Should we tax robots?

Study suggests a robot levy — but only a modest one — could help combat the effects of automation on income inequality in the U.S.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

What if the U.S. placed a tax on robots? The concept has been publicly discussed by policy analysts, scholars, and Bill Gates (who favors the notion). Because robots can replace jobs, the idea goes, a stiff tax on them would give firms incentive to help retain workers, while also compensating for a dropoff in payroll taxes when robots are used. Thus far, South Korea has reduced incentives for firms to deploy robots; European Union policymakers, on the other hand, considered a robot tax but did not enact it.  

Now a study by MIT economists scrutinizes the existing evidence and suggests the optimal policy in this situation would indeed include a tax on robots, but only a modest one. The same applies to taxes on foreign trade that would also reduce U.S. jobs, the research finds.   

“Our finding suggests that taxes on either robots or imported goods should be pretty small,” says Arnaud Costinot, an MIT economist, and co-author of a published paper detailing the findings. “Although robots have an effect on income inequality … they still lead to optimal taxes that are modest.”

Specifically, the study finds that a tax on robots should range from 1 percent to 3.7 percent of their value, while trade taxes would be from 0.03 percent to 0.11 percent, given current U.S. income taxes.

“We came in to this not knowing what would happen,” says Iván Werning, an MIT economist and the other co-author of the study. “We had all the potential ingredients for this to be a big tax, so that by stopping technology or trade you would have less inequality, but … for now, we find a tax in the one-digit range, and for trade, even smaller taxes.”

The paper, “Robots, Trade, and Luddism: A Sufficient Statistic Approach to Optimal Technology Regulation,” appears in advance online form in The Review of Economic Studies. Costinot is a professor of economics and associate head of the MIT Department of Economics; Werning is the department’s Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics.

A sufficient statistic: Wages

A key to the study is that the scholars did not start with an a priori idea about whether or not taxes on robots and trade were merited. Rather, they applied a “sufficient statistic” approach, examining empirical evidence on the subject.

For instance, one study by MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Boston University economist Pascual Restrepo found that in the U.S. from 1990 to 2007, adding one robot per 1,000 workers reduced the employment-to-population ratio by about 0.2 percent; each robot added in manufacturing replaced about 3.3 workers, while the increase in workplace robots lowered wages about 0.4 percent.

In conducting their policy analysis, Costinot and Werning drew upon that empirical study and others. They built a model to evaluate a few different scenarios, and included levers like income taxes as other means of addressing income inequality.

“We do have these other tools, though they’re not perfect, for dealing with inequality,” Werning says. “We think it’s incorrect to discuss this taxes on robots and trade as if they are our only tools for redistribution.”

Still more specifically, the scholars used wage distribution data across all five income quintiles in the U.S. — the top 20 percent, the next 20 percent, and so on — to evaluate the need for robot and trade taxes. Where empirical data indicates technology and trade have changed that wage distribution, the magnitude of that change helped produce the robot and trade tax estimates Costinot and Werning suggest. This has the benefit of simplicity; the overall wage numbers help the economists avoid making a model with too many assumptions about, say, the exact role automation might play in a workplace.

“I think where we are methodologically breaking ground, we’re able to make that connection between wages and taxes without making super-particular assumptions about technology and about the way production works,” Werning says. “It’s all encoded in that distributional effect. We’re asking a lot from that empirical work. But we’re not making assumptions we cannot test about the rest of the economy.”

Costinot adds: “If you are at peace with some high-level assumptions about the way markets operate, we can tell you that the only objects of interest driving the optimal policy on robots or Chinese goods should be these responses of wages across quantiles of the income distribution, which, luckily for us, people have tried to estimate.”

Beyond robots, an approach for climate and more

Apart from its bottom-line tax numbers, the study contains some additional conclusions about technology and income trends. Perhaps counterintuitively, the research concludes that after many more robots are added to the economy, the impact that each additional robot has on wages may actually decline. At a future point, robot taxes could then be reduced even further.   

“You could have a situation where we deeply care about redistribution, we have more robots, we have more trade, but taxes are actually going down,” Costinot says. If the economy is relatively saturated with robots, he adds, “That marginal robot you are getting in the economy matters less and less for inequality.”

The study’s approach could also be applied to subjects besides automation and trade. There is increasing empirical work on, for instance, the impact of climate change on income inequality, as well as similar studies about how migration, education, and other things affect wages. Given the increasing empirical data in those fields, the kind of modeling Costinot and Werning perform in this paper could be applied to determine, say, the right level for carbon taxes, if the goal is to sustain a reasonable income distribution.

