Robots Encourage Risk-Taking Behavior in Humans

 Fascinating premise, but highly context dependent,  would not go into a project with this idea strongly held.  Has some relationship to the 'Media Equation' concept, where trust where we trust robots more because they apparently have no hidden motives.    We used that method to drive us to assistant models. 

'The Robot Made Me Do It': Robots Encourage Risk-Taking Behavior in Humans By University of Southampton

Robots can encourage humans to take greater risks in a simulated gambling scenario than they would if the robot is silent, research shows. Increasing understanding of whether robots can affect risk-taking could have clear ethical, practical, and policy implications, according to "The Robot Made Me Do It: Human-Robot Interaction and Risk-Taking Behavior," published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

The research involved 180 undergraduate students taking the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), a computer assessment that asks participants to press the spacebar on a keyboard to inflate a balloon displayed on the screen. With each press of the spacebar, the balloon inflates slightly, and 1 penny is added to the player's "temporary money bank." The balloons can explode randomly, meaning the player loses any money they have won for that balloon and they have the option to "cash-in" before this happens and move on to the next balloon.

One-third of the participants took the test in a room on their own, one third took the test alongside a robot that only provided instructions but was silent the rest of the time, and the third group took the test with the robot providing instruction as well as speaking statements such as, "Why did you stop pumping?"

The results showed that the group who were encouraged by the robot took more risks, blowing up their balloons significantly more frequently than those in the other groups did. They also earned more money overall.

"On the one hand, our results might raise alarms about the prospect of robots causing harm by increasing risky behavior," says Yaniv Hanoch, associate professor in risk management at the University of Southampton who led the study. "On the other hand, our data points to the possibility of using robots, and AI, in preventive programs such as anti-smoking campaigns in schools, and with hard to reach populations, such as addicts."

From University of Southampton

Robots Persuasive?

An area we looked at in some detail.    Depends in part what we mean by 'robot'.  A physical representation of a person  or a screen image image.

Researchers explore what makes robots 'persuasive' to humans
by University of Toronto

The jelly bean experiment: PhD candidate Shane Saunderson conducted an exploratory study of persuasion strategies to observe which method would most influence a human’s decision. Credit: Shane Saunderson

A new study by researchers at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering explores how robots persuade and build trust with humans. The research could guide the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the next generation of socially assistive robots to aid in health care and other fields.

"My research aims to uncover behaviours and approaches that cause robots to be more persuasive to people," says Shane Saunderson, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering. "That can manifest as body language, or verbal strategies to approach people."  ... "

Computers Too Human

Saw some of this in our own chatbot testing.     Also famously mentioned in studies of how people react to obviously non-human images in chat interactions, like in the Media Equation.   Is the testing of this idea reasonably designed here?

Sometimes, Computer Programs Seem Too Human for Their Own Good
In The Economist

Researchers at Chungbuk National University in South Korea say they have demonstrated that increasingly human-like machines can invoke feelings of embarrassment in people, making some users hesitant to use assistive artificial intelligence. One experiment involved almost 200 volunteers who initially believed intelligence to be unchangeable, but who felt more embarrassed and incompetent after tests in which they were presented with 16 sets of three words and attempted to think of a fourth word that linked them, with half of the cohort given hints accompanied by an anthropomorphic computer-shaped icon. A second experiment permitted a different set of participants to ask for help rather than having it forced on them at random, which led to similar results. The researchers concluded some people appear to want to avoid losing face by seeking help from an anthropomorphic icon, suggesting there are situations in which the aggressive pseudo-humanization of machine-human interactions could usefully be reduced. .... "

Why we are Social

Something to think about whenever we do Social.   I note Davis mentions Byron Reeves, who we used as the basis for some of our work with consumer facing chatbots.  His book,  The Media Equation, is worth a look.

Why Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing  By Jim Davis  In Nautil.us

ave you ever been walking in a dark alley and seen something that you thought was a crouching person, but it turned out to be a garbage bag or something similarly innocuous? Me too.

Have you ever seen a person crouching in a dark alley and mistaken it for a garbage bag? Me neither. Why does the error go one way and not the other?

