Marching into the uncanny valley

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

That quote from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park kept going through my head as I read about the latest in robotics from Columbia University -- a robot that can recognize a human facial expression, then mimic it so fast that it looks like it's responding to emotion the way a real human would.

One of the major technical problems with trying to get robots to emulate human emotions is that up until now, they hadn't been able to respond quickly enough to make it look natural.  A delayed smile, for example, comes across as forced; on a mechanical face it drops right into the uncanny valley, the phenomenon noted by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 as an expression or gesture that is close to being human, but not quite close enough.  Take, for example, "Sophia," the interactive robot invented back in 2016 that was able to mimic human expressions, but for most people generated an "Oh, hell no" response rather than the warm-and-trusting-confidant response which the roboticists were presumably shooting for.  The timing of her expressions and comments was subtly off, and the result was that very few of us would have trusted Sophia with the kitchen knives when our backs were turned.

This new creation, though -- a robot called "Emo" -- is able to pick up on human microexpressions that signal a smile or a frown or whatnot is coming, and respond in kind so fast that it looks like true empathy.  They trained it using hours of videos of people interacting, until finally the software controlling its face was able to detect the tiny muscle movements that preceded a change in facial expressions, allowing it to emulate the emotional response it was watching.

Researcher Yuhang Hu interacting with Emo  [Image credit: Creative Machines Lab, Columbia University]

"I think predicting human facial expressions accurately is a revolution in HRI [human-robot interaction]," Hu said.  "Traditionally, robots have not been designed to consider humans' expressions during interactions. Now, the robot can integrate human facial expressions as feedback.  When a robot makes co-expressions with people in real-time, it not only improves the interaction quality but also helps in building trust between humans and robots.  In the future, when interacting with a robot, it will observe and interpret your facial expressions, just like a real person."

Hod Lipson, professor of robotics and artificial intelligence research at Columbia, at least gave a quick nod toward the potential issues with this, but very quickly lapsed into superlatives about how wonderful it would be.  "Although this capability heralds a plethora of positive applications, ranging from home assistants to educational aids, it is incumbent upon developers and users to exercise prudence and ethical considerations," Lipson said.  "But it’s also very exciting -- by advancing robots that can interpret and mimic human expressions accurately, we're moving closer to a future where robots can seamlessly integrate into our daily lives, offering companionship, assistance, and even empathy.  Imagine a world where interacting with a robot feels as natural and comfortable as talking to a friend."

Yeah, I'm imagining it, but not with the pleased smile Lipson probably wants.  I suspect I'm not alone in thinking, "What in the hell are we doing?"  We're already at the point where generative AI is not only flooding the arts -- resulting in actual creative human beings finding it hard to make a living -- but deepfake AI photographs, audio, and video are becoming so close to the real thing that you simply can't trust what you see or hear anymore.  We evolved to recognize when something in our environment was dangerously off; many psychologists think the universality of the uncanny valley phenomenon is because our brains long ago evolved the ability to detect a subtle "wrongness" in someone's expression as a warning signal.

But what happens when the fake becomes so good, so millimeter-and-millisecond accurate, that our detection systems stop working?

I don't tend to be an alarmist, but the potential for misusing this technology is, to put not too fine a point on it, fucking enormous.  We don't need another proxy for human connection; we need more opportunities for actual human connection.  We don't need another way for corporations with their own agendas (almost always revolving around making more money) to manipulate us using machines that can trick us into thinking we're talking with a human.

And for cryin' in the sink, we don't need more ways in which we can be lied to.

I'm usually very much rah-rah about scientific advances, and it's always seemed to me an impossibly thorny ethical conundrum to determine whether there are things humans simply shouldn't investigate.  Who sets those limits, and based upon what rules?  Here, though, we're accelerating the capacity for the unscrupulous to take advantage -- not just of the gullible, anymore, but everyone -- because we're rapidly getting to the point that even the smart humans won't be able to tell the difference between what's real and what's not.

And that's a flat-out dangerous situation.

So a qualified congratulations to Hu and Lipson and their team.  What they've done is, honestly, pretty amazing.  But that said, they need to stop, and so do the AI techbros who are saying "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" and inundating the internet with generative AI everything. 

And for the love of all that's good and holy, all of us internet users need to STOP SHARING AI IMAGES.  Completely.  Not only is it often passing off a faked image as real -- worse, the software is trained using art and photography without permission from, compensation to, or even the knowledge of the actual human artists and photographers.  I.e. -- it's stolen.  I don't care how "beautiful" or "cute" or "precious" you think it is.  If you don't know the source of an image, and can't be bothered to find out, don't share it.  It's that simple.

