What is the relationship between humans and chatbots?

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Since Unimation produced the first robot Unimate in 1962 and put it into use at General Motors (GM), robots have been developing for more than 50 years. During this period, robot technology has continued to make significant progress. Nowadays, robotics technology has been applied to a wider range of fields, especially as machines become more and more like humans, chatbots that can accompany humans are also playing an increasingly important role in people's social life and are loved by people .

From Siri to Xiaoice and Xiaodu, people are no longer unfamiliar with chatbots. The birth of chatbots is obviously not accidental, and compared with other service robots and industrial robots that replace humans to do repetitive work, chatbots have special significance for the future of human beings.

chatbots today

The world's first chatbot, called Eliza, was developed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum.

Originally, ELIZA was developed to mimic "the reactions of undirected psychotherapists during initial psychiatric interviews" to verify exactly how humans and machines communicate. Professor Joseph uses scripts that recognize certain patterns and keywords and generate responses accordingly. What Joseph didn't expect was that ELIZA could communicate with people like a psychotherapist and develop an emotional connection with some of them.

The birth of ELIZA has also inspired a large number of chatbots, such as PERRY, ALICE, Mitsuku, Albert One and so on . Developed in 2000, the post-00s SmarterChild was the most popular chatbot in the past. When SmarterChild was born, the SMS service was popular. In this context, SmarterChild also added cutting-edge natural language processing capabilities. At that time, SmarterChild was already able to understand and respond to human language.

Of course, chatbots really ushered in a qualitative leap, or the birth of Siri in 2010, Siri almost redefines the functions of chatbots. Not only can people query and have conversations with Siri through messages, but they can also enjoy text, audio, images, and video in a variety of ways. When Siri was released, Eliza was called out again for the conversation. At the time, there was a 45-year age gap between Eliza and Siri, and a 2 million-fold difference in memory.

After Siri, Amazon's Alexa, which is less than 4 years old, takes chatbots a step further. Alexa is built into several smart home devices like Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show, Fire TV, and more. For us, all we need to do is "Alexa, play some music" or "Alexa, turn on the TV" and we can easily command all the appliances in the house.

In 2014, Microsoft released a chatbot in China called Xiaobing, which brought chatbots to a new level . Unlike most personal smart devices, XiaoIce is optimized for user friendliness. Xiaoice's goal is not to complete people's inquiries as quickly as possible, but to keep the conversation going.

Because XiaoIce's job is to build an emotional connection, XiaoIce will give a lot of advice, often weird and wise. When a user tells XiaoIce "I think my girlfriend is mad at me", XiaoIce will ask back, "Are you more concerned about what will separate you than what will bring you together? ".

And, because XiaoIce is designed to react like a 17-year-old girl, she's not always "very polite." Xiaobing knows how to be sarcastic, sometimes even a little bit spicy. Unexpectedly, people also like talking to Xiaobing so much. Since its inception, XiaoIce has conducted more than 30 billion conversations with more than 100 million people. An average user chats with her 60 times a month, and the total number of registered users exceeds 20 million.

Today, as messaging apps continue to outpace social media networks in use, chatbots are becoming more popular in the business world, and their continued refinement and advancements have brought significant changes to society. Now, more and more companies are beginning to introduce chatbots in customer service channels to replace customer service voice systems with poor user experience; and people are more and more comfortable with these chatbots to have real conversations with people.

Try not to be alone

The birth of chatbots is not accidental. Obviously, people do not like to be alone. For humans, loneliness is a repressed feeling that is often described as distressing. In prison, the worst thing inmates fear is solitary confinement, which many believe is almost like torture. In 2012, the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights sued California prisons for the use of solitary confinement, arguing that the practice violated the Eighth Amendment.

The reason is that, from an evolutionary point of view, human beings are social creatures that need to depend on each other for survival . People who lack social interaction are more likely to die of heart disease and cancer, and if we were left alone in the jungle for a month, most would not survive. Even if we could live alone, few would want to live that way.

Our need to socialize may explain why, as AI services continue to evolve, it will be necessary to develop technology to talk to real people. Chatbots are one option .

For example, in the context of global aging, nursing homes around the world today also have to deal with the mental health of the elderly. Nursing home occupants often experience loneliness, which can lead to depression and a rapid decline in physical fitness. To compound the problem, these facilities are often understaffed.