“There are a lot of other applications,” Werning says. “There is a similar logic to those issues, where this methodology would carry through.” That suggests several other future avenues of research related to the current paper.

In the meantime, for people who have envisioned a steep tax on robots, however, they are “qualitatively right, but quantitatively off,” Werning concludes.

###

Written by Peter Dizikes, MIT News

Additional background

Paper: “Robots, Trade, and Luddism: A Sufficient Statistic Approach to Optimal Technology Regulation”

https://academic.oup.com/restud/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/restud/rdac076/6798670?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

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JOURNAL

The Review of Economic Studies

DOI

10.1093/restud/rdac076 

ARTICLE TITLE

Robots, Trade, and Luddism: A Sufficient Statistic Approach to Optimal Technology Regulation

Words prove their worth as teaching tools for robots

Reports and Proceedings

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, ENGINEERING SCHOOL

 

VIDEO: YOU CAN SEE THIS ROBOTIC ARM IS PUSHING A TOOL. IT’S ONE OF FOUR TASKS PRINCETON RESEARCHERS GAVE THE SIMULATED ARM. THEY ALSO ASKED IT TO LIFT THE TOOL; USE IT TO SWEEP A CYLINDER ALONG A TABLE; AND HAMMER – OR TRY TO HAMMER -- A PEG INTO A HOLE. IN A NEW APPROACH TO ROBOT TOOL MANIPULATION, THEY FOUND THAT HUMAN-LANGUAGE DESCRIPTIONS OF TOOLS COULD HELP THE ROBOT LEARN TO USE THE TOOLS FASTER, AND BOOST ITS PERFORMANCE ON A TEST SET OF UNFAMILIAR TOOLS. THE RESEARCH IS PART OF AN EFFORT TO IMPROVE ROBOTS’ ABILITY TO FUNCTION IN NOVEL SITUATIONS THAT DIFFER FROM THEIR TRAINING ENVIRONMENTS. view more 

CREDIT: ALLEN Z. REN ET AL./AARON NATHANS

Exploring a new way to teach robots, Princeton researchers have found that human-language descriptions of tools can accelerate the learning of a simulated robotic arm lifting and using a variety of tools.

The results build on evidence that providing richer information during artificial intelligence (AI) training can make autonomous robots more adaptive to new situations, improving their safety and effectiveness.

Adding descriptions of a tool’s form and function to the training process for the robot improved the robot’s ability to manipulate newly encountered tools that were not in the original training set. A team of mechanical engineers and computer scientists presented the new method, Accelerated Learning of Tool Manipulation with LAnguage, or ATLA, at the Conference on Robot Learning on Dec. 14.

Robotic arms have great potential to help with repetitive or challenging tasks, but training robots to manipulate tools effectively is difficult: Tools have a wide variety of shapes, and a robot’s dexterity and vision are no match for a human’s.

“Extra information in the form of language can help a robot learn to use the tools more quickly,” said study coauthor Anirudha Majumdar, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton who leads the Intelligent Robot Motion Lab.

The team obtained tool descriptions by querying GPT-3, a large language model released by OpenAI in 2020 that uses a form of AI called deep learning to generate text in response to a prompt. After experimenting with various prompts, they settled on using “Describe the [feature] of [tool] in a detailed and scientific response,” where the feature was the shape or purpose of the tool.

“Because these language models have been trained on the internet, in some sense you can think of this as a different way of retrieving that information,” more efficiently and comprehensively than using crowdsourcing or scraping specific websites for tool descriptions, said Karthik Narasimhan, an assistant professor of computer science and coauthor of the study. Narasimhan is a lead faculty member in Princeton’s natural language processing (NLP) group, and contributed to the original GPT language model as a visiting research scientist at OpenAI.

This work is the first collaboration between Narasimhan’s and Majumdar’s research groups. Majumdar focuses on developing AI-based policies to help robots — including flying and walking robots — generalize their functions to new settings, and he was curious about the potential of recent “massive progress in natural language processing” to benefit robot learning, he said.

For their simulated robot learning experiments, the team selected a training set of 27 tools, ranging from an axe to a squeegee. They gave the robotic arm four different tasks: push the tool, lift the tool, use it to sweep a cylinder along a table, or hammer a peg into a hole. The researchers developed a suite of policies using machine learning training approaches with and without language information, and then compared the policies’ performance on a separate test set of nine tools with paired descriptions.

