Bot Concepts
13 September 2016 | Lights of Soho, London, UK
The web has been infected by bots. These software entities are claimed to be responsible for 24% of all Tweets and make up over half of internet traffic. Most recently bots have found a new home within widely-used mobile messaging apps including Skype, WeChat, Facebook Messenger and Slack. These bots, commonly known as chat-bots, attempt to hide the fact that they are non-human by attempting to imitate our web-behavior in order to give personalized recommendations. Bots are fast becoming our peers.
But bots like this are nothing new and have been in existence for over 50 years: Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA chat-bot is one of the first examples, having been designed in 1966 to simulate a therapist. Since 2006, many of the notable experiments with bots have existed within the social networking platform Twitter.
Whilst most bots are merely informative or playful some attempt to be truly helpful. Examples include DoNotPay Bot, a bot a that appeals people’s parking tickets without need for a lawyer. But as bots infiltrate how society operates there are new concerns raised over the ethics of bot-creation and bot-usage. The most recent are concerns over ‘bot-nets’ in which armies of bots are being used to manipulate an individual’s personal or political choices online.
What responsibilities do bot-makers have to ensure bots are created ethically? What sorts of interactions between bots and humans should we allow? What personality might a bot develop? How might bots provide a new interface between humans and internet-enabled objects?
Panelists
Joshua Browder, DoNotPay Robot Lawyer & Stanford University (@jbrowder1)
Joshua Browder is 19, but, according to Bloomberg, his project has, “taken the legal world by storm.” Browder created the chat bot DoNotPay after receiving a large number of parking tickets. Since its launch, the site has attracted over 175,000 successful appeals and saved UK and New York motorists an estimated $5 million. He has since expanded the website to deal with other legal issues, including homelessness, and ultimately hopes to replace exploitative lawyers with bots.
When he was in his mid-teens, Browder approached what he viewed as the top 20 human-rights organizations in the world and offered to build apps for them for free. At age 13, he had created an app for Pret a Manger, the British sandwich chain, without the company’s approval and it became so popular in the United Kingdom that Pret adopted it as the official app. And so a number of human-rights groups took Browder up on his offer. He coded the first-ever app for Freedom House, the oldest democracy watchdog in the U.S., in 2013. He gave International Bridges for Justice an app that could provide training for the organization’s lawyers.
George Buckenham, Cheap Bots, Done Quick! (@v21)
George Buckenham is the creator of Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, a radically accessible botmaking tool, as well as many bots of their own, such a @unicode_garden, @softlandscapes and dkmfxr0axh7rumhs3ppv.tumblr.com. They are also a game maker (currently the designer on Beasts of Balance, a digital-physical block stacking game) and digital curator of Now Play This, a festival of games and play at Somerset House.
Dr. Ben Kirman, Lecturer in Interactive Media, University of York (@benki)
Ben is a creative technologist working in speculative, critical and adversarial design within the Digital Creativity Labs at York. Building interactive systems that use emergent technologies in unusual and challenging ways, his mischievous projects explore unconventional aspects of the human-computer relationship. This interdisciplinary work draws from computer science, game studies, psychology, HCI and the arts and has led to a wide collection of subversive projects and publications – including building anti-recommendation robots, a drug smuggling game played in real airports, the dog internet, and notoriously, the publication of science fiction, punk songs and homo-erotic stories at world-leading academic venues. His provocative work has been covered widely by the mainstream press including the BBC, New York Times, Wired, The Guardian, New Scientist and Your Cat Magazine.
Luke Robert Mason, Director of Virtual Futures (Moderator) (@LukeRobertMason)