We need to put the brakes on, hard, at least until we have lawmakers consider -- in a sober and intelligent fashion -- how to evaluate the potential dangers, and set some guidelines for how this technology can be fairly and safely used.

Otherwise, we're marching right into the valley of the shadow of uncanniness, absurdly confident we'll be fine despite all the warning signs.

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A chat at the pub

When I'm out in a crowded bar, I struggle with something that I think a lot of us do -- trying to isolate the voice of the person I'm talking to from all of the background noise.

I can do it, but it's a struggle.  When I'm tired, or have had one too many pints of beer, I find that my ability to hear what my friend is saying suddenly disappears, as if someone had flipped off a switch.  His voice is swallowed up by a cacophony of random noise in which I literally can't isolate a single word.

Usually my indication that it's time to call it a night.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's an interesting question, though, how we manage to do this at all.  Think about it; the person you're listening to is probably closer to you than the other people in the pub, but the others might well be louder.  Add to that the cacophony of glasses clinking and music blaring and whatever else might be going on around you, and the likelihood is that your friend's overall vocal volume is probably about the same as anyone or anything else picked up by your ears.

Yet most of us can isolate that one voice and hear it distinctly, and tune out all of the other voices and ambient noise.  So how do you do this?

Scientists at Columbia University got a glimpse of how our brains might accomplish this amazing task in a set of experiments described in a paper that appeared in the journal Neuron this week.  In "Hierarchical Encoding of Attended Auditory Objects in Multi-talker Speech Perception," by James O’Sullivan, Jose Herrero, Elliot Smith, Catherine Schevon, Guy M. McKhann, Sameer A. Sheth, Ashesh D. Mehta, and Nima Mesgarani, we find out that one part of the brain -- the superior temporal gyrus (STG) -- seems to be capable of boosting the gain of a sound we want to pay attention to, and to do so virtually instantaneously.

The auditory input we receive is a complex combination of acoustic vibrations in the air received all at the same time, so sorting them out is no mean feat.  (Witness how long it's taken to develop good vocal transcription software -- which, even now, is fairly slow and inaccurate.)  Yet your brain can do it flawlessly (well, for most of us, most of the time).  What O'Sullivan et al. found was that once received by the auditory cortex, the neural signals are passed through two regions -- first the Heschl's gyrus (HG), and then the STG.  The HG seems to create a multi-dimensional neural representation of what you're hearing, but doesn't really pick out one set of sounds as being more important than another.  The STG, though, is able to sort through that tapestry of electrical signals and amplify the ones it decides are more important.

"We’ve long known that areas of auditory cortex are arranged in a hierarchy, with increasingly complex decoding occurring at each stage, but we haven’t observed how the voice of a particular speaker is processed along this path," said study lead author James O’Sullivan in a press release.  "To understand this process, we needed to record the neural activity from the brain directly...  We found that that it’s possible to amplify one speaker’s voice or the other by correctly weighting the output signal coming from HG.  Based on our recordings, it’s plausible that the STG region performs that weighting."

The research has a lot of potential applications, not only for computerized vocal recognition, but for guiding the creation of devices to help the hearing impaired.  It's long been an issue that traditional hearing aids amplify everything equally, so a hearing-impaired individual in a noisy environment has to turn up the volume to hear what (s)he wants to listen to, but this can make the ambient background noise deafeningly loud.  If software can be developed that emulates what the STG does, it might create a much more natural-sounding and comfortable experience.

All of which is fascinating, isn't it?  The more we learn about our own brains, the more astonishing they seem.  Abilities we take entirely for granted are being accomplished by incredibly complex arrays and responses in that 1.3-kilogram "meat machine" sitting inside our skulls, often using mechanisms that still amaze me even after thirty-odd years of studying neuroscience.  

And it leaves me wondering what we'll find out about our own nervous systems in the next thirty years.

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In keeping with Monday's post, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics; the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Ramanujan was remarkable not only for his adeptness in handling numbers, but for his insight; one of his most famous moments was the discovery of "taxicab numbers" (I'll leave you to read the book to find out why they're called that), which are numbers that are expressible as the sum of two cubes, two different ways.

For example, 1,729 is the sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed; it's also the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed.

What's fascinating about Ramanujan is that when he discovered this, it just leapt out at him.  He looked at 1,729 and immediately recognized that it had this odd property.  When he shared it with a friend, he was kind of amazed that the friend didn't jump to the same realization.

"How did you know that?" the friend asked.

Ramanujan shrugged.  "It was obvious."