This approach is known as meta-learning, since the robot improves its ability to learn with each successive task. It’s not only learning to use each tool, but also “trying to learn to understand the descriptions of each of these hundred different tools, so when it sees the 101st tool it’s faster in learning to use the new tool,” said Narasimhan. “We’re doing two things: We’re teaching the robot how to use the tools, but we’re also teaching it English.”

The researchers measured the success of the robot in pushing, lifting, sweeping and hammering with the nine test tools, comparing the results achieved with the policies that used language in the machine learning process to those that did not use language information. In most cases, the language information offered significant advantages for the robot’s ability to use new tools.

One task that showed notable differences between the policies was using a crowbar to sweep a cylinder, or bottle, along a table, said Allen Z. Ren, a Ph.D. student in Majumdar’s group and lead author of the research paper.

“With the language training, it learns to grasp at the long end of the crowbar and use the curved surface to better constrain the movement of the bottle,” said Ren. “Without the language, it grasped the crowbar close to the curved surface and it was harder to control.”

The research was supported in part by the Toyota Research Institute (TRI), and is part of a larger TRI-funded project in Majumdar’s research group aimed at improving robots’ ability to function in novel situations that differ from their training environments.

“The broad goal is to get robotic systems — specifically, ones that are trained using machine learning — to generalize to new environments,” said Majumdar. Other TRI-supported work by his group has addressed failure prediction for vision-based robot control, and used an “adversarial environment generation” approach to help robot policies function better in conditions outside their initial training.

The article, Leveraging language for accelerated learning of tool manipulation, was presented Dec. 14 at the Conference on Robot Learning. Besides Majumdar, Narasimhan and Ren, coauthors include Bharat Govil, Princeton Class of 2022, and Tsung-Yen Yang, who completed a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Princeton this year and is now a machine learning scientist at Meta Platforms Inc.

In addition to TRI, support for the research was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University through the generosity of William Addy ’82.

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METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Leveraging Language for Accelerated Learning of Tool Manipulation

New multi-institutional project to examine the flow of the Earth’s mantle

Grant and Award Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES

The work of a team led by Visiting Research Scientist Chris Havlin and Assistant Professor Matthew Turk of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is at the center of a National Science Foundation (NSF) project to better understand the microphysical activities of rocks that affect the upper mantle of the Earth.

The mantle is the interior layer of Earth, between the crust at the surface and the core at the center. Although solid, the mantle can be caused to flow by the push or pull of physical phenomena. The primary driver of mantle flow is thermal convection, which controls the motion of the mantle and evolution of tectonic plates over millions of years. On top of the convective background, processes that occur on shorter timescales cause perturbations of this background state. These include seismic waves following an earthquake, melting of continental ice sheets and glaciers, the annual recharge and extraction of groundwater, and the drainage of large lakes. For this new project, scientists will focus on these shorter time scale responses and consider three locations on the planet with existing datasets, the western United States, Iceland, and Alaska.

Havilin and Turk have been awarded a five-year, $127,723 grant from the NSF to focus on computational modeling for their project, “inveStigating the Transient Rheology of the Upper Mantle (iSTRUM).” Joining the iSchool team for the total $1.6 million project will be scientists from the University of California-Berkeley, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, University of California-Santa Barbara, and Brown University. The work will integrate theory, experiments, and observations spanning seismic to convective timescales.

“It’s rare to have a big project like this,” Havlin said. “Our modeling sits at the intersection of all this work. It’s at the heart of the scientific process behind this project.”

The iSchool team will use a software program Havlin has developed, Very Broadband Rheology Calculator (VBRc), to determine the rocks’ properties at various time and length scales. The tool will connect the microscopic description of the rock to macroscopic observations of the land masses as recorded from satellites in space, Global Positioning System networks and seismic stations. Part of the iSchool team’s work will be conducting workshops to use VBRc.

“I help the team of scientists to use this tool, and we will adjust the code to make it specialized for this project,” Havlin said. “I’m hoping we can get a larger user base and community to modify the tool for their needs.”