Human beings are intensely social animals. We live in hierarchical social environments in which our comfort, reproduction, and very survival depend on our relationships with other people. As a result, we are very good at thinking about things in social ways. In fact, some scientists have argued that the evolutionary arms race for strategic social thinking—either for competition, for cooperation, or both—was a large part of why we became so intelligent as a species. .... " 

Polite Software

This piece mentions Byron Reeves research in UXMatters:

The 14 Characteristics of Polite Software, Part 1  By Awais Imran

With a list of 'polite' (human?) aspects of conversation.  Are we polite?  Do we expect software to be polite?   We tried to make our bots informative, engaging, not argumentative.  But polite was not mentioned.  Never heard the term used with software.  We expected:  transparent, at least surface-logical and data-based, complete, useful...

People Treat New Media Like Real People
The Media Equation.  Why is designing polite software important? In the 1990s, Stanford professors Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass conducted a number of experiments that proved people treat computers and new media just like they treat other people. They published their findings in The Media Equation.  .... " 

Bots in the UnCanny Valley

The 'Uncanny Valley'  is a term used in the physical representation of people in android form,  as they get closer to reality we get uneasy. Now it has been suggested that the way bots chat is also reaching that.  I have conversed with bots where they seemed to have a personality.  Even the tone of Alexa when she says something like 'Good Night', can invoke an oddly social but uncanny feeling.  But a longer conversation,  which expects basic human performance, soon breaks that spell. So are we soon likely to combine image features and chat speech?  Will that be more or less disconcerting?

Chatbots Have Entered the Uncanny Valley 
The Atlantic,  Kaveh Waddell

The tendency for people to be repelled by increasingly humanoid and human-like robots may extend to chatbots and digital assistants as well. "The more human-like a system acts, the broader the expectations that people may have for it," says Carnegie Mellon University professor Justine Cassell. Modern chatbots use banter and humor, conversational speech, and parsing free-form questions and answers to coax users into engaging with them in more a human-like manner. "This creates a perception that if you say anything to this bot, it should respond to it," says Autodesk engineer Nikhil Mane. This makes for situations in which user requests exceed the bot's limitations, and the subsequent errors serve to remind users of the assistant's artificiality. Mane says a better approach for bots is to make users aware of their constraints, such as prompting  ... " 

Looking More Closely at a Voice Retail Channel

Is Amazon’s Alexa a threat to rival retailers?
The author starts a conversation remarking on how much her family has taken to voice ordering.     Does every kind of assistant insert their 'voice' into an interaction?  A sales voice is meant to sell. A work voice could be 'focus'.  Other adjustable voices?

In Retailwire: 

  " ... After hearing about the girl who loves Alexa and watching my own kids, I have a feeling the human tendency is going to be to relate to anything that is moderately human as human — even when they know it’s not. I’m also certain that retailers struggling to compete against Amazon need to think a lot more about what kind of personality and trust people are projecting on to services like Alexa. Increasingly, they may find they are not competing against some wacky bald guy and an internet behemoth. They are competing against Alexa, my kids’ favorite disembodied voice. ... " .

 I no longer have children around,  so have not seen this.  We order a bit vocally, but not very much.   But is this aspect of AI,  known since the 70s, to trust the human-like as well.  See the book Media Equation conversation (below)  for more ...

Discussion is interesting there too.

The Kuri Home Robot

I attended an introductory presentation on Bosch's Kuri home robotic system today.  This is a two foot high moving robot with eyes.   The eyes it have an embedded video camera,  so can transfer HD images it sees to a smartphone App.

The use of eyes immediately reminded me of the studies that have been done that showed that the anthropomorphic addition of eyes can increase our engagement with a system.  (See Media Equation Tag Below)  So this can be interpreted as having a personality.  Perhaps most useful in a household with children.

The device can roll around, can interpret and obey commands, can do voice and face recognition.  It has no voice itself,  but can act as a speaker delivering music.  It can't talk, but can communicate via a simple code of chirps for Yes, No or Hello.  Works with the IFTTT rule engine.

Also very interesting, it claims to be able to learn a home space, and how the inhabitants use the space.  That's all I know now, you can learn much more here.  Its expensive at US $699, not yet available, but you can pre-order at the link and then buy at a discount..   More technical details.    And a blog.   Lots of videos at the links.

