Q&A recap: Online communities, ethical algorithms and sex robots

Groups based on fringe ideas such as the alt-right and Incels are amplified by the internet, said Chuck Klosterman.

Pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman.

Social commentator Van Badham has said her voice would have been “filtered out” were it not for the internet, as part of a discussion on the growth of online communities and the ethics of algorithms.

Appearing on ABC’s Q&A, Ms Badham was joined by artificial intelligence researcher Toby Walsh, sexologist Nicki Goldstein, pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman, and Emma Maye Gibson in character as sex clown Betty Grumble, during a Festival of Dangerous Ideas special of the program.

Speaking on the strength the alt-right and the involuntary celibate, or Incel, communities have gained from an online presence, Mr Klosterman said the message of these groups based around “fringe ideas” were amplified by the internet.

“It is sort of impossible to imagine these factions having existed say in 1992 or whatever,” he said.

“It would be very strange to self-identify as an Incel in the real world. I mean, even if somebody had these ideas in their mind, it would seem strange to say go to a bar and try to find other people who shared this identity. It’s very strange.”

Is there a difference between how the far left and far right use the internet to communicate their agenda? #QandA pic.twitter.com/CH9TYBilTq

— ABC Q&A (@QandA) November 5, 2018

“What I think is the disturbing thing about the internet … is how these fringe ideas cannot only be amplified, but be then further amplified by their coverage in the media.

“It’s a complicated thing because I do feel as though the internet is shifting everyone’s sense of reality by sort of the most bombastic ideas are the ones that get the most attention and seem more central to the experience of living and the experience of life.

“I feel a real distance between the world I see on my computer and the world I live in,” he said.

Ms Badham brought up her personal experiences of being attacked “constantly” on social media by “intense neo-Nazis and radical misogynists”.

“One of the reasons I know they’re attacking me is I am a hard left person and have explicit socialist politics. I obviously don’t support violence.

“I enter my views into a public realm where they are discussed and processed through traditional media. I don’t think somebody like me existed before the internet because I was filtered out of mass media. And I couldn’t build an audience.”

Ethical Algorithms

Responding to a question on how AI can help with the filtering of discredited views online, Mr Walsh said that recent events had been “disappointing” and called for Facebook to be held to the same editorial standards as the ABC.

“The dream that we started out with and the Arab spring, the technology being used to give people voice and to promote democracy has been badly distorted and badly perverted away.

“While we can be critical of the alt-right and the alt-left, I think we also have to be critical of the

tech companies. It’s their algorithms that are filtering the news … and filtering those things up to the top.

“It’s Facebook that was selling adverts to Cambridge Analytica and they have not taken responsibility … I think we have to call the tech companies into account.

“(Algorithms) have the ethics of the people that write them. And the algorithms are just bits of maths and we have to really call into account people and say ‘you need to be responsible’.

“The biggest media organisation on the planet today is Facebook. It’s not a media company anymore. They provide most of the news to people. And we have to probably hold them to the same sorts of standards we hold the ABC too.”

Asked if he was optimistic for the future, Mr Klosterman said “all technologies are good in the short term and problematic in the long term.”

Sex Robots

Responding to a question on the ethics of sex robots, Ms Badham said that “as long as there have been people there’s been some form of sex robot or sex toy or sex object.”

“The issue that I have is where these sex robots occur in the conditions of modern patriarchy and the potential for them to become a vehicle for greater objectification of women and greater acts of misogyny.

“One of the issues we have around the sort of modern malaise of depression amongst men, resentments and anger about a lack of sexual fulfilment comes from a decommunifying essentially of people’s lives and experiences.”

“As we move towards certain automations the notion of human contact is being taken away from us. If you provide somebody with a sex robot and go ‘here you can have this instead of a relationship’, you’re furthering that loneliness and that sense of isolation.

“You can project all kinds of qualities on the robot or doll but it does not overcome the fundamental loneliness,” Ms Badham said.

Do sex robots lead to misogyny and the objectification of women? @vanbadham #QandA pic.twitter.com/gYE58P75kM

— ABC Q&A (@QandA) November 5, 2018

On the questions around monogamy and kinks that were raised by the spread of sex robots, Ms Goldstein said that society was shaped by “a linear model”, and that how we viewed sex was influenced by religion.

“Boy meets girl, boy-girl get married. Have sex, procreate. We are still struggling to even encourage women to be sexual outside of monogamy.

“We need this liberation and need people to be able to be accepted for whatever they want to be and how they want to identify as long as they’re being true to themselves and they’re not being harmful to anybody else, I don’t have a problem with it,” Ms Goldstein said.

Artificial Intelligence

University of New South Wales professor Toby Walsh said that with the rate of current technology progression, robots that are “indistinguishable” from humans could be a reality in as little as 50 years’ time.

Will robots eventually become indistinguishable from humans? @TobyWalsh #QandA pic.twitter.com/VzcGfp94Hw

— ABC Q&A (@QandA) November 5, 2018

“They will be indistinguishable from the real thing, eventually. In 50, 100 years. I don’t know how long it will take but eventually they will be indistinguishable.

“We’re wonderful because we’re human and don’t have any need to replace us as humans. We want machines to do the things we can’t do. The dull and dirty and repetitive things and let us focus time being with other people. We’re social animals at the end of the day.

On robots and their role in a future economy, Mr Klosterman said that the “ideal thing” would be for robots to take over all jobs that involved undesirable tasks.

“Isn’t it kind of the social goal that unemployment goes to 100 per cent?” Mr Klosterman said.