The results of this study have a bearing on topics ranging from predicting how sea levels will rise due to melting ice sheets to understanding tidal deformation on the Jupiter moon Io

Chronic dysentery unlikely killer of Edward the Black Prince as is commonly believed

Malaria and inflammatory bowel disease among possible causes that changed course of English history, suggests military expert

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMJ

Whatever disease killed Edward the Black Prince—heir apparent to the English throne in the mid 1300s, and heralded as the greatest English soldier ever to have lived—is unlikely to have been chronic dysentery, as is commonly believed, writes a military expert in the journal BMJ Military Health.

But whether it was malaria; brucellosis, caused by eating unpasteurised dairy products and raw meat; inflammatory bowel disease; or complications arising from a single bout of dysentery—all possible causes—the disease changed the course of English history, says Dr James Robert Anderson of 21 Engineer Regiment.

And what happened to the Black Prince, who pretty much continuously fought wars and was exposed to violence from the age of 16, has been endlessly repeated throughout millennia, with disease, rather than battle injury, taking the heaviest toll on life during warfare, he says.

Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince, was never seriously injured despite the number of military campaigns he led. But he had a chronic illness that waxed and waned for almost 9 years, to which he finally succumbed in 1376 at the age of 45. 

His early death changed the course of English history, because the crown passed directly to his 10 year-old son after the death of King Edward III. Young King Richard II was later deposed and murdered, sparking over a century of instability, including the Wars of the Roses and the rise of the Tudors, notes the author.

The Black Prince’s illness is thought to have started after his victory at the Battle of Nájera in Spain in 1367, writes the author. A chronicle suggested that up to 80% of his army may have died from “dysentery and other diseases.” 

And most later accounts of the Black Prince’s death suggest that he died from chronic dysentery, possibly the amoebic form, which was common in medieval Europe. 

Amoebic dysentery can cause long term complications, including internal scarring (amoeboma), intestinal inflammation and ulceration (colitis), and extreme inflammation and distension of the bowel (life threatening toxic megacolon), points out the author. 

But if he really did have amoebic dysentery, with its symptoms of chronic diarrhoea, would he really have been well enough, or even welcomed aboard, a ship with a cargo of soldiers heading for battle in France in 1372, asks the author? 

Complications from surviving a single bout of dysentery are a possibility, particularly as historical records indicate that paratyphoid—similar to typhoid, but caused by a different bug—and a recently discovered cause of dysentery, was in circulation in 1367.

Complications from this could have included long term health issues, such as anaemia, kidney damage, liver abscess and/or reactive arthritis, suggests the author.

Dehydration due to lack of water during the hot Spanish campaign is another possibility. This could have caused kidney stones which would fit with a fluctuating illness lasting several years, he says. 

Another candidate is inflammatory bowel disease, which might have accounted for relapsing-remitting symptoms and gradual deterioration, suggests the author.

Brucellosis was also common in medieval Europe, and its sources (dairy products and raw meat) were often kept aside for the nobility on military campaigns, says the author. It can produce chronic symptoms of fatigue, recurrent fever, and joint and heart inflammation.

Another common disease in medieval Europe was malaria, the symptoms of which include fever, headache, myalgia (muscle aches and pains), gut problems, fatigue, chronic anaemia and susceptibility to acute infections, such as pneumonia or gastroenteritis, leading to multiorgan failure and death, he adds.

“This would fit the fluctuating nature of his illness and the decline towards the end of his life. Any anaemia would not have been helped by the purging and venesection [blood letting] treatments of the time,” he suggests.

“There are several diverse infections or inflammatory conditions that may have led to [the Black Prince’s] demise…However, chronic dysentery is probably unlikely,” he writes. 

And he concludes :“Even in modern conflicts and war zones, disease has caused enormous morbidity and loss of life, something that has remained consistent for centuries. Efforts to protect and treat deployed forces are as important now as in the 1370s.”

 

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JOURNAL

BMJ Military Health

DOI

10.1136/military-2022-002282 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

News article

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The death of the Black Prince: a case of disease in 1376 that changed the course of English history

Popular folk medicine remedy (‘The Secret’) doesn’t prevent bleeding after invasive heart procedures

But it may help to relieve stress among its believers, suggest the researchers

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMJ

A popular folk medicine remedy for staunching blood, known as ‘The Secret’, doesn’t stop bleeding after invasive coronary procedures used to diagnose or treat cardiac problems, finds research published in the open access journal Open Heart.

But this remnant from medical practice in the Middle Ages may help to relieve stress among its believers, and may have ‘therapeutic’ placebo effect value, suggest the researchers.

