I find this really interesting and a portent of the future. I am sure you remember the context to the films Bladerunner, chasing down sneeky renegade bots. Then there was AI with its ‘Flesh Fair’, (humans destroying orphaned robots), then the agents in Matrix, what is real and who is not etc: All come from many years of fiction and dread about a future infested with automatons. But AI is already receiving a backlash yet a BBC report last week, has experts agreeing it is here to stay and will be ubiquitous.
Here are on the dawn of real and virtual spaces having AI driven ‘invaders’. I say invaders because in the most ‘socialised’ virtual world of SL not knowing who is human or not in is already receiving backlash and resistance. New World Notes post ‘How to Spot a Bot‘ is the tip of the iceberg and many forums/blogs around the larger virtual worlds talk about corporate spies, automated gold farmers (WoW) and the embarrassment of spending three hours chatting up an avatar only to find out he or she is a database driven machine! In a completely virtual environment which is of course far ahead of ‘humanoids’ being present in real space, it has become very difficult to tell now if the avatars have a human or an sql driving them and this is irritating many ‘human’ inhabitants!
This is definitely something that we will be facing more and more in the coming years and the BBC report ‘Machines to Match Man by 2029‘ takes a different approach.
“”I’ve made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029,” said Ray Kurzweil. The report continues – Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering. The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter. The 14 challenges were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, which concludes on Monday.
I have been looking at AI in its various manifestations over the years as it is the ultimate in personalization, a digital you. Last year I created a simple chatbot on the ABC Island (and other builds I have created in Second Life) that uses a Pandora look-up back-end (calling to the web on each line of chat). I get many IM’s inworld asking if it is actually me talking through it! (not sure what that says about my conversational abilities!). There are also some ‘cultured’ (as in they can talk literature, science etc) book-bots I created for Thursday’s Fictions (another SL project) – and I am working with a great Australian company called MyCyberTwin who are leading the way globally in personalized, personality based AI. As regards the backlash mob I quote Hamlet from NWN
“And in any event, what happens when the bot farmers program their bots to have minimal AI and conversational abilities, a technology which already exists? I can see the fun in not knowing if the avatar you’re dancing with has a human being controlling her. But at some point, isn’t there an ethical obligation for bot owners to clearly designate them as such?”
It is a shame these poor bots (they prefer to be called AIs at the moment – eventually of course we will treat them as ourselves) are already being blamed for the ills and wrong doings in Virtual Worlds, but expect much more. Anyone for the next ‘Flesh Fair’ in Second Life, may as well get practicing for the real thing in a couple of years, or is that a couple of centuries? 😉
Gary, thanks again for providing the seeds for important research. These statements from American scientists and engineers around AI and robotics demonstrate the process of yesterday\’s science-fiction becoming today\’s headlines. We must be careful what we wish for. The ethical issues raised by artificial life forms in virtual worlds are broad. While we appreciate the creative and expressive freedoms provided in virtual worlds like Second Life, we may be witnessing the end of the honeymoon phase. An influx of corporate interests may perhaps raise issues around identity; digital profiling; intellectual property and surveillance. These issues may necessitate the kind of interventions that we were all hoping to avoid in the first place and perhaps be taken up by RW governments producing the usual RW quagmire of debate and policy around legislation, tax and data-mining. Question then becomes; how to protect the slender freedoms of digital utopia?
Hi Lisa,
Totally agree with your point that there will be lots of questions asked and a regulatory nightmare as more and more folk have presences in VWorlds and the resulting privacy issues rear their heads. This is two sided, is it ethical to put a digital character into a VW imitating a real person but should we really fight against it – after all much of our 2D web personalized experience at the moment is ‘database’ driven, engines on Amazon suggest “recommended for you”, iTunes have a section “just for you” and endless other sites that hold ‘your tastes’. This will be the driver for ‘bots’ in a wholey digital world to perform ‘AI whisper marketing’ – your with a group of real ‘digital’ friends – then someone joins you and tells you about the latest cool album/book/cd/gadget/service that bizarrely is something your really interested in.
Apart from the inevitable above we will of course be able to escape this mining by have walled garden hideaways – for a price…not too much different from the real world!
RT @tweetmeme What have you Got against my Bot! bit.ly/DnaHC oldie post, but now looking at Twitter saturated with EI bots!