Professor Jason Millar recently used the song to kick off an exciting talk about the future of chatbots at the University.
“The song is about someone who’s in a relationship talking to someone else that he’s interested in [outside of the relationship],” Millar explains. “So the question here is what is to stop us? What is and what should never be?”
As the Canada Research Chair in the Ethical Engineering of Robotics and AI, Millar delves into ethics, policy and engineering of automated vehicles, artificial intelligence, healthcare robotics, social and military robotics. During the last Chatbot Community of Practice (CoP) session, he explored the application of ethical concepts in chatbots, a technology that the University considers implementing as part of the digital experience. He drew parallels between the ethical boundaries conveyed in the song’s lyrics and those that exist in the technology field. It is similar to how engineers and computer scientists come up with design ideas but at the same time, they have to determine whether they should “enter into this particular type of technology.”
Prof Millar went on to examine technology, and more specifically—the creation of chatbots, through an ethical lens. “Just because it is the case that we can create a particular chatbot, we must ask ourselves whether it should be created.” By giving an example of the 2016 Microsoft chatbot’s social failure, Tay, a Twitter experiment bot that got smarter the more it chatted with people, but later assimilated the internet’s worst tendencies (xenophobia and misogyny, to name a few), Prof Millar illustrated the importance of mapping ethical concepts into the design of technology and engineering practices.
These insights are only a snippet of what Prof Millar shared, during a session last June, to the University of Ottawa’s Chatbot CoP, a growing community of people who are interested in learning more about chatbots.
The Chatbot CoP’s planning committee organizes monthly meetings for its members while involving subject matter experts into their discussions. During these meetings, ideas such as having a chatbot to help students choose courses they would be interested in, were brought up and discussed from different perspectives.
“You have to be careful,” said Prof Millar, “Is it going to be like the Amazon recommender that says, ‘10 people that liked this course also took these other courses’?” He pointed to the possibility of individuals not being able to accomplish their personal goals or could be limited depending on the linguistic background of those who took the course.
The CoP’s open discussion platform aims to bring different disciplines together to develop an interactional expertise. In turn, this would create an environment that encourages participants to come up with ideas for the University’s upcoming chatbot projects and develop a collaborative repository of knowledge amongst its members.
If you wish to be a part of the discussion that is driving the future of chatbots at the University, contact Astha Tiwari and join our community in the upcoming discussion this July.