‘The Secret’ has been used for several centuries in Switzerland, particularly in the French speaking part, to staunch blood during and after a procedure. It consists of a healing ‘formula’ or prayer that is intended to mobilise superior forces to help cure the patient.

 The ‘formula’, which can be deployed on site or remotely by an initiated ‘Secret Maker’, is a widely practised and reputed complementary medicine in Switzerland, so much so that it is used in hospitals. But its clinical effectiveness has never been formally evaluated.

In a bid to plug this knowledge gap, the researchers compared bleeding outcomes in 200 people admitted to one tertiary care centre for planned invasive coronary procedures.

These were diagnostic coronary angiography (x-ray imaging of the heart vessels) and/or percutaneous coronary intervention (unclogging of blocked arteries to restore blood flow) between January and July 2022.

Half the patients were randomly assigned to standard care, and half were randomly assigned to standard care plus The Secret, which was administered by a randomly selected Secret Maker.

The average age of the patients was 68, and nearly three out of four were men. Most (76%) of the entire sample believed that The Secret would prevent bleeding, with believers more or less evenly distributed across both groups.

Risk factors for postoperative complications were similar between the two groups, as were the criteria for minor and major bleeding. 

Bleeding severity was defined according to Bleeding Academic Research Consortium (BARC) criteria, ranging from 1 (minor) to 5 (major).

Bleeding after a procedure occurred in 55 (27.5%) of the patients. Rates were similar in both groups:16% in The Secret group vs 14% (BARC 1) in the standard care group; and 12% vs 13% (BARC 2). No patient had a major bleed (BARC 3 and above).

The researchers acknowledge that their study was relatively small and carried out in one hospital. And despite random group allocation, radial artery access for angiography was more often used for patients in the standard care group. This can lower the risk of serious vascular complications and major bleeding. 

That The Secret didn’t affect bleeding outcomes for better or worse wasn’t exactly a surprise, say the researchers, but a substantial proportion of patients nevertheless request The Secret.

“This apparent discrepancy between the measured effects on bleeding and patient demands touches on an aspect that was not addressed by this study, but which can be understood as stress management and wellbeing,” they point out. 

“The reduction of stress in the patient who has used a ‘Secret Maker’ has been considered after burns. As such, ‘The Secret’ might allow some neuropsychological conditioning and act as a placebo, as do other beliefs or biofeedback techniques,” they suggest.

The Secret is a remnant of the Middle Ages, when medicine was practised by monks or sorcerers, based on one of the miracles reported in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) as “Jesus healing the bleeding woman,” they explain. 

Despite medical and scientific advances, “recent enthusiasm for ‘alternative’ medicines and healers, which is particularly intense on social media since the last COVID-19 pandemic started, or the techno-optimism towards global warming, are proof of persistent magical thinking among the general public,” they add.

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JOURNAL

Open Heart

DOI

10.1136/openhrt-2022-002134 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Is the folk medicine known as “The Secret” efficient in reducing bleeding after percutaneous coronary procedures?: a double-blinded, randomised trial

New study finds birds build hanging-nests to protect offspring from nest invaders

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DURHAM UNIVERSITY

-With pictures-

A new study has found that birds build hanging-nests, particularly those with extended entrance tunnels, to help protect offspring against nest invaders like snakes and parasitic cuckoos.

Researchers at Durham University, the British Trust for Ornithology and Princeton University examined the relationship between nest design and the length of time offspring spend in the nest before fledging across species of weaverbirds and icterids, two bird families renowned for their complex woven nests.

They found that species building the most elaborate nests, particularly those with long entrance tunnels, produce offspring with longer developmental periods.

Nests with longer entrance tunnels are more effective at hindering access by nest invaders than shorter tunnels and thereby limits the exposure of developing offspring to nest invaders.

Researchers suggest that the complex structural features in these nests do indeed play a role in protecting offspring from predators and brood parasites.

They find the consistency of these findings ‘striking’ given that highly elaborate nests have evolved independently in the weaverbirds and icterids.

Full analysis of the study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Lead author of the study, Dr Sally Street of Durham University, said: “Ornithologists have long been fascinated by the beautifully woven nests of weaverbirds and icterids – these nests often dangle precariously from slim branches and some have extended entrance tunnels up to a metre long.