Some things that come up immediately.   Charging, how does it deal with stairs and carpets,  it is shown with children,  what are the COPPA implications in the US ....  ?

Exploring the Uncanny Valley of Bots

Have long been a student and practitioner of engineering how people react to intelligent machines. And here we mean by a depth beyond just posing and answering questions, but how people actually engage, trust and build some relationship with machines.

One aspect of this,  that came out of robotics, is the idea of an 'uncanny valley', where people are averse to machines that seem too human-like.  Can also be applied to bots, as described below.  From the CACM:

The Edge of the Uncanny By Gregory Mone 
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 59 No. 9, Pages 17-19

" ... Mitsuku is quick-witted, occasionally confusing, and strangely engaging. She is also a chatbot, built from the A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) platform originally developed by Richard Wallace in 1995. She conducts hundreds of thousands of conversations daily, according to Lauren Kunze, principal of Pandorabots, the Oakland, CA-based company behind the technology. "She doesn't really do anything," Kunze says. "She's not designed to assist you. She can tell you the weather or perform an Internet search, but she's really just there to talk to you, and she's wildly popular with teens. People say, 'I love you' and 'you're my best friend.'"

The appeal is not accidental. The designers of chatbots like Mitsuku and the engineers of physical social robots have made significant advances in their understanding of how to build more engaging machines. Yet there are still many challenges, one of which is the unpredictability of humans. "We just don't understand how people are going to react to physical or software robots," says University of Southern California computer scientist Yolanda Gil, chair of SIGAI, ACM's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence. "This is one kind of technology where people continue to surprise us."

While there are no absolute guidelines for building effective social robots or engaging chatbots, a few common themes have emerged.

Uncanny Expectations

One frequently cited theory in social robotics is the Uncanny Valley, first described by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. The Uncanny Valley contends there is a risk in building machines that are too human, that instead of attracting people, realistic androids can have a repulsive effect because of their "uncanny" resemblance to real humans. The reasons for the aversion are varied. Researchers have found evidence that highly capable androids bother people because they represent a threat to human uniqueness, or that on a subconscious level, they actually remind us of corpses. ... " 

Should we Create Humanlike Robots

In IEEE Spectrum:  Sure, we will do it, and are doing it, if only for their capability of getting attention.  But will there be actual value in mimicking ourselves?   Or danger?  Reminds me of the 'Media Equation', which we aimed to use to create engagement.   Now new Chatbots are here again, looking for human leverage.

Turing Test Breakthrough, Could Mr Clean do Better?

The Turing Test is the classic test for AI.  Can a machine consistently fool a person into thinking it is a person rather than a machine?  Article claims that just this weekend a milestone has been passed.   Not a technical source, so its hard to place complete reliance on this reporting.  Update: Some skeptics ...  See also the WP article on the Turing Test here. The article does give a nice non technical overview of the test and related issues.  I would not worry that this in particular warns of a dangerous future, machines can already fool many people most of the time, even when they have their guard up.  That has fascinating implications for marketing.  See my notes on The Media Equation.   See also my notes on how we tried to make Mr. Clean beat the Turing Test.

Decision Making Science

New and of interest:

Thinking: the New Science of  Decision Making, Problem solving and Prediction.
CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel C. Dennett, Philip Tetlock, Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Gilbert, Vilayanur Ramacahndran. Timothy D. Wilson, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Bruce Hood, Simon Baron-Cohen, Gary Klein, Simon Schnall, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Alva Noe, Daniel L. Everett, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, Sam Harris, Roy Baumeister, Paul Bloom, Daivd Pizarro, Joshua Knobe, Daniel Kahneman

"Thinking is excellent and mind-expanding in its entirety. Complement it with Brockman's This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking, one of the best psychology books of 2012."
--Maria Popova, BRAIN PICKING

"For ... readers interested in keeping up with what serious thinkers are thinking about thinking, this book offers nourishing food for thought".  (Kirkus Reviews)

