Posts tagged Ethics and Policy
Effects of Transparency in Humanoid Robots - A Pilot Study

Heinrich Mellmann, Polina Arbuzova, Dimosthenis Kontogiorgos, Magdalena Yordanova, Jennifer X. Haensel, Verena V. Hafner, and Joanna J. Bryson, HRI '24: Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 750-754, 11 March 2024.

Transparency is recognized as a vital feature for understanding and predicting robot behavior. Another feature that affects interaction with robots is their anthropomorphism. The relationship between these remains under-explored but is postulated to be negative. We present a pilot study investigating the effects of robot transparency in human-robot interactions, where the robot has an anthropomorphic appearance. We asked participants to evaluate and interact with the humanoid robot Pepper to examine whether visualizing the robot’s goals and behavior affects perceived intelligence, anthropomorphism, and robot agency. Our preliminary findings suggest that users may attribute higher ratings of agency when interacting with a robot visualizing its goals. In this late-breaking report, we propose our experiment on the interplay between transparency and anthropomorphism in human-robot interaction and summarize insights from our preliminary pilot study.

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2024ScienceSitesSystems Engineering, Ethics and Policy
Human Experience and AI Regulation: What European Union Law Brings to Digital Technology Ethics

Joanna J. Bryson, Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society, 3(3), 2023. 

Joseph Weizenbaum is famous for quitting AI after his secretary thought his chatbot, Eliza, understood her. But his ethical concerns went well beyond that, and concern not only potential abuse but also culpable lack of use of intelligent systems. Abuse includes making inhuman cruelty and acts of war more emotionally accessible to human operators or simply solving the problems necessary to make nuclear weapons, negligent lack of use of AI includes failing to solve the social issues of inequality and resource distribution. I was honoured to be asked for the Weizenbaum centenary to explain how the EU’s new digital regulations address his concerns. I first talk about whether Europe has legitimacy or capacity to do so, and then (concluding it might) I describe how the Digital Services Acts and the General Data Protection Regulation mostly do so, though I also spare some words for the Digital Markets Act (which addresses inequality) and the AI Act — which in theory helps by labelling all AI as AI. But Weizenbaum’s secretary knew Eliza was a chatbot, so the GDPR and DSA’s lines about transparency might be more important than that.

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2023ScienceSitesAI Ethics, Ethics and Policy, Regulation and Digital Governance
Going Nuclear? Precedents and Options for the Transnational Governance of AI (pdf)

David Backovsky and Joanna Bryson, Horizons: Journal of International Relations and Sustainable Development , Issue 24, a special issue on AI and AI governance, Summer 2023.

We argue that the current global governance regime for AI is deeply dysfunctional. GPAI, OECD, UNESCO and ITU form a set of competing actors that do not presently provide us with the necessary legitimacy and centralization that would best serve global governance of AI. But we do have a history of technological governance we can learn from, and we know the basic structure of what an organization that can govern an emerging technology can look like. Regardless of the fact that nuclear and AI safeguards will never prove to be completely comparable, many core lessons from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are straightforwardly applicable. We need a centralized agency, with political and technical capacity, with internal expertise and the right balance between accountability and political autonomy.

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2023ScienceSitesRegulation and Digital Governance, Ethics and Policy
Do We Collaborate With What We Design?

Katie D. Evans, Scott A. Robbins, and Joanna J. Bryson, Topics in Cognitive Science, 2023. 

In this paper, we critically assess both the accuracy and desirability of using the term “collaboration” to describe interactions between humans and AI systems. We begin by proposing an alternative ontology of human–machine interaction, one which features not two equivalently autonomous agents, but rather one machine that exists in a relationship of heteronomy to one or more human agents. In this sense, while the machine may have a significant degree of independence concerning the means by which it achieves its ends, the ends themselves are always chosen by at least one human agent, whose interests may differ from those of the individuals interacting with the machine. We finally consider the motivations and risks inherent to the continued use of the term “collaboration,” exploring its strained relation to the concept of transparency, and consequences for the future of work.

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2023ScienceSitesAI Ethics, Ethics and Policy
The European Parliament’s AI Regulation: Should We Call It Progress?

