Conference paper presented at #4s2017 in Boston, Massachusetts. Introduction; During the last years we have witnessed how conversational interfaces have popped up in the digital landscape due to the great advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Speech Recognition (SR). That has made possible that chatbots and virtual assistants became common in different platforms and devices. This emergence has been also coined as “conversation-as-a-platform” stressing the radical change that means to communicate with machines throughout the human voice in terms of user experience (UX). This emphasis in outlining a new version of the Web is not new as it was also something previously stressed in past techno-market paradigms like “Web 2.0” but it also reflects the need of political reflection about the introduction of emergent and pervasive technologies in our society. The development of these chatting agents mirrors the concentration of AI resources around a bunch of companies that lead the so-called “platform economy”.

1. Conversational Interfaces;
Speaking with
irresponsible black-boxes
31/8/2017
Dr. Raúl Tabarés
#4S2017
Boston

2. Index
Introduction Speaking to the
Internet
The rising of
Platform
Economy & AI
Conversational
Interfaces as
Autonomous
Technologies
2 ▌
What is a
conversational
interface exactly?
The need for
Responsible
Innovations
Discussion

3. During the last years we have witnessed how conversational interfaces have popped up in the
digital landscape due to the great advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Speech
Recognition (SR). That has made possible that chatbots and virtual assistants became
common in different platforms and devices.
This emergence has been also coined as “conversation-as-a-platform” stressing the radical
change that means to communicate with machines throughout the human voice in terms of
user experience (UX).
This emphasis in outlining a new version of the Web is not new as it was also something
previously stressed in past techno-market paradigms like “Web 2.0” but it also reflects the
need of political reflection about the introduction of emergent and pervasive technologies in
our society.
The development of these chatting agents mirrors the concentration of AI resources around a
bunch of companies that lead the so-called “platform economy”.
3 ▌
Introduction

4. “It's a simple concept, yet it's very
powerful in its impact.
It is about taking the power of
human language and applying it
more pervasively to our
computing”
Satya Nadella - Microsoft CEO´s

8. Different platforms have emerged and become common in our routines. This paradigm shift
in business has been driven by the growing digitalization of sociality (Van Dijck, 2013) and the
decentralization effect that Internet culture provokes on society (Castells, 1997) favoring this
transition to digital services created by nascent start up´s.
These digital ecosystems are trying to position themselves as cultural intermediaries while
they look for sustainable business models (Gillespie, 2010) and they are totally depend on
the contribution of human beings and the digitization of value-creating human activities
(Kenney & Zysman, 2016).
The emergence of Web 2.0 (O´Reilly, 2005) and Social Media (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010)
paradigms have fuelled the growing datasets (Helmond, 2015) that are available in different
UGC platforms (Van Dijck, 2009).This has made possible “digital labor” (Scholz, 2012) or “free
labor” (Terranova, 2000) that is characterized by the exploitation of commons by capital
(platform owners) on the Internet (Fuchs, 2010; Fuster-Morell, 2010; Tufekci, 2010).
AI is the last breakthrough in this technological race because it has attracted a lot of attention
due to promising applications like self-driving cars (Stilgoe, 2017), banking (Pasquale, 2015)
and conversational interfaces (Geller, 2012), all of them favored by the greater availability of
data that has made possible to train computers in these tasks.
8 ▌
The rising of Platform Economy
& Artificial Intelligence

9. “If the industrial revolution was organized around
the factory, today´s changes are organized around
these digital platforms, loosely defined.
Indeed, we are in the midst of a reorganization of our
economy in which the platform owners are
seemingly developing power that may be even more
formidable than was that of the factory owners in the
early industrial revolution”
(Kenney & Zysman, 2016).

10. 10 ▌

11. The conviction that humans will be able to interact with machines through speech has been
widely covered by sci-fi (Allen et al., 2001). It has also been commonly argued that speech is
the technology that will bring the Internet to everyone (Lai, 2000) because spoken language
“is the most natural, efficient, flexible, and inexpensive means of communication among
humans” (Zue & Glass, 2000).
We can define a conversational interface like any user interface that mimics chatting with a
real human and therefore; can provide a quasi-human experience in a human-computer
interaction. There are two major conversational interfaces; chatbots and virtual assistants.
But there are also other artifacts that can implement a conversational interface like social
robots.
The origins of NLP are tightly related with Alan Turing´s article published in 1950;
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence” where he wondered whether a machine can act
indistinguishably from the way a thinker acts (Turing´s Test).
New competitions have been fostered like “Winograd Schema Challenge” for improving
“Turing´s test” and ask computers to make sense of sentences that are ambiguous but
usually simple for humans to parse (Knight, 2016b). Common-sense reasoning is the next
frontier as it is something that can´t be trained through data and is probably out of reach for
current deep learning models (Chollet, 2017). 11 ▌
What is a conversational
interface exactly?

