This article in NewScientist (23 January 2021) is more noteworthy for where it doesn’t go than where it does:
Artificial intelligence could train your dog while you are out at work. A prototype device can issue basic dog commands, recognise if they are carried out and provide a treat if they are.
Uh huh. And?
“It is a step forward and an exciting area,” says Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas at Aalto University, Finland, who has a PhD in dog-computer interaction. “Yet it is also ethically precarious as computers are not able to recognise the welfare of dogs as effectively as humans.”
Dirk van der Linden at Northumbria University in the UK also praises the tech while having some qualms. “It’s the automating of the human-dog relationship that I think is increasingly problematic, because it is using a technological fix for a very valuable interspecies relationship that caregivers ought to keep working on,” he says.
No, no, no! These folks are worrying about ethics towards dogs when they should be asking this: Is the dog smarter than the AI? Look: somewhere, I have no link, but somewhere I’ve read of experiments where little robots are left around college campuses with big eyes, and students carefully treat them with respect, imputing human intelligence to what are just dumb chunks of slightly animated machinery. (I’ve promised myself to carefully step on any such that I might stumble across.)
Will these dogs accept the AI as being on par with a human? Or are they perspicacious enough to realize these AIs are not really AIs, just some ML in a body, with no self-agency, and certainly not intrinsically considerate of their welfare.
That’s what I want to know!