“It has been widely assumed that these nests prevent attacks by tree-climbing snakes but this idea is largely based on anecdotes until now. We are excited to show that these ideas appear to be correct – species building the most elaborate nests, particularly those with long entrance tunnels, have more slowly developing offspring which is exactly what we should expect if the nests protect chicks from predators and other nest invaders such as brood parasitic cuckoos”

Researchers have also revealed that by building protective structures such as the elaborate nest, birds and other species can deploy greater control over their exposure to environmental hazards.

The scientists obtained data on nest design, life-history traits, body mass and latitude in weaverbird and icterid species from multiple secondary sources for the purpose of this study.

Their study findings reveal how animal architects such as nest-building birds and burrowing mammals can create protective environments that change how their offspring develop.

The researchers say this may even help to understand the role of shelter-building in human evolution.

ENDS

Media Information

Dr Sally Street is available for interview and can be contacted on sally.e.street@durham.ac.uk.   

Alternatively, please contact Durham University Communications Office for interview requests on communications.team@durham.ac.uk.

Source

“Convergent evolution of elaborate nests as structural defences in birds”, (2022), S. Street, R. Jaques and T. Silva, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

An embargoed copy of the paper is available from Durham University Communications Office. Please email communications.team@durham.ac.uk.

The article will be available online after the embargo lifts: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1734

Graphics

Associated images are available via the following link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/cwuafjz1iie5b8ur0rtit/h?dl=0&rlkey=bzlamt5xwydb0eev61nty1i19

Useful Web Links  

Dr Sally Street staff profile: https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/sally-e-street/

Department of Anthropology: https://www.durham.ac.uk/anthropology/

Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre: https://www.durham.ac.uk/dcerc/

About Durham University

Durham University is a globally outstanding centre of teaching and research based in historic Durham City in the UK.

We are a collegiate university committed to inspiring our people to do outstanding things at Durham and in the world.

We conduct boundary-breaking research that improves lives globally and we are ranked as a world top 100 university with an international reputation in research and education (QS World University Rankings 2023).

We are a member of the Russell Group of leading research-intensive UK universities and we are consistently ranked as a top 10 university in national league tables (Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, Guardian University Guide and The Complete University Guide).

For more information about Durham University visit: www.durham.ac.uk/about/

END OF MEDIA RELEASE – issued by Durham University

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DOI

10.1098/rspb.2022.1734 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

What it would take to discover life on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus

Surrounded by a vast ocean underneath a thick ice shell, Enceladus is a hot candidate for potentially harboring alien life. A team of researchers led by the University of Arizona concluded that a future mission could provide answers even without landing 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

 

IMAGE: ARTIST'S IMPRESSION OF THE CASSINI SPACECRAFT FLYING THROUGH PLUMES ERUPTING FROM THE SOUTH POLE OF SATURN'S MOON ENCELADUS. THESE PLUMES ARE MUCH LIKE GEYSERS AND EXPEL A COMBINATION OF WATER VAPOR, ICE GRAINS, SALTS, METHANE AND OTHER ORGANIC MOLECULES. view more 

CREDIT: NASA/JPL-CALTECH

The mystery of whether microbial alien life might inhabit Enceladus, one of Saturn's 83 moons, could be solved by an orbiting space probe, according to a new study led by University of Arizona researchers. In a paper published in The Planetary Science Journal, the researchers map out how a hypothetical space mission could provide definite answers.  

When Enceladus was initially surveyed in 1980 by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, it looked like a small, not overly exciting "snowball" in the sky. Later, between 2005 to 2017, NASA's Cassini probe zipped around the Saturnian System and studied Saturn's complex rings and moons in unprecedented detail. Scientists were stunned when Cassini discovered that Enceladus' thick layer of ice hides a vast, warm saltwater ocean outgassing methane, a gas that typically originates from microbial life on Earth.  

The methane, along with other organic molecules that build the foundations of life, were detected when Cassini flew through giant water plumes erupting from the surface of Enceladus. As the tiny moon orbits the ringed gas giant, it is being squeezed and tugged by Saturn's immense gravitational field, heating up its interior due to friction. As a result, spectacular plumes of water jet from cracks and crevices on Enceladus' icy surface into space.  

Last year, a team of scientists at UArizona and Université Paris Sciences et Lettres in Paris calculated that if life could have emerged on Enceladus, there is a high likelihood that its presence could explain why the moon is burping up methane.  

"To know if that is the case, we must go back to Enceladus and look," said Régis Ferrière, senior author of the new paper and associate professor in the UArizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. 

