Tag: HCI

Turn left at the robot

It’s easy to forget, now that so many computer interfaces seem to be getting more inscrutable, that in the early 1990s the shift from the command line to graphical interfaces and the desire to reach the wider mass market introduced a new focus on usability. In classics like Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, a common idea was that a really well-designed system should not require a manual because the design itself would tell the user how to operate it.

What is intuitive, though, is defined by what you’re used to. The rumor that Apple might replace the letters on keys with glyphs is a case in point. People who’ve grown up with smartphones might like the idea of glyphs that match those on their phones. But try doing technical support over the phone and describing a glyph; easier to communicate the letters.

Those years in which computer interfaces were standardized relied on metaphors based on familiar physical items: a floppy disk to save a file, an artist’s palette for color choices. In 1993, leading software companies like Microsoft and Lotus set up usability labs; it took watching user testing to convince developers that struggling to use their software was not a sign the users were stupid.

With that background, it was interesting to attend this year’s edition of the 20-year-old Human-Robot Interaction conference. Robots don’t need metaphors; they *are* the thing itself. Although: why shouldn’t a robot also have menu buttons for common functions?

In the paper I found most interesting and valuable, Lauren Wright examined the use of a speaking Misty robot to deliver social-emotional learning lessons. Wright’s group tested the value of deception – that is, having the robot speak in the first person of its “family”, experiences, and “emotions” – versus a more truthful presentation, in which the robot is neutral and tells its stories in the third person, refers to its programmers, and professes no humanity. The researchers were testing the widely-held assumption that kids engage more with robots programmed to appear more human. They found the opposite: while both versions significantly increased their learning, the kids who used the factual robot showed more engagement and higher scores in the sense of using concepts from the lesson in their answers. This really shouldn’t be surprising. Children don’t in general respond well to deception. Really, who does?

The children’s personal reactions to the robots were at least as interesting. In Michael F. Xu‘s paper, the researchers held co-design sessions and then installed a robot in eight family homes to act as a neutral third-party enforcer issuing timely reminders on behalf of busy parents. Some of the families did indeed report that the robot’s reminder got stuff done more efficiently. On the other hand, the experiment was short – only four days – and you have to wonder if that would still be true after the novelty wore off. There were hints of this from the kids, some of whom pushed back. One simply bypassed a robot reminding him of the limits on his TV viewing by taking the TV upstairs, where the robot couldn’t go. Another reacted like I would at any age and told the robot to “shut up”.

The fact versus fiction presentation included short video clips of some of the kids’ interaction with the robot tutor. In one, a boy placed his hands on either side of the robot’s “face” while it was talking and kept moving its head around, exploring the robot’s physical capabilities (or trying to take its head off?). The speaker ignored this entirely, but the sight hilariously made an important point: the robot’s physical form speaks even when the robot is silent.

We saw this at We Robot 2016, when a Jamaican lawyer asked Olivier Guilhem, from Aldebaran Robotics, which makes Pepper, “Why is the robot white?” His response: “It looks clean.” This week, one paper tried to tease out how “representation bias” – assumptions about gender, skin tone, dis/ability, accessibility, size, age – affect users’ reactions. In the dataset used to train an AI model, bias may be baked in through the historical record. With robots, bias can also present directly through the robot’s design, as Yolande Strengers’ and Jenny Kennedy’s showed in their 2020 book The Smart Wife. Despite its shiny, unmistakable whiteness, Pepper’s shape was ambiguous enough for its gender to be interpreted differently in different cultures. In the HRI paper, the researchers concluded that biases in robot design could perpetuate occupational stereotypes – “technological segregation”. They also found their participants consistently preferred non-skin tones – in their examples, silver and light teal.

“Who builds AI shapes what AI becomes,” said Ben Rosman, who outlined a burgeoning collaborative effort to build a machine learning community across Africa and redress its underrepresentation. The same with robots: many, many cultural norms affect how humans interact with them. That information is signal, not noise, he says, and should be captured to enable robots to operate across wide ranges of human context without relying on “brittle defaults” that interpret human variation as failures. “Turn left at the robot,” makes perfect sense once you know that in South Africa “robots” are known elsewhere as traffic lights.

Illustrations: Rosey, the still-influential “old demo model” robot maid in The Jetsons (1962-1963).

