-dollar industry so it is possible to say that the stakes are high. Most, if not all, online poker sites already ban computer bots from playing. Bots have a number of advantages, certainly over weaker players. They never tire. They can compute odds very accurately. They can track historical play very accurately. Of course, in the current state of the art, they also have disadvantages such as understanding the psychology of their opponents. Nevertheless, in the interest of fairness, I suspect most human poker players would prefer to know if any of their opponents was not human. A similar argument could be made for other online computer games. You might want to know if you’re being “killed” easily because your opponent is a computer bot with lightning-fast reflexes.

I conclude with a fourth example: computer-generated text. Associated Press now generates most of its U.S. corporate earnings reports using a computer program developed by Automated Insights. 1 A narrow interpretation might rule such computer-generated text outside the scope of a Turing Red Flag law. Text-generation algorithms are typically not autonomous.

Indeed, they are typically not interac-
tive. However, if we consider a longer
time scale, then such algorithms are
interacting in some way with the real
world, and they may well be mistaken
for human-generated text. Personally,
I would prefer to know whether I was
reading text written by human or com-
puter—it is likely to impact my emo-
tional engagement with the text. But I
fully accept that we are now in a grey
area. You might be happy for automati-
cally generated tables of stock prices
and weather maps to be unidentified
as computer generated, but perhaps
you do want match reports to be identi-
fied as such? What if the commentary
on the TV show covering the World
Cup Final is not Messi, one of the best
footballers ever, but a computer that
just happens to sound like Messi? And
should you be informed if the beauti-
ful piano music being played on the
radio is composed by Chopin or by a
computer in the style of Chopin? These
examples illustrate that we still have
some way to go working out where to
draw the line with any Turing Red Flag
law. But I would argue, there is a line to
be drawn somewhere here.

There are several arguments that can be raised against a Turing Red Flag law. One argument is that it’s way too early to be worrying about this problem now. Indeed, by flagging this problem today, we’re just adding to the hype around AI systems breaking bad. There are several reasons why I discount this argument. First, autonomous vehicles are likely only a few years away. In June 2011, Nevada’s Governor signed into law AB 511, the first legislation anywhere in the world that explicitly permits autonomous vehicles. As I mentioned earlier, I find it surprising that the bill says nothing about the need for autonomous vehicles to identify themselves. In Germany, autonomous vehicles are currently prohibited based on the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Traffic to which Germany and 72 other countries follow. However, the German transport minister formed a committee in February 2015 to draw up the legal framework that would make autonomous vehicles permissible on German roads. This committee has been asked to present a draft of the key points in such a framework before the Frankfurt car fair in September 2015. We may therefore already be running late to ensure autonomous vehicles identify themselves on German roads. Second, many of us have already been

I suspect most
human poker players
would prefer
to know if any
of their opponents
was not human.