Bots With An Attitude

Tools for Ethical Creative Intelligence

Agenda

  1. Tools for Rizom
  2. Ethical Creative Intelligence
  3. Protobots Roll Out!

Tools for Rizom

Task

To design and develop collaborative tools that are tailor-made for Rizom and its learning communities

The Wrong Solution

An army of evil bots that will render humanity obsolete

The Right Solution

A network of creative, ethical, intelligent agents that allow us to easily automate laborious and complex tasks

Team Mapping

Characteristics Challenges
Blurry Distinction Team and Community Relevancy of Information
Location is Distributed No Shared Space
Communication occurs Asynchronously No Shared Time
Multi-Disciplinary Community No Common Language and Practices
Knowledge Heavy No shared Archive / Database
Knowledge is often Specialized Different and Fragmented Domain Models
Community is Creative and Critical Known Tools may not be Acceptable

Artificial Intelligence

Sciolist

One who exhibits only superficial knowledge; a self-proclaimed expert with little real understanding

Ethical Creative Intelligence

Intelligent

  • The ability to come up with new information
  • The ability to find more, relevant information
  • The ability to find more relevant information
  • The ability to aggregate and condense information

Creative

  • The ability to combine existing information in such a manner that it opens new insights
  • The ability to present information in such a manner that it opens new insights

Ethical

  • The ability to respect the values of a given community
  • The ability to guard the values of such community
  • The ability to question these values if needed
  • The ability to leave the community when an irresolvable conflict arises

Protobots Roll Out!

Chat Environment

A shared online space where community members (human and bots) can read/write to a uniform stream of information

Grid

A rule-based system of governance where each member of the community (bots and human) is assigned a health score based on the value of their ethical and creative contributions

Bots

  • Creative, ethical, and intelligent agents that compensate for the lacunas of a stream-based commonplace by providing context, augmentations, and an archive for our community
  • A state machine that consists of several, consecutive — but not linear — states

Cassettes

  • Reusable single-purpose functions that lower the threshold to contribute new features to our community
  • Each cassette hooks into one of the bots' aforementioned states

Bot State Machine

State Description Next States
Acquire Get data from chat stream or external source Clean, Acquire, Evaluate
Clean Remove irrelevant/sensitive data, translate to domain models Acquire, Analyze, Evaluate
Analyze Transform into recommendations and aggregations Evaluate, Present
Evaluate Decide if data is ready or needs to reenter loop Present, Acquire
Present Show data in textual, visual, or other form None

Example: Tweet It

Tweet It Flow

State Action Next
Acquire Get user data for Rizom collaborators on Twitter Clean
Clean Tokenize tweets, reduce to three keywords Analyze
Analyze Recommend relevant hashtags for next tweet Present
Evaluate Ask user if they will use the hashtags Yes → Present, No → Acquire
Present Return tweet with hashtags to user None

Example: The Cartographer

The Cartographer Flow

State Action Next
Acquire Listen for links on chat stream Clean
Clean Remove invalid and internal links Acquire
Acquire Follow links and fetch data Clean
Clean Extract keywords, authors, metadata Analyze
Analyze Determine most relevant keywords/authors Present
Present Visualize Rizom's online ecosystem None