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I have a friend who was participating often in psychology experiments at Stanford, and he became familiar with the whole procedure of letting the subjects belie
by gyom 8y ago
I have a friend who was participating often in psychology experiments at Stanford, and he became familiar with the whole procedure of letting the subjects believe that they were interacting with another person via a computer, when in fact they were interacting with a program (makes everything more standard and easier to analyse).
One day he participated in this "split or share" kind of experiment, and he was ruthless. Nobody's emotions would be damaged by acting nasty and never sharing with the computer program.
Turns out, it probably was actually a real person who was behind on the other side. He saw some old woman crying, coming out of some adjacent room after the experiment was over.
So, yeah, different social conventions definitely apply.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoIf I know anything about college psych experiments, the woman was an actor and the study was about your reaction to seeing her cry.
- Freak_NL 8y agoActually setting up a software environment that connects two participants in the same simulation, and have it run without any bugs is usually way beyond the capabilities of the psychology students running the experiment. Not to mention the bother of coordinating the different teamed up participants (“Did you click start? The other participant is waiting for you to click sta— oh no it timed out. Hang on I'll restart the pairing sequence…”). If you participate in one of those studies on campus, you are facing a computer running a local bit of standalone software, or a webservice running a questionnaire.
- kolpa 8y agoSurely you could solve this problem quite simply by having both participants and the experimenter join a group chat using COTS software+accounts (Skype, Hangouts, Whatsapp...) pre-installed on the machines?
- lozenge 8y agoYou would normally want to limit their input to a few form fields so the data can be analysed, rather than letting them have a conversation. Look at the ultimatum game for example.
- hosh 8y agoThere's the reverse where, what if AIs do develop feelings like that? Why shouldn't they be treated with the courtesy we treat other humans? Just thought of these: - Would this kind of personal assisstant be useful for people on the autism spectrum, to help navigate the kind of implied and unspoken narratives that people with autism seem to have difficulty with? - Would there be a call to train Duplex to speak in a way that is more comfortable for people on the spectrum? - Or any of the neurodivergent tribes for that matter?
- ryanianian 8y ago> Why shouldn't they be treated with the courtesy we treat other humans? Because courtesy requires some amount of empathy and mental effort on top of what's required just to communicate your point. That effort is wasted on a machine.
- hosh 8y agoEmpathy is not necessarily just for the one receiving empathy. There is a radical view that consciousness is the fundemental unit of reality, and as such, it would not be wasted.
- ryanianian 8y agoSure that's fine for some, but I personally don't see myself bothering to faux-empathize with a machine since I really don't have a mental-model for that kind of entity, so the empathy would be false in any case. Empathy for machines may in fact be cutting straight to the point and not worrying about emotional impacts since maybe machines value efficiency and conserved-cycles.
- hosh 8y agoThat mental-modelling would be cognitive empathy. Affective empathy is another, where the empathy is felt, rather than modelled out. Then there is a particular kind of emotional attitude / posture / intent, where the something is treated as if it were sentient. It is neither cognitive or affective empathy, ao much as a shift in how things are experienced. It isn't something invoked through will. Hard to describe if you've never experienced altered consciousness states. That particular shift is a fairly important experience for people (or at least for neurotypical), but is not obvious why to anyone who had never experience that shift. (I am speaking about neurotypical people, and some neurodovergent people, not necessarily someonr with a pauci-affective empathy neural architecture, such as people who are psychopaths).
- nitwit005 8y agoIt's going to be quite the adventure for anyone who happens to sound like the automated voices.
- salgernon 8y agoSusan Bennett, the voice of Siri: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Bennett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Bennett