Also this week:
At the Plutopia podcast, we interview Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobel awards.
At Skeptical Inquirer, the latest Letter to America finds David Clarke conducting the English folklore survey.

Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Relativity

“Status: closed,” the website read. It gave the time as 10:30 p.m.

Except it wasn’t. It was 5:30 p.m., and the store was very much open. The website, instead of consulting the time zone the store – I mean, the store’s particular branch whose hours and address I had looked up – was in was taking the time from my laptop. Which I hadn’t bothered to switch to the US east coat from Britain because I can subtract five hours in my head and why bother?

Years ago, I remember writing a rant (which I now cannot find) about the “myness” of modern computers: My Computer, My Documents. My account. And so on, like a demented two-year-old who needed to learn to share. The notion that the time on my laptop determined whether or not the store was open had something of the same feel: the computational universe I inhabit is designed to revolve around me, and any dispute with reality is someone else’s problem.

Modern social media have hardened this approach. I say “modern” because back in the days of bulletin board systems, information services, and Usenet, postings were time- and date-stamped with when they were sent and specifying a time zone. Now, every post is labelled “2m” or “30s” or “1d”, so the actual date and time are hidden behind their relationship to “now”. It’s like those maps that rotate along with you so wherever you’re pointed physically is at the top. I guess it works for some people, but I find it disorienting; instead of the map orienting itself to me, I want to orient myself to the map. This seems to me my proper (infinitesimal) place in the universe.

All of this leads up to the revival of software agents. This was a Big Idea in the late 1990s/early 2000s, when it was commonplace to think that the era of having to make appointments and book train tickets was almost over. Instead, software agents configured with your preferences would do the negotiating for you. Discussions of this sort of thing died away as the technology never arrived. Generative AI has brought this idea back, at least to some extent, particularly in the financial area, where smart contracts can be used to set rules and then run automatically. I think only people who never have to worry about being able to afford anything will like this. But they may be the only ones the “market” cares about.

Somewhere during the time when software agents were originally mooted, I happened to sit at a conference dinner with the University of Maryland human-computer interaction expert Ben Shneiderman. There are, he said, two distinct schools of thought in software. In one, software is meant to adapt to the human using it – think of predictive text and smartphones as an example. In the other, software is consistent, and while using it may be repetitive, you always know that x command or action will produce y result. If I remember correctly, both Shneiderman and I were of the “want consistency” school.

Philosophically, though, these twin approaches have something in common with seeing the universe as if the sun went around the earth as against the earth going around the sun. The first of those makes our planet and, by extension, us far more important in the universe than we really are. The second cuts us down to size. No surprise, then, if the techbros who build these things, like the Catholic church in Galileo’s day, prefer the former.

***

Politico has started the year by warning that the UK is seeking to expand its surveillance regime even further by amending the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act. Unnoticed in the run-up to Christmas, the industry body techUK sent a letter to “express our concerns”. The short version: the bill expands the definition of “telecommunications operator” to include non-UK providers when operating outside the UK; allows the Home Office to require companies to seek permission before making changes to a privately and uniquely specified list of services; and the government wants to whip it through Parliament as fast as possible.

No, no, Politico reports the Home Office told the House of Lords, it supports innovation and isn’t threatening encryption. These are minor technical changes. But: “public safety”. With the ink barely dry on the Online Safety Act, here we go again.

***

As data breaches go, the one recently reported by 23andMe is alarming. By using passwords exposed in previous breaches (“credential stuffing”) to break into 14,000 accounts, attackers gained access to 6.9 million account profiles. The reason is reminiscent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where access to a few hundred thousand Facebook accounts was leveraged to obtain the data of millions: people turned on “DNA Relatives to allow themselves to be found by those searching for genetic relatives. The company, which afterwards turned on a requireme\nt for two-factor authentication, is fending off dozens of lawsuits by blaming the users for reusing passwords. According to Gizmodo, the legal messiness is considerable, as the company recently changed its terms and conditions to make arbitration more difficult and litigation almost impossible.

There’s nothing good to say about a data breach like this or a company that handles such sensitive data with such disdainx. But it’s yet one more reason why putting yourself at the center of the universe is bad hoodoo.

Illustrations: DNA strands (via Wikimedia.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon.