You can’t do anything on the web these days without falling over a bot. They operate in every field imaginable, from finance to medicine, and play an increasingly large role in our future. So it’s probably a good idea to learn something about them.
Below, you’ll find a comprehensive reading list to get you quickly up to speed on the crucial issues surrounding conversational bots and society, as part of our Talking With Bots section.
“The ones in power will always dare to dream about their horrible mistakes”
–InspiroBot, 2016
Start Here
For the best overview of where we are right now, turn to Motherboard‘s excellent “botifesto,” “How to Think About Bots,” compiled by bringing together a diverse group of experts from different fields:
“One distinguishing feature of bots is that they are semi-autonomous: they exhibit behavior that is partially a function of the intentions that a programmer builds into them, and partially a function of algorithms and machine learning abilities that respond to a plenitude of inputs. Thinking about bots as semi-automated actors makes them a challenge in terms of design. It also makes them unusual in an ethical sense. Questions of deception and responsibility must be considered when discussing both the construction and functionality of bots.”
The full piece covers bots from the point of view of designers, implementers, and regulators:
- “How to Think About Bots“
Samuel Woolley, Danah Boyd, Meredith Broussard, Madeleine Elish, Lainna Fader, Tim Hwang, Alexis Lloyd, Gilad Lotan, Luis Daniel Palacios, Allison Parrish, Gilad Rosner, Saiph Savage, and Samantha Shorey, Motherboard. [11-minute read]
Then Try
- “How the New, Improved Chatbots Rewrite 50 Years of Bot History“
Jared Newman, Fast Company [8-minute read] - “Rise of the Robots Is Sparking an Investment Boom“
Richard Waters and Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times [7-minute read] - “Possible Problems of Persona Politeness“
Ben Hammersley [3-minute read] - “Chatbot Fail–Why the New Fad Might Be a Waste of Time, and Why That Doesn’t Matter“
Jon Evans, The Walrus [7-minute read] - “Some Strategies of Bot Poetics“
Harry Giles [20-minute read] - “The Humans Hiding Behind the Chatbots“
Ellen Huet, Bloomberg [8-minute read]
Dive Deeper
- “Terrifyingly Convenient“
Will Oremus, Slate [28-minute read] - “Amazon Echo Is Magical. It’s Also Turning My Kid Into an Asshole“
Hunter Walk [1-minute read] - “A Computer Finally Passed the Turing Test?“
David Auerbach, Slate [21-minute read] - “The Tech Industry Wants to Use Women’s Voices–They Just Won’t Listen to Them“
Leigh Alexander, The Guardian [5-minute read] - “A Charge of Bots–The Tech World as We Know It Is About to Be Rewritten“
Phil Libin, Medium [5-minute read] - “Not Just Tay: A Recent History of the Internet’s Racist Bots“
Abby Ohlheiser, The Washington Post [4-minute read] - “Life With My Robot Secretary“
Mark Wilson, Co.Design [9-minute read] - “The Future of Chat Isn’t AI“
Ted Livingston, Medium [6-minute read] - “Siri, Alexa and Other Virtual Assistants Put to the Test“
Brian X. Chen, The New York Times [7-minute read] - “A Chicken in Every Bot“
M.G. Siegler, 500ish Words [4-minute read] - “Bots, Explained“
Kurt Wagner, Re/code [6-minute read] - “On Chat as Interface“
Alistair Croll, Medium [7-minute read] - “Conversational Commerce May Be Our Best Chance to Re-Imagine the Web“
Stephanie Rieger, Medium [17-minute read] - “The Hidden Homescreen“
Matt Hartman, ART + marketing [13-minute read] - “Meet the Chatbot Radiohead Launched 15 Years Ago“
Robin Sloan Bechtel, Chatbots Magazine [4-minute read] - “Why Do We Give Robots Female Names? Because We Don’t Want to Consider Their Feelings“
Laurie Penny, The New Statesman [6-minute read] - “What Microsoft Could Learn From Actual Teens About Designing Fake Teen Chatbots“
Matt Locke, Chatbots Magazine [4-minute read] - “What Chatbots Reveal About Our Own Shortcomings“
Jenna Wortham, The New York Times Magazine [6-minute read] - “Bots Won’t Replace Apps. Better Apps Will Replace Apps.“
Dan Grover [30-minute read] - “Amazon’s Alexa & the Vaudeville of Things“
Logan Hill, Backchannel [10-minute read] - “Please, Facebook, Don’t Make Me Speak to Your Awful Chatbots“
Alex Hern, The Guardian [10-minute read] - “Your New Best Friend Might Be a Robot“
Yongdong Wang, Nautilus [8-minute read]
Books
- Rodney Brooks–Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us
- David G Stork–Hal’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality
- Andrew Leonard–Bots: The Origin of the New Species
- Brian Christian–The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive
- Timmy The Chatbot–Staring Into the Abyss
Watch Something
Finally, if you prefer to learn in audiovisual form, here are a bunch of bot-themed documentaries and videos you can watch instead.
- “Plug & Pray“
A documentary profiling the life of Joseph Weizenbaum, who created ELIZA, one of the world’s first chatbots:
- “The Turing Test: Can a Computer Pass for a Human?“
A short explainer on the history of the Turing test–the first speculative attempt at gauging sentience in humanmade machines:
- “Conversation Between Robots–The Hunt for AI“
This clip from BBC Worldwide’s The Hunt for AI features robots learning to communicate with each other.
- Her
One of the major touchstones for chatbots over the past few years has been Spike Jonze’s movie Her, which follows a man who falls in love with an operating system:
- Ex Machina
Alex Garland’s movie about a robot learning to interact with humans explores issues of sentience, free will, gender, feminism, and parental responsibility:
How We Get To Next was a magazine that explored the future of science, technology, and culture from 2014 to 2019. This article is part of our Talking With Bots section, which asks: What does it mean now that our technology is now smart enough to hold a conversation? Click the logo to read more.
