The darker side of Human - Computer Interaction

Wartime research into code breaking produced “crypto-intelligence,” a discourse in early computing that conflated cryptography with machine and human intelligence. Crypto-intelligence constrained and directed research into intelligent machines and autonomous conversational agents, shaping the agendas of scientists and engineers as well as user attitudes and behaviors. Although dating back to the 1940s, the widespread elaboration of the cryptographic discourse remains prevalent today, positioning users in an antagonistic relation with autonomous agents and exacerbating the problem of agent abuse. 1 The Cryptographic Agent “Intelligent Machinery” [1], Alan Turing’s earliest treatment of artificial intelligence, presented nascent computing communities with two agents: one generated enigmas, another solved them. These agents defined the “autonomy” we recognize today as that of the “autonomous agent”: situated and flexible, receiving input from the environments, independently acting on it, and offering feedback. One agent was Turing’s intelligent machine, and opposite it stood an implied enemy agent transmitting enciphered messages. The intelligence that organized, transformed and transmitted the enemy agent’s enciphered message justified development of Turing’s digital agent and determined the character of its design. This encounter with the highly structured and narrowly defined problems of military intelligence informed Turing’s general theories of intelligence, both humanand machine-. When Turing hypothesized that cryptography could be the intelligent machines’ “most rewarding task” [2], readers had no idea the author had already aided in the construction of just such a machine years earlier at Bletchley Park, nor that its success cracking Nazi codes had helped turn the tide of World War II. Hoping to generalize his work’s relevance beyond the arcanum of confidential wartime sciences, Turing suggested that this hypothetical machine might be relevant to broader scientific inquiry. As he explained to his patrons at the National Physics Laboratory There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but