Meeri Haataja and Joanna J. Bryson, Amicus Curiae, Series 2, 4(3), 707-718, Spring 2023.

We here describe the outcomes of the first round of legislative action by one of the EU’s two legislative bodies, the European Parliament, in terms of modifying the Artificial Intelligence Act. The Parliament has introduced a number of changes we consider to be enormously important, some in a very good way, and some in a very bad way. At stake is whether the AI Act really brings the power and strength of product law to continuously scale improved practice on products in the EU with intelligent components, or whether the law becomes window-dressing aimed only at attacking a few elite actors post hoc. We describe here the EU process, the changes and our recommendations.

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2023ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, Regulation and Digital Governance
Spamming the Regulator: Exploring a New Lobbying Strategy in EU Competition Procedures (pdf)

Marlene Jugl, William A.M. Pagel, Maria Camila Garcia Jimenez, Jean Pierre Salendres, William Lowe, Joanna J. Bryson, and Helena Malikova, Journal of Antitrust Enforcement, April 2023.

We document and examine a novel lobbying strategy in the context of competition regulation, a strategy that exploits the regulator’s finite administrative capacities. Companies with merger cases under scrutiny by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition appear to be employing a strategy of ‘spamming the regulator,’ through the strategic and cumulative submission of economic expert assessments. Procedural pressures may result in an undeservedly favorable assessment of the merger. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of an original dataset of all complex merger cases in the EU 2005–2020, we present evidence of this new strategy and a possible learning process among private actors. We suggest remedies to ensure regulatory effectiveness in the face of this novel strategy.

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2023ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, Evolving Social Behaviors, Regulation and Digital Governance
Reflections on the EU’s AI Act and How We Could Make It Even Better (pdf)

Meeri Haataja and Joanna J. Bryson, CPI TechREG Chronicle, March 2022

Meeri Haataja and I wrote two papers (really, originally one long one) to inform the writing of the EU’s AI Act (AIA). Because of the importance of getting the material out to policy makers while they were still writing, we published in essentially a newsletter, who promised to publish the second part, a supplement about the costs in the next issue, then didn’t, so it’s just in arxiv for now. See What Costs Should We Expect From the EU’s AI Act?, SocArXiv, 2021

The main thrust of this article is that there is a lot of good work done in the AIA that some people with vested interests are unjustly attacking, but there are also a few things that can be improved. This may be interesting even if you don’t care about law in the EU, just if you are trying to regulate AI or the digital in your own country. See also my Wired article expanding on one aspect here: the definition of AI used in the AIA, and how that relates to the purpose of AI regulation.

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2022ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, Regulation and Digital Governance
Is There an AI Cold War? (pdf)

Joanna J. Bryson and Helena Malikova, Global Perspectives, 2(1), 2021.

Regulation is a means societies use to create the stability, public goods, and infrastructure they need to thrive securely. This policy brief is intended to both document and to address claims of a new AI cold war: a binary competition between the United States and China that is too important for other powers to either ignore or truly participate in directly, beyond taking sides.

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2021ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, Regulation and Digital Governance
Polarization Under Rising Inequality and Economic Decline

Alexander J. Stewart, Nolan McCarty, and Joanna J. Bryson, Science Advances, 6(50), Dec 2020.

This project came out of my work on cultural variation in public goods investment, crossed with getting asked on live TV whether AI was increasing inequality. I thought I’d better find out and went to talk by Nolan and learned about the correlation between inequality and polarization. I’ve been talking about this project for a couple years, but the model in the paper is entirely Alex. (I did replicate his work with an ABM, but that’s harder to analyze ... ). This has been my main research focus personally since 2016 and I’ve spoken about it a few times as a contribution to academic meetings, including EHBEA, APSA, and ICSD (well, Alex spoke about it there, I watched :-)

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2020ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, Cultural Variation in Cooperation
The Sustainability Game: AI Technology as an Intervention for Public Understanding of Cooperative Investment (pdf)

Andreas Theodorou, Bryn Bandt-Law and Joanna J. Bryson, to appear at the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), August 2019.

