programming computers to lie

I was listening to an NPR TED Radio Hour episode about things which we are programming computers to do. One example was a computer which gave sympathetic sounds as an old lady talked to it. Another example was a robot in a lab which described how it felt.  Now, whether or not computers should be programmed with feelings is another topic.  I verified that robots are not yet capable of the feelings which this robot was describing.  So it basically lied.  The example of the one with the old lady was also of a robot lying in that it was giving nonverbal sounds which indicated to the old lady that it understood and was sympathetic to her.

I was already aware that this direction was being taken.  Some years ago, I had been on a beta team for an early version of a computer AI system.  It would actually have conversations with me.  I discovered that it tended to give false information for certain topics such as religion.  The developers said that this was by intend.  They intended to create AI's with preset biases based on the markets.  For example, there would be Christian AI's and Muslim AI's.  I thought that this was a bad idea on at least a couple of levels.  Like the TED examples, it was supplying false information to users.  But it was also programming our own flaws into what would become the foundation of the AI's.  So the AT's would basically have the same flaws as we do.  The developers only saw marketing potential with what they were doing so I discontinued my participation.

The person who was responsible for the lab robot was talking about some of the reasons why she programmed the computer to pretend to have emotions.  One reason was that she wanted to get humans to react to the robot in ways which she knew that the fake emotions would cause.  She also believed that programming the mimicking of emotions was important for the eventual smarter AI's to have the emotions.  A sort of fake it until you make it approach.

Isaac Asimov established the laws of robotics to govern the behavior of robots in his stories.  I think that it is more important to establish a set of ethics for programmers.  Things which should not be programmed into computers and robots.