Just as Stephen Hawking warned? Here comes 'the world's angriest robot'
Technically Incorrect: A New Zealand-based company says it's building a very, very angry robot to help companies deal with angry customers.
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
It's almost a religious question: in whose image are we making robots?
Will we only make clever, efficient robots who will do what they're told -- built, naturally, in the image of your average middle management functionary?
Or will we attempt to build monsters -- just because we like to put our fingers in the fire occasionally?
A New Zealand company called Touchpoint Group says it's building a robot that will be the worst of us.
It will be angry all the time. Angrier than a motorist trying to tolerate yet another cyclist who goes straight through a stop sign. Angrier than Kanye when he sees a paparazzo. And, yes, angrier than any Comcast customer that ever lived.
The idea, in fact, is to help organizations deal with angry customers. As the Australian Business Review reports, Touchpoint is working with a bank so that its machines can better understand why customers get angry.
Those who enjoy their Isaac Asimov might be amused (or appalled) that this project carries the name Radiant. In Asimov's work, Prime Radiant predicted how humans might behave in the future.
Some, though, might be concerned about Touchpoint's angry robot.
It is, of course, marginally hilarious that a bank might need a robot to explain that bad or opaque customer service might get humans mad. What is there to understand? Or is this, perhaps, another step for financial organizations to remove, say, employees altogether?
Indeed, Touchpoint CEO Frank van der Velden told the Australian Business Review: "Companies don't have the numbers of staff to go through this manually. It's very difficult. Take a bank for example, they receive a hell of a lot of data every day. But it gets to a point where that dataset grows so large that it becomes meaningless unless you can interpret it. That's where Radiant will fit in."
However, the eminent scientist Stephen Hawking and others have warned us repeatedly that AI could be, in Hawking's words, "the worst thing ever for humanity."
From one well-intentioned project like Touchpoint's angry robot will come other projects that delve deeper into angry robotic possibilities.
Soon, angry birds will come to life and peck at us till we succumb to their whims. Just because they can.
Soon, our robots will simply be having a bad day and will take that bad day out on us.
I'm mad as HAL, and I'm not going to take this anymore.
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The rise of the Internet police
For decades, the Internet has been like the Wild West, with anonymous users creating racist or hate-filled posts. Now the world's largest social networks are doing something about it.
Anisha Vora remembers when she first realized something was wrong.
It was February 2012, and the then-22-year-old student learned that photos showing her naked or partially clothed were circulating on the Internet. The culprit was an ex-boyfriend she'd dated on and off for four years and had known since childhood.
Photos she'd sent him during their long-distance relationship were soon posted on more than 300 websites, including Tumblr, Flickr and Facebook, and her friends, family and neighbors were invited to view them. Some of the posts gave her name, address and phone number. Strangers were coming by her house.
Online harassment isn't new. From the earliest message boards to the newest social apps, if there's a way for people to say something, you can bet someone will say something awful. But it's gotten even worse. Those operating in the shadows can now connect to billions of users through Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, and disseminate racist and hate-filled messages. Some publish disturbing images of murder, child exploitation and sexual abuse while others resort to so-called revenge porn to humiliate former lovers. Perhaps most distressing: A few threaten rape and other forms of violence, then release their victims' addresses and phone numbers so strangers can terrorize their targets even further.
"Dangerous people are everywhere, but when they have the power of anonymity behind them and the power of distance, they become more dangerous," says Karen Riggs, a professor of media arts and studies at Ohio University. "It's part of human nature: We have people who will be abusive and lurid."
The Internet just makes it that much easier.
Policing the wild frontier
Never before have so many people come together as they have on Twitter and Facebook. More than 300 million people use via Twitter every month, while more than 1.4 billion users sign on to Facebook.
For the past decade, the social networks have been working behind the scenes to police their sites.
Monika Bickert, head of Facebook's product policy around the world, and Ellen Silver, who runs global operations, help the world's largest social network fight against a barrage of abusive, pornographic and racist posts. Bickert's team sets the rules about the types of comments, photos and videos Facebook won't allow. Silver's team eliminates the offensive content. All are offered counseling to help them cope with the worst parts of the Internet they face each day.
The policing requires human intervention because Facebook's systems are only trained to spot and automatically eliminate images showing child exploitation.
For everything else, Facebook's teams wait for alerts to come to them. Users can register complaints and call out spam, harassment, hate speech or sexually explicit content. Because it only takes two clicks to begin a report, users frequently point out bad behavior. "It's one of the reasons we make it so easy to report," says Silver.
Facebook processes about 1 million legitimate complaints every week -- a sliver of the site's posts. It's not perfect, and the company doesn't identify everything.
"It's hard, and at scale, it's impossible," says Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and author of "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace."
Global scale
Silver's and Bickert's teams sit next to each other at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., as well as other offices, including Austin, Texas; Dublin, Ireland; and Hyderabad, India. All are on constant alert for abusive trends. They also prioritize posts that signal problems in the real world, like self-harm and bullying.
If a newsworthy event happens, such as the August beheading of photojournalist James Foley, the team sends alerts to one another about possible images showing up on the site.
Even so, they're always a step behind because they're largely reactive, not proactive.
"We are relying on the community to tell us when things are going wrong," says Bickert, who spent more than a decade as an assistant US attorney. "I think of it like a Neighborhood Watch program. When you're in your neighborhood, you are the person who knows if there is something going wrong."
Twitter also works to stop users from behaving badly -- suspending accounts and making it easier for family members to ask for the removal of images of deceased loved ones. But it faces an extra wrinkle: Unlike Facebook, Twitter's users can choose to be anonymous.
And Twitter doesn't hunt for bad content; users have to report it first. Clamping down on abusers may work for individual cases of bullying, where several users might verbally attack another. It's not so easy when victims are harangued by a nameless, faceless mob.
Feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez started getting anonymous tweets threatening rape and murder after kicking off a campaign two years ago to put author Jane Austen's image on Great Britain's banknotes. Robin Williams' daughter Zelda suffered harassment after her father stunned fans by committing suicide. And Anita Sarkeesian, whose YouTube series explores the treatment of women in video games, was driven from her home last year after anonymous tweeters threatened her with violence and told the world where she lived.
Calling in the professionals
What's someone like Vora, whose private photos were spread around the Internet, to do?
She contacted Facebook and others, asking them to remove the photos, but soon realized she needed professional help. So she turned to DMCA Defender, in Kansas City, Mo. Co-founded by LaMonica Wallace and Regina Moore, the company helps revenge-porn victims remove online photos.
DMCA's software scans search engines for offending images and records their associated websites. The consultation scan, as Wallace calls it, is free. The team charges about $6 per site, though their fees are negotiable. "You're not paying for a service that you wanted," Wallace says. "These are victims."
Scrubbing stuff off the Web typically takes a month, though some sites don't respond immediately, and not all comply. Sometimes, DMCA appeals to Google to remove the site from search results.
Vora paid about $300 for the initial service. The first year, her ex-boyfriend was forced to pay the bill, in addition to being jailed for 180 days. Vora's pictures are still circulating two years later.
"For a while, for every one site they took down, 20 more popped up," says Vora, who realizes the problem may never go away. "There's still stuff up there. It's the Internet."
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Forget being a victim. What to do when revenge porn strikes
The Internet is a terrible place sometimes, but thankfully there are now organizations that can help people who become victims.
When illicit photos of Anisha Vora began showing up online, she didn't know what to do. She contacted Facebook, Twitter and other companies hoping they'd do the right thing and take the photos down. But soon, there were too many places for her to deal with on her own.
What happened to Vora happens to all sorts of people. Students, college graduates and professionals. People have lost their jobs because photos were published online without their consent. Most of the victims are women, though not all.
As the threat of revenge porn has grown, companies, organizations and even lawyers have sprung up to help victims.
Figure out the size and scope of the problem
The moment your photos begin circulating online, it's easy to get overwhelmed. You've been violated, and suddenly your name, phone number, address and naked images are being published on sites around the Web.
If someone posted these images to Facebook, Twitter or another reputable site, it's relatively easy to report the images and begin the process of asking the sites to take them down.
Less reputable sites aren't as easy. Some might demand a payment to remove listings. In those cases, don't give in.
Instead, go to companies like DMCA Defender, a Kansas City, Mo.-based service that scans the Web for free to help figure out how far and wide your photos have been sent. The company started out as a service to help artists enforce the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 law that attempted to update US copyright rules to apply to the Internet.
About 70 percent of DMCA Defender's staff now works on revenge porn issues, and they charge about $6 per site for takedown services. It also works with minors for free. The company also offers services to regularly search for photos in case they pop up in new sites.
The way they work is mostly to send takedown demands to websites. When those don't work, they ask search companies like Google, Yahoo and Bing to remove them from listings instead.
"You're not paying for a service that you wanted," said co-founder LaMonica Wallace. "These are victims."
These takedowns don't always work. Sometimes, online companies ask for proof of a copyright before agreeing to remove the photo, stalling the process and potentially further traumatizing the victim.
Hide the photos
If trying to get photos taken down doesn't work, there's another option: Flood the Internet with lots of other stuff about you. This is where Reputation.com comes in. The service, based in Redwood City, Calif., creates a network of website postings designed to push all the negative stuff about you down search rankings as much as possible. The theory is the further someone has to click on Google or Bing to find negative information about a person, the less likely that info will impact their lives.
"We flood the robots with positive information about you that's accurate and true," said Karissa Sparks, vice president of marketing at the site. "It can work and it does work."
Why not use takedown requests like DMCA Defender does? Sparks said Reputation.com followed that route in the beginning, after it launched in 2006. "What we discovered was that isn't particularly effective," she said.
The service, which has been around since 2006, can cost as much as $10,000 for a typical case, depending on the number of bad websites out there with your information already. Revenge porn cases represent a small percentage of the company's business, but they know how to handle it.
When it works, Sparks said customers say they feel like they can breathe again. "They got their life back," she said. To them, "Everything was at risk: their career, their family."
Find a lawyer
Law firms are increasingly focusing on Internet issues, and there's a growing group of lawyers who specialize on revenge porn.
"People will go through substantial stretches to have content removed with no results, and that's where we come in," said John Arsenault, a Denver-based attorney whose firm specializes in takedown demands. Often times, he's found, a request to remove images is more effective when it comes from a lawyer's letterhead or a persistent series of calls. "I prefer to get results."
He said most lawyers charge between $500 to upwards of $1,500 -- or more -- depending on the content and number of "takedown notices" that are needed to be sent out to sites to remove unauthorized content.
Removals can take just a day or two, or as long as several weeks or months, said Cleveland-based attorney Aaron Minc, who writes a blog about defamation removal. His clients include "celebrities, politicians, millionaires and even billionaires," in addition to the general public. He declined to give names, citing attorney-client privilege.
Minc said in addition to seeking out a lawyer, victims should also file criminal charges, if appropriate.
"The Internet, it touches everybody," Minc said. "Removing things off it depends on a lot of different factors, the type of sites, the country where the server is located, all of that factors into the equation because it can have a very devastating impact on a victim's life."
Get help for yourself
Finally, it's important to remember that this type of invasion is an attack that can leave terrible emotional scars. Counseling is an option. Getting involved is another.
Vora is now a victim outreach coordinator at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's EndRevengePorn.org. There's also Without My Consent.
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