Mind Hacks - Prisoners and Bots

Tweet For some reason I read Mind Hacks, which is a highly theoretical (at least for me) blog about psychology and neuroscience. I liked a couple of articles recently. Firstly a light hearted one on chat bots (a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods.). Here are some amusing extracts of conversations between two chat bots, ALICE and Jabberwacky:

A: Do you dream?

J: Yes, I dream.

A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?

J: I remember them vividly.

A: What do you remember about it?

J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.

A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered “alive”?

J: Stranger things have happened.

A: Not many people express themselves that way.

J: How would you know, machine?

A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.

J: I think I do not understand you completely.

A: Oh, you don’t understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?

J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.

The second article was about the Stanford Prison Experiment. From Wikipedia:

The Stanford prison experiment was a psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular to the real world circumstances of prison life and the effects of imposed social roles on behavior....

Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their assigned roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to genuinely dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.

I saw a TV show on this a long time ago and I think they actually tried to repeat it in a reality TV show, but that lacked realism. It is interesting to question whether humanity has really improved as a whole and got over dictatorships, wars and atrocities. The answer is probably no but at least there is progress. Anyway the article questions how unbiased the Stanford Prison Experiment was based on the type of people that would apply for such an experiment, its interesting to see at what lengths psychologies have to go to to ensure fair