AI & SocietyPub Date : 2023-08-15DOI: 10.1007/s00146-023-01738-6
Guy Moshe Ross
{"title":"Dancing with robots: acceptability of humanoid companions to reduce loneliness during COVID-19 (and beyond)","authors":"Guy Moshe Ross","doi":"10.1007/s00146-023-01738-6","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-023-01738-6","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The purpose of this research is to explore the acceptance of social robots as companions. Understanding what affects the acceptance of humanoid companions may give society tools that will help people overcome loneliness throughout pandemics, such as COVID-19 and beyond. Based on regulatory focus theory, it is proposed that there is a relationship between goal-directed motivation and acceptance of robots as companions. The theory of regulatory focus posits that goal-directed behavior is regulated by two motivational systems—promotion and prevention. People with a promotion focus are concerned about accomplishments, are sensitive to the presence and absence of positive outcomes (gains/non-gains), and have a strategic preference for eager means of goal-pursuit. People with a prevention focus are concerned about security and safety, are sensitive to the absence and presence of negative outcomes (non-losses/losses), and have a strategic preference for vigilant means. Two studies support the notion of a relationship between acceptance of robots as companions and regulatory focus. In Study 1, chronic promotion focus was associated with acceptance of robots, and this association was mediated by loneliness. The weaker the promotion focus, the stronger was the sense of loneliness, and thus the higher was the acceptance of the robots. In Study 2, a situationally induced regulatory focus moderated the association between acceptance of robots and COVID-19 perceived severity. The higher the perceived severity of the disease, the higher was the willingness to accept the robots, and the effect was stronger for an induced prevention (vs. promotion) focus. Models of acceptance of robots are presented. Implications for well-being are discussed.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"39 5","pages":"2557 - 2568"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122074432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AI & SocietyPub Date : 2023-08-12DOI: 10.1007/s00146-023-01742-w
Emre Sezgin
{"title":"Economics of AI behavior: nudging the digital minds toward greater societal benefit","authors":"Emre Sezgin","doi":"10.1007/s00146-023-01742-w","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-023-01742-w","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"39 6","pages":"3031 - 3032"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120896273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AI & SocietyPub Date : 2023-08-12DOI: 10.1007/s00146-023-01739-5
Vian Bakir, Alexander Laffer, Andrew McStay
{"title":"Blurring the moral limits of data markets: biometrics, emotion and data dividends","authors":"Vian Bakir, Alexander Laffer, Andrew McStay","doi":"10.1007/s00146-023-01739-5","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-023-01739-5","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper considers what liberal philosopher Michael Sandel coins the ‘moral limits of markets’ in relation to the idea of paying people for data about their biometrics and emotions. With Sandel arguing that certain aspects of human life (such as our bodies and body parts) should be beyond monetisation and exchange, others argue that emerging technologies such as Personal Information Management Systems can enable a fairer, paid, data exchange between the individual and the organisation, even regarding highly personal data about our bodies and emotions. With the field of data ethics rarely addressing questions of payment, this paper explores normative questions about data dividends. It does so by conducting a UK-wide, demographically representative online survey to quantitatively assess adults’ views on being paid for personal data about their biometrics and emotions via a Personal Information Management System, producing a data dividend, a premise which sees personal data through the prism of markets and property. The paper finds diverse attitudes based on socio-demographic characteristics, the type of personal data sold, and the type of organisation sold to. It argues that (a) Sandel’s argument regarding the moral limits of markets has value in protecting fundamental freedoms of those in society who are arguably least able to (such as the poor); but (b) that contexts of use, in particular, blur moral limits regarding fundamental freedoms and markets.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"39 5","pages":"2569 - 2583"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-023-01739-5.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126101909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AI & SocietyPub Date : 2023-08-09DOI: 10.1007/s00146-023-01732-y
Leila Brännström, Markus Gunneflo, Gregor Noll, Amin Parsa
{"title":"Legal imagination and the US project of globalising the free flow of data","authors":"Leila Brännström, Markus Gunneflo, Gregor Noll, Amin Parsa","doi":"10.1007/s00146-023-01732-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-023-01732-y","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Today, the US pursues the global capture of data (understood as a significant engine of growth) by way of bi- and plurilateral trade agreements. However, the project of securing the global free flow of data has been pursued ever since the dawn of digital telecommunication in the 1960s and the US has made significant legal efforts to institutionalise it. These efforts have two phases: In the first 1970s and 80s “freedom of information” phase, the legal justification (and contestation) of the global free flow of data hinged on imagining data as information, and its exchange as a practice of liberty. The second phase began in the late 1990s and continues today. In this phase, the free flow of data is aligned with a free-trade agenda in the context of first e-commerce and, starting in the 2000s, through attempts at creating a global public domain of personal data for the platform economy. The global free flow of data is an intrinsic aspect of informational capitalism. Assuming a constitutive, but not commanding role for law in informational capitalism, we conclude that the US attempt at ensuring free flow for its informational corporations is neither an entirely contingent nor a necessary outcome. It is a product of legal imagination.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"39 5","pages":"2259 - 2266"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-023-01732-y.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132545859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AI & SocietyPub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1007/s00146-023-01733-x