The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel is the story of Ramanujan, whose life ended from tuberculosis at the young age of 32.  It's a brilliant, intriguing, and deeply perplexing book, looking at the mind of a savant -- someone who is so much better than most of us at a particular subject that it's hard even to conceive.  But Kanigel doesn't just hold up Ramanujan as some kind of odd specimen; he looks at the human side of a man whose phenomenal abilities put him in a class by himself.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Trump of Finland

So you know about the ongoing nonsense regarding whether Barack Obama was born on American soil?  The "Birther Truther" foolishness still plagues us here in the United States, even though Obama only has a little less than a year left of his presidency, and amazingly enough hasn't turned the White House into a mosque or ceded the country to Kenya or any of the hundreds of other silly things these people claimed.

And of course, being a fact-free conspiracy, when the Show Us The Birth Certificate cadre were actually shown the birth certificate, they responded by claiming that it was a forgery.  Other "evidence" began to be trotted out, such as an alleged 1981 Columbia University identification card under the name "Barry Soetoro" with Obama's photograph, which says, in large unfriendly letters, "FOREIGN STUDENT."

This claim has been roundly debunked, of course.  The bar-coded ID card format wasn't even adopted by Columbia until 1996.  The individual who was issued the ID number shown turns out to be one Thomas Lugert, a Columbia student in 1998 who is white and looks nothing like President Obama.  But as I've said before: facts don't matter to these people.  If they have a claim they can shriek about, they'll shriek even louder if you show them why it can't possibly be true.

And you may recall that one of the leaders of the Barack-Born-In-Kenya model of reality was none other than Donald Trump.  As recently as July of last year, Trump was asked for his opinion on whether Obama was born in the United States, and he replied, "I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I don’t know why he wouldn’t release his records."  Except, of course, for the fact that Obama did release his records.  It's just that conspiracy wackos don't become conspiracy wackos by falling for little tricks like hard evidence, and also that being Donald Trump means never having to admit you were wrong about anything.

The reason this all comes up, and what makes it kind of hilarious in a twisted way, is that there is a guy who is mounting a one-person campaign...

... to prove that Trump himself was born in Finland.

According to this guy, Donald Trump was born "Rögnvaldr Trømp," a name that immediately reminded me of the bit in the opening credits of Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail that had lines like, "Mööse chöreögraphed by Hörst Pröt III."  And being something of a language geek, I was also struck by the fact that "Rögnvaldr Trømp" doesn't look like a Finnish name at all, but more like a bizarre hybrid of Norwegian and Icelandic.

But the lunacy doesn't end there.  According to the blogger in question -- whose name I wasn't able to find anywhere on the site, presumably because he's afraid that if he is ever identified, black-clad Finnish operatives are going to take him out for blowing the whistle -- the whole thing came from "sources close to the Clintons."  These "sources," he says, are certain that if Trump gets elected, he's going to sell us out to the "Euroleftists."  But best of all was a paragraph a little further down that I have to quote in toto, because just describing it would not give you the full impact of how truly wonderful it is:

According to Eurotech magnate Linus Torvalds, on whose Lapland estate Tromp and Princess Ivana are reported to own a summer home, the Congressman takes "an active hand" in the governance of his native Finland. Torvalds, head of pro-piracy tech firm Lindex, says that he "sees [Tromp] as a brother--no, a hellittelysana (Here he used a Finnish term of endearment which translates roughtly [sic] to 'solstice-father-brother') who has done more for Finlandia than any other man could dream."

Okay.  So it's "Linux," not "Lindex."  "Lindex" sounds like a spray cleaner you'd use for getting the dust off of computer monitor screens.  And hellittelysana isn't a Finnish term of endearment, it's the word that means "term of endearment."  So it'd be a little odd if someone called Trump that.  It'd be as if I said to Ted Cruz, "You are a complete and total epithet!"

So the whole thing is kind of ridiculous, although I have to admit that it's wonderful for the humorous irony value.  I doubt anyone will take it as seriously as the Obama birther thing was -- showing, perhaps, that Trump's opponents have a lot better critical thinking skills than his followers do.  But even if it never gains traction, I thought it merited a shout-out as being one of the most purely weird conspiracy theories I've ever run across.

And given how many conspiracy theories I've run through here in Skeptophilia, that by itself is worthy of note.

The appeal of the underdog

We skeptics like to think that our logic will always be convincing, that people who believe in counterfactual nonsense will come around to a more scientific way of thinking if only we point out how silly they're being.  Turn on the lights, we think, and people can't help but see more clearly.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the human brain doesn't work like that.

We have two strikes against us right from the start.  One of them is the backfire effect, the well-documented tendency of people to double-down on their beliefs when they're presented with hard evidence against them.  Shown data, facts, and a logical argument that people are wrong, and often they'll come away even more convinced that they're right... and threatened.

But a second one has to do with how people react when they see others attacked.  Many people end up espousing woo-woo beliefs because they were persuaded by some charismatic public figure, so the figure him/herself ends up being representative of the ideas.  And an attack on someone we revere often leaves us outraged on their behalf, and thinking that the ones mounting the attack are simply arrogant assholes.