13. Since the irruption of the WWW in the 80´s (Berners-Lee, 2000) the PC was the only one
gateway to access this platform but this will change with the advent of the iPod (O´Reilly,
2005) and the iPhone (Honan, 2007).
Although it wasn´t the first smartphone , it was the most popular (Vogelstein, 2013) and it
clearly contributed to a massive access to the Web. Afterwards, Android OS and other
smartphones will appear in the market favoring multi-touch controls that radically changed
the development of UI´s (Tabarés-Gutiérrez, 2015).
Apple also launched a virtual assistant in 2011 called “Siri”. This innovation is also a
byproduct of “CALO” (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project funded by
DARPA under its PAL (Personalized Assistant that Learns) program. The aim of the project
was “to create cognitive software systems, that is, systems that can reason, learn from
experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and
respond robustly to surprise.” (SRI project web).
CALO project proved that different disciplines of AI can cooperate together (Bosker, 2013).
This new approach opened up doors to a new paradigm in machine learning because every
part of the project learned “in vivo” and with an uncontrolled diet of information instead of a
fixed set of data.
13 ▌
Speaking to the Internet

15. Chatbots like “Tay” demonstrated how to love Hitler and hate feminism can be rewarded with
fame and followers in the social media landscape (Wong, 2016). The digital assistant Alexa
has been involved in several controversies (Green, 2017). Other chatbots have been used in a
non-ethical ways by portals like “Ashley Madison” (Morris, 2016; Newitz, 2015) or to spread
fake news in US presidential elections (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016; Ferrara et al., 2016).
As Winner argues; “The term AT is understood to be a general label for all conceptions and
observations to the effect that technology I somehow out of control by human agency”
(Winner, 1977:15). Control and knowledge over technological systems have been deterred in
favor of “progress” as a major ideal.
Our incapacity to decrypt the algorithmic culture (Hallinan & Striphas, 2014; Striphas, 2015)
that is at the backbone of digital platforms (Gillespie, 2011) impedes to analyze the
technological systems that stand for them (Dourish, 2016).
It also remains unclear to public opinion how these companies gather, store and manage data
about users what it clearly contributes to create formidable black-boxes that operate in the
cultural sphere with rules and mechanisms that are not open to public scrutiny.
15 ▌
Conversational Interfaces as
autonomous technologies

17. “The loss of mastery manifests itself in a decline
of our ability to know, to judge, or to control our
technical means. It is in this general waning of
intellectual, moral, and political command that
ideas of autonomous technology find their
basis”
(Winner, 1977:30)

18. AI techniques are built up in methods and tools that defy the human reasoning and are
confident about computer processing power; that is, a power that has been centralized during
the last years due to the development of cloud computing (Bustamante Donas, 2014), and the
availability of high-speed bandwidths (Geller, 2012).
The biggest aspiration of conversational interfaces is to provide with a more natural way of
communication between humans and machines, erasing the recurrent frictions that many
users experiment when they want to get things done on a computer. But fewer frictions with
computers could also mean fewer barriers to shop, or less space for moral deliberation.
These technologies can provide advantages to interact with computers but also with greater
technological somnambulism (Winner, 1983) to act impulsively in the digital ecosystem.
These artifacts can reduce our already declining autonomy in the cultural sphere favoring to
have conversations with digital agents that will assess and recommend us what to do, shop
or like.
The diversity of human languages can be also endangered. Nuances, tones and dialects
belong also to the cultural landscape that is behind our linguistic diversity and the
standardization of these corpuses might not be beneficial for speaking minorities. Current
developments in the AI ecosystem are gathered by a minority of companies that command
the majority of resources (Echeverría & Tabarés, 2016). 18 ▌
Conversational Interfaces as
autonomous technologies