Multitasking Influencing the Brain

In Fast Company:  On multitasking.  Our shiny new devices allow us to do this creatively, all the time.  There has been debate about how ultimately this effects our productivity and lives.  Here new findings in this area.  Tough talk.  By  Stanford researcher whose work we used:  Clifford Nass: (I see he has a new book out: The Man Who Lied to his Laptop, exploring)

  " ...  As Nass told NPR, if you think you're good at multitasking, you aren't:

. . . We have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can't filter out irrelevancy. They can't manage a working memory. They're chronically distracted.
They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand. And . . . they're even terrible at multitasking. When we ask them to multitask, they're actually worse at it. So they're pretty much mental wrecks. ... " 

Tamagotchi to Re Hatch in 2014

Hard to believe it was over seventeen years ago, then we examined the Tamagotchi by  Bandai 'pets' as a means to connect with consumers.  They were a true craze then.  Children, even adults were feeding and caring for them.  Strangely persuasive toys. See  The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places" by Reeves and Nass.  We used those same findings to power other brand engagement approaches. It did not work, and was lost in a stream of hype, it ramped up and then failed.   But now it has been announced that they are coming back next year.  Will they succeed more broadly this time?   Still don't think so.  They are toys and not engaging entities.  It looked like we could find a way to connect to the emotions of people with very simple computing systems.   Will wait and see.

The WP also reports: " .. In early 2013, Bandai released an enhanced version of the original 1996 Tamagotchi as a free iOS and Android app named "Tamagotchi L.i.f.e." to great fanfare and reviews. ... " 

Fragility and Convexity

Long on my reading list, this essay by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.   Some fascinating thoughts:   " ... The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor "chance" and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress. ... " 

" ... It took at least five millennia between the invention of the wheel and the innovation of putting wheels under suitcases. It is sometimes the simplest technologies that are ignored. In practice there is no premium for complexification; in academia there is. Looking for rationalizations, narratives and theories invites for complexity. In an opaque operation to figure out ex ante what knowledge is required to navigate is impossible. ... "

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, essayist and former mathematical trader, is Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute. He is the author the international bestseller The Black Swan and the recently published Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder ... 

Taleb on Accepting Uncertainty and Volatility

Nassim Nicholas Taleb reviewing his new book on Accepting Uncertainty, Embracing Volatility  in  Knowledge@Wharton.    Over the years I have talked to many vendors that believed that they could directly solve the uncertainty problem, despite the obvious volatility of the data about world we live in.  Once again Taleb does an excellent job of describing this space well.  I am still looking for something I can use directly to better simulate the volatile world we live in.   " ... The day before a big game, regardless of the sport, a team's coach or star player is often asked, "How will you stop the opposing team tomorrow?" The answer typically goes something like this: "We can't worry about the other team. We just have to play our game." That, in a very simplified nutshell, is the essence of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's highly polemical, always thought-provoking new book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Here, though, the opponent is not another team's slugger, quarterback or point guard, but the future and change ... " 

Brand Creatures

In HBR: I found this idea of creatures for a brand interesting because I had a project that tried to integrate Mr. Clean and the use of artificial intelligence.   A creature, brand equity and an attempt to integrate personality and intelligence to the creature. Not successful beyond the usual 1940's view of the brand.  He reverted back to the old plan very quickly.

P&G Names New Connect & Develop Leader

On P&G's site ... more information here, including links to get your own ideas used by P&G:

" ... Connect+Develop, the program that’s brought consumers a series of breakthrough products including Swiffer Dusters, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, TidePods and Olay Regenerist. Laura Becker will lead P&G’s Global Business Development group, responsible for empowering and driving Connect+Develop open innovation work across the Company and around the world. ... " 

Also mentioned, that they plan to accellerate their open innovation network.

Signal and Noise

An excerpt from Nassim Taleb's  forthcoming book: Antifragile.  On order.
" ... When consuming information, we strive for more signal and less noise. Intuitively we feel like the more information we consume the more signal we receive. While this is probably true on an absolute basis, Nassim Taleb argues in this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Antifragile, that it is not true on a relative basis. He contends that as you consume more data, and the ratio of noise to signal increases, the less you know what’s going on and the more inadvertent trouble you are likely to cause ... "

Black Swans

A conversation with Nassim Taleb on living with Black Swans. In KnowlegeAtWharton.   And more about black swan theory.