Because as Robert Park tells us in his wonderful book Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud (which all of you should order right now and read), we love backing an underdog.  If the spokesperson for our favorite silly idea appears unfairly besieged by the establishment, we rally to the cause.

Describing the campaign of the amazingly persistent crank Joe Newman, who claimed for years that both the First and the Second Laws of Thermodynamics were false and that he'd created a perpetual motion machine that could create energy, Park writes:

An intense, handsome man in his forties, dressed in work clothes, his dark hair combed straight back, the plainspoken mechanic looked directly into the eyes of his viewers.  He declared that his Energy Machine could produce ten times the electrical energy it took to run it.  "Put one in your home," he said, "and you'll never have to pay another electric bill." 

It's the sort of story Americans love.  A backwoods wizard who never finished high school makes a revolutionary scientific discovery.  He is denied the fruits of his genius by a pompous scientific establishment and a patent examiner who rejects his application for a patent on "an unlimited source of energy" without even examining it, on the ground that all alleged inventions of perpetual motion machines are refused patents.  Not a man to be pushed around, Joseph Wesley Newman takes on the U. S. government, filing suit in federal court against the Patent and Trademark Office.  It's the little man battling a gigantic, impersonal system... 

Perhaps the most endearing characteristic of Americans is their sympathy for the underdog.  They resent arrogant scientists who talk down to them in unfamiliar language, and the government bureaucrats who hide behind rules.  Moreover, Joe Newman's claim invoked one of the most persistent myths of the industrialized world -- free energy.  Who has not heard stories of the automobile that runs on ordinary water?  Suppressed, of course, by the oil industry.  The public never tires of that story.

And just lately, we've had two examples of just this.  First, Vani Hari, the self-proclaimed "Food Babe" whose ideas basically boil down to "if you can't pronounce the name of a chemical, you shouldn't have it in your body," was systematically taken apart by analytical chemist Yvette d'Entremont in a Gawker article entitled, "The 'Food Babe' is Full of Shit."  The article is well-researched, well-written, and its logic seems incontrovertible.

And yet, Ms. Babe and her followers, the self-proclaimed "Food Babe Army," are still going strong.  Food herself has responded to her critics with a shrieking diatribe that amounts to nothing more than one long string of loose-cannon ad hominems.  Food is rather notorious for this approach; when last year she wrote a piece on her blog about how horrible it was that the air in airplane cabins wasn't pure oxygen, and within hours received 4,847,901 responses that (1) ordinary air is only 21% oxygen, and (2) if airplanes were filled with pure oxygen, they'd be explosive, she responded by taking down the post and claiming that her views were being misrepresented by a hostile cadre of shills for Big Nitrogen.

And her followers loved it.  "Go Food Babe!" one of them wrote.  "Keep fighting for the health of Americans!  We're behind you 100%."

Then we had Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose weird brand of holistic alternative medicine has raised the ire of everyone who thinks that medical modalities should be based on, you know, actual hard data.  Here are three of his claims (quoted from a wonderful article by Scott Gavura in Science-Based Medicine):

• (On green coffee extract) — “You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they found the magic weight-loss for every body type.”
• (On raspberry ketone) — “I’ve got the number one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat”
• (On Garcinia cambogia) — “It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”

This is just scratching the surface.  Oz has become rich off of telling people not to listen to their doctors, that science is actually a religion, and that all they need to do is buy his books and come to his speaking appearances and they'll know how to improve their health. 

And just last week, there was a well-meant campaign against Oz that threatens to fail spectacularly.  A group of medical researchers banded together to try to get Oz fired from his position at Columbia University, saying he promoted "disdain for science" and "quack medicine," statements which are fairly unarguable to anyone who understands how scientific research works.  But Oz, like Food Babe, isn't quelled in the least by these accusations -- and now has said that he will use his television show (of course he has a television show) to take on his critics.

"We plan to show America who these authors are, because discussion of health topics should be free of intimidation," Oz said.

It should also, apparently, be free of logic, data, evidence, and peer review.

And the sad thing is how unlikely all this is to change anyone's opinion.  My guess is that neither Food Babe nor Dr. Oz will experience the least drop in their popularity or book sales from the criticisms they've received.  Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they increase, because as Brendan Behan famously said, "There's no such thing as bad publicity."

Sorry if all of this is depressing.  The human mind, unfortunately, is more often swayed by emotion than it is by logic.  But the news is not all bad.  If you'll send me $39.95, I'll send you a device that you can hook into your home wiring system that will provide for all of your electricity needs.

You'll never have to pay the electric company another cent.  I promise, cross my heart and hope to die.