In their latest paper, Ferrière and his collaborators report that while the hypothetical total mass of living microbes in Enceladus' ocean would be small, a visit from an orbiting spacecraft is all that would be needed to know for sure whether Earthlike microbes populate Enceladus' ocean underneath its shell.  

"Clearly, sending a robot crawling through ice cracks and deep-diving down to the seafloor would not be easy," Ferrière said, explaining that more realistic missions have been designed that would use upgraded instruments to sample the plumes like Cassini did, or even land on the moon's surface.  

"By simulating the data that a more prepared and advanced orbiting spacecraft would gather from just the plumes alone, our team has now shown that this approach would be enough to confidently determine whether or not there is life within Enceladus' ocean without actually having to probe the depths of the moon," he said. "This is a thrilling perspective." 

Located about 800 million miles from Earth, Enceladus completes an orbit around Saturn every 33 hours. While the moon isn't even as wide as the state of Arizona, it visually stands out because of its surface; like a frozen pond glinting in the sun, the moon reflects light like no other object in the solar system. Along the moon's south pole, at least 100 giant water plumes erupt through cracks in the icy landscape much like lava from a violent volcano.  

Scientists believe that water vapor and ice particles ejected by these geyser-like features contribute to one of Saturn's iconic rings. This ejected mixture, which brings up gases and other particles from deep inside Enceladus' ocean, was sampled by the Cassini spacecraft.

The excess methane Cassini detected in the plumes conjures images of extraordinary ecosystems found in the lightless depths of Earth's oceans: hydrothermal vents. Here, at the edges of two adjacent tectonic plates, hot magma below the seafloor heats the ocean water in porous bedrock, creating "white smokers," vents spewing scorching hot, mineral-saturated seawater. With no access to sunlight, organisms depend on energy stored in chemical compounds released by the white smokers to make a living.   

"On our planet, hydrothermal vents teem with life, big and small, in spite of darkness and insane pressure," Ferrière said. "The simplest living creatures there are microbes called methanogens that power themselves even in the absence of sunlight."  

This graphic depicts how scientists believe water interacts with rock at the bottom of Enceladus’ ocean to create hydrothermal vent systems. These same chimney-like vents are found along tectonic plate borders in Earth’s oceans, approximately 7000 feet below the surface.

CREDIT

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Southwest Research Institute

Methanogens convert dihydrogen and carbon dioxide to gain energy, releasing methane as a byproduct. Ferrière's research group modeled its calculations based on the hypothesis that Enceladus has methanogens that inhabit oceanic hydrothermal vents resembling the ones found on Earth. In this way, the researchers calculated what the total mass of methanogens on Enceladus would be, as well as the likelihood that their cells and other organic molecules could be ejected through the plumes. 

"We were surprised to find that the hypothetical abundance of cells would only amount to the biomass of one single whale in Enceladus' global ocean," said the paper's first author, Antonin Affholder, a postdoctoral research associate at UArizona who was at Paris Sciences & Lettres when doing this research. "Enceladus' biosphere may be very sparse. And yet our models indicate that it would be productive enough to feed the plumes with just enough organic molecules or cells to be picked up by instruments onboard a future spacecraft." 

Enceladus has garnered recent attention as a location to someday be revisited and more thoroughly scrutinized. One proposal, the "Enceladus Orbilander," designed by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, envisions a mission that would collect extensive data about Enceladus by landing on and orbiting this celestial body beginning in the 2050s.   

"Our research shows that if a biosphere is present in Enceladus' ocean, signs of its existence could be picked up in plume material without the need to land or drill," said Affholder, "but such a mission would require an orbiter to fly through the plume multiple times to collect lots of oceanic material." 

The paper includes recommendations about the minimum amount of material that must be collected from the plumes to confidently search for both microbial cells and certain organic molecules. Observable cells would show direct evidence of life.  

"The possibility that actual cells could be found might be slim," Affholder said, "because they would have to survive the outgassing process carrying them through the plumes from the deep ocean to the vacuum of space – quite a journey for a tiny cell."  

Instead, the authors suggest that detected organic molecules, such as particular amino acids, would serve as indirect evidence for or against an environment abounding with life.  

"Considering that according to the calculations, any life present on Enceladus would be extremely sparse, there still is a good chance that we'll never find enough organic molecules in the plumes to unambiguously conclude that it is there," Ferrière said. "So, rather than focusing on the question of how much is enough to prove that life is there, we asked, 'What is the maximum amount of organic material that could be present in the absence of life?'" 