19. There is a need to develop conversational interfaces in liaison with other stakeholders for
promoting a collective and reflexive dialogue about its development that can foster shared
responsibility (Von Schomberg, 2013), can prevent potentially dangerous or non-socially
desirable products (Stilgoe et al., 2013) and can create the “right impacts” at the same time
(Owen, Macnaghten, & Stilgoe, 2012).
Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) aims to foresee the threats that emergent
technologies can bring to our societies while trying to reframe responsibility in innovation
contexts (Owen et al., 2012) as well as conferring new responsibilities (Douglas, 2003).
As conversational interfaces are being promoted as new UI´s in computer-human
communication it will be necessary to establish these long-term collaborations between
different stakeholders in order to promote responsible digital assistants. This can prevent the
pitfalls that many innovations in the field of AI have committed due to the lack of social
diversity and political critique that is present in the R&D departments that promote these
innovations.
The AI industry is not open and inclusive. This prevents it for becoming a socially desirable
technology. “Progress” in this sense means “inequality” as the benefits of these advances
are not available to the majority of society.
19 ▌
The need for Responsible
innovations

21. Conversational Interfaces can offer new possibilities to improve human-machine
communications that can lead to a mass adoption of digital technologies and at the same
time contributing to mitigate different digital divides that exist in society.
Nevertheless, it is still not clear how these innovations are going to confront the growing
inequality that the digital revolution is creating in society throughout what has been coined as
the “platform economy”. In this sense, the development of these technologies is the next step
in the growing digitization of sociality.
The role of chatbots and other virtual assistants in the social media landscape has generated
a lot of controversy. We cannot fully understand how these socio-technological systems are
built up but its impact in society is much greater than we can expect.
Conversational interfaces can help humans in their daily frictions with computers trying to
get things done but at the same time this lowering of resistance can make people more prone
to be “automatic”.
Our current declining autonomy in the social sphere is driven by the introduction of
autonomous technological systems that are disturbing spaces for moral and political
deliberation.
Conversational interfaces are being branded as digital servants but we have to reflect about
the ways that are being developed for assuring that they will not become digital tyrants.
21 ▌
Discussion

22. Bosker, B. (2013). SIRI RISING: The Inside Story Of Siri’s Origins — And Why She Could Overshadow The iPhone. Retrieved
July 11, 2017, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-apple-iphone_n_2499165.html
Boyd, D., & Crawford, K. (2011). Six Provocations for Big Data. In A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of
Internet and Society (pp. 1–17). http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1926431
Dijck, J. Van. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dourish, P. (2016). Algorithms and their Others: Algorithmic Culture in Context. Big Data & Society, (December), 1–11.
http://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716665128
Echeverría, J., & Tabarés, R. (2016). Artificial Intelligence, Cybercities and Technosocieties. Minds and Machines.
http://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-016-9412-3
Ferrara, E., Varol, O., Davis, C., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. (2016). The Rise of Social Bots. Communications of the ACM5,
59(7), 96–104. http://doi.org/10.1145/2818717
Gillespie, T. (2010). The Politics of Platforms. New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364.
http://doi.org/10.1002/9781118321607.ch28
Hallinan, B., & Striphas, T. (2014). Recommended for you: The Netflix Prize and the production of algorithmic culture. New
Media & Society, 1461444814538646-. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814538646
Helmond, A (2015). The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready. Social Media + Society. Volume 1 (2).
DOI: 10.1177/2056305115603080
Kenney, M., & Zysman, J. (2016). The Rise of the Platform Economy. Issues in Science and Technology, 32(3), 61.
Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. London: Harvard
University Press.
Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433–460.
http://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6710-5_3
Winner, L. (1977). Autonomus Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics ? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136. Retrieved from https://blog.itu.dk/I-II-
E2013/files/2013/11/winner-l-do-artifacts-have-politics.pdf
Winner, L. (1983). Technologies as Forms of Life. In R. S. Cohen & M. . Wartofsky (Eds.), Epistemology, Methodology, and the
Social Sciences (pp. 249–263). Dordrecht: Springer. http://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1458-7_10
22 ▌
Bibliography

23. Dr. Rául Tabarés
raul.tabares@tecnalia.com
@faraondemetal
https://es.linkedin.com/in/rtabares
www.tecnalia.com
Thanks a lot and
keep in touch!!!