This is the first paper unifying our transparency work, our games work, and our work on cultural variation in human cooperation and anti-social punishment. Hopefully there will be a bunch more in 2020 and 2021. Camera ready from July 2019 or so. Software on github, linked from the AmonI Software Page.

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2019ScienceSitesOrigins and Nature of Cognition, Ethics and Policy
Improving Robot Transparency: An Investigation With Mobile Augmented Reality (pdf)

Alexandros Rotsidis, Andreas Theodorou, Joanna J. Bryson, and Robert H. Wortham, to be presented at RO-MAN 2019.

Authors’ final copy. Alex (with Andreas & Rob) got ABOD3 working on mobile phones so you can point your phone at a POSH / BOD robot and see what it’s trying to do. Software is probably available on github, just checking ...

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2019ScienceSitesSystems Engineering, Ethics and Policy
The Past Decade and Future of AI’s Impact on Society (pdf)

Joanna J. Bryson, a solicited and reviewed chapter in Towards a New Enlightenment? A Transcendent Decade, published by BBVA OpenMind, 2019.

This is a major policy document with my perspectives on how AI has been and should be incorporated into human society. It was originally written as a solicited white paper for the OECD on AI policy (May 2017), which I then revised to BBVA’s title (I’m almost the only person in the book who didn’t realise you could change the title). Final version submitted September 2018.

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2019ScienceSitesEthics and Policy
How Society Can Maintain Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence (pdf)

Joanna J. Bryson and Andreas Theodorou, solicited and reviewed chapter (title given) in the collection Human-Centered Digitalization and Services, Marja Toivonen-Noroand Eveliina Saari (eds.), Springer, 2019.

Includes justification, motivation, strategies for systems engineering of AI, and strategies for regulating it. tl;dr see the bullet-point version in my blogpost, A smart bureaucrat’s guide to AI regulation.

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2019ScienceSitesSystems Engineering, Ethics and Policy
No One Should Trust AI

Joanna J. Bryson, an invited, reviewed, and edited blogpost by the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, for their Artificial Intelligence and Global Governance blog series, 13 November 2018.

No one should trust AI because we ought to build it for accountability. Then we would have certain knowledge of who’s at fault, and trust isn’t needed, see the scientific trust paper just below with Paul Rauwolf as first author. Published November 2018.

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2018ScienceSitesEthics and Policy
Patiency Is Not a Virtue: The Design of Intelligent Systems and Systems of Ethics

Joanna J. Bryson, Ethics and Information Technology, 20(1):15-26, 2018.

Both AI and Ethics are artefacts, so there is no necessary position for AI artefacts in society, rather we need to decide what we should build and how we should treat what we build. So why build something to compete for the rights we already struggle to offer 8 billion people? Gold open access paid for by Bath out of our library budget. There are also older versions of this paper which was a discussion paper for a long time, but this is the archival version.

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2018ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, AI Ethics
The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation

Miles Brundage, Shahar Avin, Jack Clark, Helen Toner, Peter Eckersley, Ben Garfinkel, Allan Dafoe, Paul Scharre, Thomas Zeitzoff, Bobby Filar, Hyrum Anderson, Heather Roff, Gregory C. Allen, Jacob Steinhardt, Carrick Flynn, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Simon Beard, Haydn Belfield, Sebastian Farquhar, Clare Lyle, Rebecca Crootof, Owain Evans, Michael Page, Joanna Bryson, Roman Yampolskiy, Dario Amodei, a technical report apparently published by all seven of the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge, Center for a New American Security, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and OpenAI, 2018.

Apparently exactly one other author did even less than I did on this report; aside from turning up to the meeting I think my main contribution was insisting “use of” was in the title. Final (not peer reviewed except by the authors), February 2018.

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2018ScienceSitesEthics and Policy
Of, For, and By the People: The Legal Lacuna of Synthetic Persons

Joanna J. Bryson, Mihailis E. Diamantis, and Thomas D. Grant, Artificial Intelligence and Law, 25(3):273–291, Sep 2017.