If all measurements were to come back above a certain threshold, it could signal that life is a serious possibility, according to the authors.  

"The definitive evidence of living cells caught on an alien world may remain elusive for generations," Affholder said. "Until then, the fact that we can't rule out life's existence on Enceladus is probably the best we can do." 

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JOURNAL

The Planetary Science Journal

DOI

10.3847/PSJ/aca275 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Putative methanogenic biosphere in Enceladus's deep ocean: Biomass, productivity, and implications for detection

Cheerful chatbots don’t necessarily improve customer service

Peer-Reviewed Publication

GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

 

IMAGE: HAN ZHANG view more 

CREDIT: GEORGIA TECH

Imagine messaging an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot about a missing package and getting the response that it would be “delighted” to help. Once the bot creates the new order, they say they are “happy” to resolve the issue. After, you receive a survey about your interaction, but would you be likely to rate it as positive or negative?

This scenario isn’t that far from reality, as AI chatbots are already taking over online commerce. By 2025, 95% of companies will have an AI chatbot, according to Finance Digest. AI might not be sentient yet, but it can be programmed to express emotions.

Humans displaying positive emotions in customer service interactions have long been known to improve customer experience, but researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business wanted to see if this also applied to AI. They conducted experimental studies to determine if positive emotional displays improved customer service and found that emotive AI is only appreciated if the customer expects it, and it may not be the best avenue for companies to invest in.

“It is commonly believed and repeatedly shown that human employees can express positive emotion to improve customers’ service evaluations,” said Han Zhang, the Steven A. Denning Professor in Technology & Management. “Our findings suggest that the likelihood of AI’s expression of positive emotion to benefit or hurt service evaluations depends on the type of relationship that customers expect from the service agent.”

The researchers presented their findings in the paper, “Bots With Feelings: Should AI Agents Express Positive Emotion in Customer Service?,” in Information Systems Research in December.

Studying AI Emotion

The researchers conducted three studies to expand the understanding of emotional AI in customer service transactions. Although they changed the participants and scenario in each study, AI chatbots imbued with emotion used positive emotional adjectives, such as excited, delighted, happy, or glad. They also deployed more exclamation points.

The first study focused on whether customers responded more favorably to positive emotion if they knew the customer agent was a bot or person. Participants were told they were seeking help for a missing item in a retail order. The 155 participants were then randomly assigned to four different scenarios: human agents with neutral emotion, human agents with positive emotion, bots with neutral emotion, and bots with positive emotion. Then they asked participants about service quality and overall satisfaction. The results indicated that positive emotion was more beneficial when human agents exhibited it, but it had no effect when bots exhibited it.

The second study examined if customers’ personal expectations determined their reaction to the bot. In this scenario, the 88 participants imagined returning a textbook and were randomly assigned to either emotion-positive or emotion-neutral bots. After chatting with the bot, they were asked to rate if they were communal (social) oriented or exchange (transaction) oriented on a scale. If the participant was communal-focused, they were more likely to appreciate the positive emotional bot, but if they expected the exchange as merely transactional, the emotionally positive bot made their experience worse.

“Our work enables businesses to understand the expectations of customers exposed to AI-provided services before they haphazardly equip AIs with emotion-expressing capabilities,” Zhang said.

The final study explored why a bot’s positive emotion influences customer emotions, following 177 undergraduate students randomly assigned to emotive or non-emotive bots. The results explained why positive bots have less of an effect than anticipated. Because customers do not expect machines to have emotions, they can react negatively to emotion in a bot.

The results across the studies show that using positive emotion in chatbots is challenging because businesses don’t know a customer’s biases and expectations going into the interaction. A happy chatbot could lead to an unhappy customer.

“Our findings suggest that the positive effect of expressing positive emotion on service evaluations may not materialize when the source of the emotion is not a human,” Zhang said. “Practitioners should be cautious about the promises of equipping AI agents with emotion-expressing capabilities.”

 

CITATION: Han, Elizabeth and Yin, Dezhi and Zhang, Han (2022) Bots with Feelings: Should AI Agents Express Positive Emotion in Customer Service?. Information Systems Research.

Published online in Articles in Advance 02 Dec 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.1179

 

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The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 46,000 students, representing 50 states and more than 150 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

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JOURNAL

Information Systems Research

DOI

10.1287/isre.2022.1179 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Bots with feelings: Should AI agents express positive emotion in customer service?