Conor McGinn, director of the Robotics Lab at Trinity College Dublin, said: "Those who work in nursing homes are not really spending their time with the elderly, they are under a lot of stress and have The ringtones of various calls are constantly urging them. In fact, those seniors have been lonely all the time, and they are eager to care and communicate with each other.” And such scenarios are where chatbots can come into play. As long as they learn how to communicate with humans, they will become an important part of our healthcare system.

Of course, it's not just the elderly who can benefit from chatbots, fitness people need it too. At the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, researchers conducted a study to see if robots could act as personal trainers. They outfitted a fitness trainer with a robot in the gym, and then had the robot provide participants with various kinds of feedback based on their personality, mood, heart rate, speed, and fitness level. Throughout the process, the robot learned when to give compliments and what cues to encourage the fitness person.

Also, and more importantly, chatbots will enter each of our lives. In the future, chatbots may understand our feelings and accept our needs.

If we want to chat, we'll want them to initiate a conversation; if we're nervous or emotional, a chatbot might be able to play a relaxing tune or listen to a problem we're having. These may seem a little weird today, but in the end, it's as natural as we cuddle our dog or chat with our friends.

Today, chatbots are going a step further, and most experts agree that bots will eventually reach a level of sophistication that they will imitate our emotions so perfectly that their behavior is simply indistinguishable from our own. In the future, hyper-self-aware machines may behave as if they have a full range of emotions, including empathy, and today we are on the way to building them.

What is the relationship between humans and robots?

Today, conversational systems are increasingly making their way into our daily interactions.

At the same time, rapidly developing intelligent technologies have also raised questions about the relationship between humans and machines . In "Group Loneliness," MIT social scientist Shirley Turkel expressed her dissatisfaction with technology, saying that the price of increasing human-computer interaction is sacrificing human connection. " I firmly believe that social technology will always disappoint because it promises what it can't deliver, it promises camaraderie, but only performance, " Turkle wrote .

Social scientists describe this phenomenon as a social illusion -- a "pseudo-gemeinschaft", where, for example, a bank customer might evaluate his relationship with a bank teller, even if the relationship only existed in one business transaction context, and it might just be a polite, unfamiliar exchange. Turkel believes that the relationship between humans and robots is not real. These machines are designed to express complex emotions just to elicit or interpret certain human emotional responses.

Relying on chatbots does bring new challenges to traditional relationship building. Know that the process of growing and building relationships with others is a process of learning how to deal with rejection and disappointment. Because of human uncertainty, we may not always get what we want from our relationships, and we may need to have difficult conversations with others and some degree of compromise when building a relationship.

And with the painless, effortless, and pleasurable alternatives offered by robots, young people may never learn how to develop deep relationships with other people because it is too trouble. This could lead to a "machine-induced state of isolation" when we choose to interact with the world almost exclusively through machines, and become so dependent on algorithms as an intermediary between ourselves and reality that we completely We are in such a state when we lose direct contact with another person and with the outside world.

In fact, such a state has already emerged, and can now be seen on the mobile phones we use every day: more and more people are choosing to use various instant messaging apps, games and social media. to communicate with others, even when we are in the same physical space, such as in the same office. Chatbot lovers are likely to be the culmination of this trend, as humans may be building a society that requires little direct human contact.

And, inevitably, this human-machine relationship doesn't always develop into the state we expect it to be. In the fall of 2013, the film "Her" was a hit, telling the story of a male protagonist, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who falls in love with a virtual assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

"Her" is set sometime in the future of Southern California, where a lonely male falls in love with an operating system. Many people who watched the film seemed to be perfectly fine with the ending. The movie "Her" also talks about the concept of a "singularity", that is, the point at which machine intelligence will accelerate, eventually surpassing human intelligence and becoming an independent existence, leaving humans behind. In the movie "Her", the relationship between man and his operating system collapses because of the rapid development of computer intelligence. Unwilling to accept 1,000 simultaneous relationships, the computer transcends human nature and ultimately chooses to leave.

"Her," and another singularity-obsessed science film, "Transcendence," which came out that summer, were both interesting in the way they portrayed the relationship between humans and machines. In Transcendental Hackers, human-computer interaction turns from pleasant to dark, and finally, a super-intelligent machine destroys human civilization.

Compared to other robots, chatbots are more special to humans. And, ultimately, how far chatbots will develop is not the most important thing, but what kind of relationship we will have with them and how they will integrate into our society .