Two professors of law and I argue that it would be a terrible, terrible idea to make something strictly AI (in contrast to an organisation also containing humans) a legal person. In fact, the only good thing about this is that it gives us a chance to think about where legal personhood has already been overextended (we give examples). “Gold” open access, not because I think it’s right to make universities or academics pay to do their work, but because Bath has some deal with Springer / has already been coerced into paying. Notice you can read below all my papers going back to 1993 (when I started academia); I don't think “green” open access is part of the war on science.

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2017ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, Regulation and Digital Governance, AI Ethics
Semantics Derived Automatically From Language Corpora Contain Human Biases

Aylin Caliskan, Joanna J. Bryson, & Arvind Narayanan, Science, 356 (6334):183-186, 14 Apr 2017.

Be sure to also look at the supplement, which gives the stimuli and shows similar results for a different corpus and word-embedding model. Meaning really is no more or less than how a word is used, so AI absorbs true meaning, including prejudice. We demonstrate this empirically. This is an extension of my research programme into semantics originally deriving from my interest in the origins of human cognition, but now with help from the awesome researchers at Princeton I’ve merged this with my AI ethics work, and also managed to pitch for cognitive systems approaches to AI. Open access version: authors’ final copy of both the main article and the supplement (pdf).

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2017ScienceSitesEvolving Human-Like Culture, Ethics and Policy, Origins and Nature of Cognition
Standardizing Ethical Design for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems

Joanna J. Bryson and Alan F.T. Winfield, IEEE Computer, 50(5):116-119, 2017.

What do you do when technology like AI changes faster than the law can keep up? One thing is have law enforce standards maintained by professional organisations, which are hopefully more agile and informed. Invited commentary. Open access version, authors’ final copy (pdf).

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2017ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, Regulation and Digital Governance
Improving Robot Transparency: Real-Time Visualisation of Robot AI Substantially Improves Understanding in Naive Observers

Robert H Wortham, Andreas Theodorou, Joanna J Bryson, in The 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2017.

What’s visualised is the system’s priorities (the upper part of a POSH plan hierarchy), and which priorities are active in real time. Extends the IJCAI ethics workshop results to direct interaction with robots, and for an archival conference.

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2017ScienceSitesSystems Engineering, Ethics and Policy
The Meaning of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics

Joanna J. Bryson, Connection Science, 29(2):130-136, 2017.

In honour of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics’ fifth anniversary in 2016, Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy ran an AISB symposium which was followed up by a special issue of the journal Connection Science the following year. I explain the principles' utility as policy, and their intent: to clarify that we are responsible for the AI we build and use. Open access version.

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2017ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, AI Ethics
Designing and Implementing Transparency for Real Time Inspection of Autonomous Robots

Andreas Theodorou, Rob Wortham, and Joanna J. Bryson, Connection Science, 29(3):230-241, 2017.

In honour of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics' fifth anniversary in 2016, Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy ran an AISB symposium which was followed up by a special issue of the journal Connection Science the following year. Open access version.

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2017ScienceSitesSystems Engineering, Ethics and Policy
Principles of Robotics: Regulating Robots in the Real World

2016

In honour of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics' fifth anniversary in 2016, Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy ran an AISB symposium which was followed up by a special issue of the journal Connection Science the following year. Here are the original EPSRC Principles of Robotics as they appear on the web pages of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's (EPSRC – the UK council for funding AI research). Tony got Alan Winfield to submit an article version of the Principles with the same authors, including me.

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2017ScienceSitesEthics and Policy
Artificial Intelligence and Pro-Social Behaviour

Joanna J. Bryson, from the October 2015 Springer volume, Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems: Explanation, Implementation and Simulation, derived from Catrin Misselhorn’s 2013 meeting, Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems.

This brings together all three threads of my research: action selection, natural cognition and collective behaviour, and the mischaracterisation of AI as an active threat. In response to the apocalyptic futurism typified by Bostrom’s Superintelligence, I frame AI as an ordinary part of human culture, which for 10,000 years has included physical artefacts that enhance our cognitive capacities, and is apocalyptic enough in its own right. Open access: here’s the post-review submitted version from September 2014, or email me for the corrected final.

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2015ScienceSitesEthics and Policy, Origins and Nature of Cognition, AI Ethics