Devan Marr

@devanmarr.bsky.social

769 Followers 1114 Following

Bike Rider. Mediocre Beer Brewer. Lawyer. Luddite. JDHD. He/Him. It’s never legal advice. It’s rarely good advice. Toronto, ON

An e-mail to the Minister for the Environment: Good morning Minister Dabrusin, I want to ensure that my e-mail today is grounded in clear, accessible facts. The skies over Toronto are currently orange and we have registered the worst air quality in the world because of ongoing forest fires. I wanted to reiterate my view as a constituent who voted for you specifically in the last election that any Federal support for the expansion of a downtown airport to accommodate increased jet departures during a climate crisis is a complete abdication of your Government's responsibilities. It continues to make no sense to support a mode of transportation that will directly compete with your Government's high speed rail project that has been designated a project of national importance. If the Government continues to fail in its responsibility to take active steps to combat climate change. I will not vote for you, or your party, again. I will actively donate to, and campaign for, another party in the next election. These issues are too important to do otherwise. Regards,
Request to the Minister for response.
A text excerpt that reads: f research is the recent work of Kate Darling who, through careful integration of the HCI/HRI and legal literature on the subject, has suggested that we ought to pay attention not merely to our tendency to anthropomorphize but also, and more fundamentally, to the efects of what she calls “anthropomorphic framing.”123 Framing — for example, giving an AI a human name, providing it with a certain character description, or furnishing the AI with a personal backstory — is a means of infuencing the manner and extent to which people will anthropomorphize AI. As Darling observes, “framing has a broader efect on the way we view robotic technology and the analogies that drive both use and regulation.”124 In a rather striking example, Darling discovered during an interview with the CEO of a company that develops medicine delivery robots, that “tolerance for malfunction was higher with anthropomorphic framing (‘Oh, Betsy made a mistake!’ vs. ‘This stupid machine doesn’t work!’).”125 With mounting examples of this sort, Darling and her colleagues decided to conduct experiments of their own at the MIT Media Lab.126 As part of these experiments, participants got a chance to play with a Hexbug Nano — a commercially available toy robot. In the style of Milgram, participants were then asked to strike the Hexbug with a mallet. It was observed that participants hesitated signifcantly longer before striking the robot whenever it was introduced through anthropomorphic framing (for example, “This is Frank. He’s lived at the Lab for a few months now. His favorite color is red. Etc.”).127