Gabriele de Seta, Anya Shchetvina
{"title":"Imagining machine vision: Four visual registers from the Chinese AI industry","authors":"Gabriele de Seta, Anya Shchetvina","doi":"10.1007/s00146-023-01733-x","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-023-01733-x","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Machine vision is one of the main applications of artificial intelligence. In China, the machine vision industry makes up more than a third of the national AI market, and technologies like face recognition, object tracking and automated driving play a central role in surveillance systems and social governance projects relying on the large-scale collection and processing of sensor data. Like other novel articulations of technology and society, machine vision is defined, developed and explained by different actors through the work of imagination. In this article, we draw on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to understand how Chinese companies represent machine vision. Through a qualitative multimodal analysis of the corporate websites of leading industry players, we identify a cohesive sociotechnical imaginary of machine vision, and explain how four distinct visual registers contribute to its articulation. These four registers, which we call <i>computational abstraction</i>, <i>human–machine coordination</i>, <i>smooth everyday</i>, and <i>dashboard realism</i>, allow Chinese tech companies to articulate their global ambitions and competitiveness through narrow and opaque representations of machine vision technologies.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"39 5","pages":"2267 - 2284"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-023-01733-x.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122510234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AI & SocietyPub Date : 2023-07-27DOI: 10.1101/2023.07.26.550355
Kelly Jin, Zizhen Yao, Cindy T J van Velthoven, Eitan S Kaplan, Katie Glattfelder, Samuel T Barlow, Gabriella Boyer, Daniel Carey, Tamara Casper, Anish Bhaswanth Chakka, Rushil Chakrabarty, Michael Clark, Max Departee, Marie Desierto, Amanda Gary, Jessica Gloe, Jeff Goldy, Nathan Guilford, Junitta Guzman, Daniel Hirschstein, Changkyu Lee, Elizabeth Liang, Trangthanh Pham, Melissa Reding, Kara Ronellenfitch, Augustin Ruiz, Josh Sevigny, Nadiya Shapovalova, Lyudmila Shulga, Josef Sulc, Amy Torkelson, Herman Tung, Boaz Levi, Susan M Sunkin, Nick Dee, Luke Esposito, Kimberly Smith, Bosiljka Tasic, Hongkui Zeng
{"title":"Cell-type specific molecular signatures of aging revealed in a brain-wide transcriptomic cell-type atlas.","authors":"Kelly Jin, Zizhen Yao, Cindy T J van Velthoven, Eitan S Kaplan, Katie Glattfelder, Samuel T Barlow, Gabriella Boyer, Daniel Carey, Tamara Casper, Anish Bhaswanth Chakka, Rushil Chakrabarty, Michael Clark, Max Departee, Marie Desierto, Amanda Gary, Jessica Gloe, Jeff Goldy, Nathan Guilford, Junitta Guzman, Daniel Hirschstein, Changkyu Lee, Elizabeth Liang, Trangthanh Pham, Melissa Reding, Kara Ronellenfitch, Augustin Ruiz, Josh Sevigny, Nadiya Shapovalova, Lyudmila Shulga, Josef Sulc, Amy Torkelson, Herman Tung, Boaz Levi, Susan M Sunkin, Nick Dee, Luke Esposito, Kimberly Smith, Bosiljka Tasic, Hongkui Zeng","doi":"10.1101/2023.07.26.550355","DOIUrl":"10.1101/2023.07.26.550355","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Biological aging can be defined as a gradual loss of homeostasis across various aspects of molecular and cellular function. Aging is a complex and dynamic process which influences distinct cell types in a myriad of ways. The cellular architecture of the mammalian brain is heterogeneous and diverse, making it challenging to identify precise areas and cell types of the brain that are more susceptible to aging than others. Here, we present a high-resolution single-cell RNA sequencing dataset containing ~1.2 million high-quality single-cell transcriptomic profiles of brain cells from young adult and aged mice across both sexes, including areas spanning the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. We find age-associated gene expression signatures across nearly all 130+ neuronal and non-neuronal cell subclasses we identified. We detect the greatest gene expression changes in non-neuronal cell types, suggesting that different cell types in the brain vary in their susceptibility to aging. We identify specific, age-enriched clusters within specific glial, vascular, and immune cell types from both cortical and subcortical regions of the brain, and specific gene expression changes associated with cell senescence, inflammation, decrease in new myelination, and decreased vasculature integrity. We also identify genes with expression changes across multiple cell subclasses, pointing to certain mechanisms of aging that may occur across wide regions or broad cell types of the brain. Finally, we discover the greatest gene expression changes in cell types localized to the third ventricle of the hypothalamus, including tanycytes, ependymal cells, and <i>Tbx3</i>+ neurons found in the arcuate nucleus that are part of the neuronal circuits regulating food intake and energy homeostasis. These findings suggest that the area surrounding the third ventricle in the hypothalamus may be a hub for aging in the mouse brain. Overall, we reveal a dynamic landscape of cell-type-specific transcriptomic changes in the brain associated with normal aging that will serve as a foundation for the investigation of functional changes in the aging process and the interaction of aging and diseases.</p>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"8 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10760145/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72583841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AI & SocietyPub Date : 2023-07-24DOI: 10.1007/s00146-023-01726-w
