The Truman Show is one of the most important films produced in the past 15 years. Do yourself a favor, and (re)watch it now.
The past couple days, a fascinating article written by a young woman delving into chat logs from past exchanges with her boyfriend, who died of cancer, made the frontpage of several social news website [1].
As she notes, pulling up these chat histories enables her to “enter a world of the unscripted dialogue that filled our 9-to-5 existence. I become immersed in the coziness of our union.”. This kind of experience is likely familiar to anyone who has been through a separation fron someone they cared about and with whom they regularly exchanged digitally.
A mere couple weeks before that, news had broken that Cleverbot, a chatbot algorithm, had passed a form of the Turing test[2], meaning that it had fooled a certain percentage of human judges in making them believe that it was itself a human (~59% of the judges thought it was a human; human contestants only got ~63% of the judges’ votes). The reason why Cleverbot is so convincing is that it pulls its answers from past conversations it had, determining which sentence is semantically the closest to the one it is being presented with.
It’s not hard to connect the dots here if you’re a tiny bit tech-inclined. If you and someone else are users of Google Talk (or any other instant messaging service that systematically archives messages) on a quasi-daily basis over a period of several years, you have a huge database of hundreds of thousands of sentences, covering pretty much every topic of everyday life and your personal intimacy with that person. What happens then if you train a chatbot with this data?
I haven’t performed this experiment myself (and would be very much interested in hearing from anyone who has), but I believe that right now you would get, at best, a chatbot that utters semi-familiar sounding but unconvincing phrases and falls right into the uncanny valley [3]. However, things will be different a few years down the road, with the natural advances in the field of natural language processing as well as the exponential increase of the amount of data we store.
What happens then when you have a computer program that seems to speak and react just like a lost loved one? Especially perceived through the lens of grief and loneliness, it could have a huge impact on how we internalize and perceive the loss.
New forms of communication and social media have already impacted questions relating to this one (it’s obviously harder to get over an ex when you have Facebook updates everyday; and what should happen to the digital presence of someone who has passed away?[4])- but this could be extremely disruptive. Many people already suffer from addiction problems regarding games that simulate reality, or that provide an alternate one, and parents and psychologists all over the world are struggling with this issue that was non-existent a mere decade ago.
What happens to the grieving process if you can communicate daily with the “digital ghost” of a loved one, just as easily as you would exchange with a former roommate or coworker?
There are a lot of potential scenarios that unfold from there- what if you can purchase the chatlogs of a dead celebrity? What if our society deems these things to be perfectly normal (why not?), and companies compete to sell you the most realistic chat bot version of your late mother?
This definitely sounds a little bit sci-fi and far fetched right now- but one thing that you can never underestimate is the potential for technology to completely disrupt things the way we know them. Only by asking ourselves these questions preemptively will we be able to deal with them should they arise.
A great piece on Dwarf Fortress, based around a very interesting portrait of its creators. Yay for obscure indie games in mainstream media.
Björk’s Biophilia app is out for all iOS devices. It’s divided in 10 parts that will be released progressively, each one meant to accompany a track of her new eponymous album.
Includes collaborations with Scott Snibbe Studios (Gravilux), touch press (Elements), relativewave (soundrop), msm Paris, and quite a few others.
Cool game written for a multitouch wall display. Built with Processing- I wonder what the specs of the machine pushing this are. It’s probably not your average Celeron, although you can notice some slowdowns here and there.
At any rate, looking forward to when such a display will be affordable enough for me to have one in my office and hack with.
A friend has been running the OS X Lion Golden Master on his MacBook Air; when you press a key on the keyboard, instead of having the letter repeated, here’s what you get:
Reminds you of anything?
That’s a very tablet-y behavior indeed.
OS X running on beefed up iPads in the future?
The Miss USA candidates interviewed on the topic of evolution.
When you consider the fact that these clueless Barbie dolls are role models to most of the country’s little girls, it’s not hard to understand why we struggle so much with the female/male ratio in the STEM fields.
On a side note, surprisingly enough, Miss Louisiana wasn’t the worst of the lot.
Now that you’ve seen this trainwreck, a nice parody to cheer you up.