Helena Mihaljević, Ivana Müller, Katja Dill, Aysel Yollu-Tok, Maximilian von Grafenstein
{"title":"More or less discrimination? Practical feasibility of fairness auditing of technologies for personnel selection","authors":"Helena Mihaljević, Ivana Müller, Katja Dill, Aysel Yollu-Tok, Maximilian von Grafenstein","doi":"10.1007/s00146-023-01726-w","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-023-01726-w","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The use of technologies in personnel selection has come under increased scrutiny in recent years, revealing their potential to amplify existing inequalities in recruitment processes. To date, however, there has been a lack of comprehensive assessments of respective discriminatory potentials and no legal or practical standards have been explicitly established for fairness auditing. The current proposal of the Artificial Intelligence Act classifies numerous applications in personnel selection and recruitment as high-risk technologies, and while it requires quality standards to protect the fundamental rights of those involved, particularly during development, it does not provide concrete guidance on how to ensure this, especially once the technologies are commercially available. We argue that comprehensive and reliable auditing of personnel selection technologies must be contextual, that is, embedded in existing processes and based on real data, as well as participative, involving various stakeholders beyond technology vendors and customers, such as advocacy organizations and researchers. We propose an architectural draft that employs a data trustee to provide independent, fiduciary management of personal and corporate data to audit the fairness of technologies used in personnel selection. Drawing on a case study conducted with two state-owned companies in Berlin, Germany, we discuss challenges and approaches related to suitable fairness metrics, operationalization of vague concepts such as migration* and applicable legal foundations that can be utilized to overcome the fairness-privacy-dilemma arising from uncertainties associated with current laws. We highlight issues that require further interdisciplinary research to enable a prototypical implementation of the auditing concept in the mid-term.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"39 5","pages":"2507 - 2523"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-023-01726-w.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132783278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AI & SocietyPub Date : 2023-07-23DOI: 10.1007/s00146-023-01715-z
Shauna Concannon, Marcus Tomalin
{"title":"Measuring perceived empathy in dialogue systems","authors":"Shauna Concannon, Marcus Tomalin","doi":"10.1007/s00146-023-01715-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s00146-023-01715-z","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Dialogue systems, from Virtual Personal Assistants such as Siri, Cortana, and Alexa to state-of-the-art systems such as BlenderBot3 and ChatGPT, are already widely available, used in a variety of applications, and are increasingly part of many people’s lives. However, the task of enabling them to use empathetic language more convincingly is still an emerging research topic. Such systems generally make use of complex neural networks to learn the patterns of typical human language use, and the interactions in which the systems participate are usually mediated either via interactive text-based or speech-based interfaces. In human–human interaction, empathy has been shown to promote prosocial behaviour and improve interaction. In the context of dialogue systems, to advance the understanding of how perceptions of empathy affect interactions, it is necessary to bring greater clarity to how empathy is measured and assessed. Assessing the way dialogue systems create perceptions of empathy brings together a range of technological, psychological, and ethical considerations that merit greater scrutiny than they have received so far. However, there is currently no widely accepted evaluation method for determining the degree of empathy that any given system possesses (or, at least, appears to possess). Currently, different research teams use a variety of automated metrics, alongside different forms of subjective human assessment such as questionnaires, self-assessment measures and narrative engagement scales. This diversity of evaluation practice means that, given two DSs, it is usually impossible to determine which of them conveys the greater degree of empathy in its dialogic exchanges with human users. Acknowledging this problem, the present article provides an overview of how empathy is measured in human–human interactions and considers some of the ways it is currently measured in human–DS interactions. Finally, it introduces a novel third-person analytical framework, called the Empathy Scale for Human–Computer Communication (ESHCC), to support greater uniformity in how perceived empathy is measured during interactions with state-of-the-art DSs.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47165,"journal":{"name":"AI & Society","volume":"39 5","pages":"2233 - 2247"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-023-01715-z.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115518481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}