Jeff Sym lives in South Austin and likes Indian TV dramas, dubstep inspired remixes and the Austin Children’s Museum. Keiko Kyoda lives in Japan, likes to read old travel books and wants Condensed Milk for dinner. They tweet. Sometimes they even post things they shouldn’t.
Jeff and Keiko didn’t exist yesterday.
The first time I failed the Turing test was 1993. I’d dialed up to a BBS in Austin, a one-line operation probably running out of some guys bedroom. There was an option in one of the menus to chat with the sysop. It was an ELIZA style bot. It took at least a screen full of text and growing irritation for me to realize I was talking to a machine. I don’t remember a lot from 1993, but I remember sitting there in front of my 14″ glowing CRT, feeling incredibly dumb. (A few years later I upgraded to this NeXT Cube.)
Artificial intelligence is only as convincing as the data behind it. Back in that relative stone age the system could only echo back at me what I’d written or ask open ended questions. “How does that make you feel?” Watson read all of Wikipedia before it (he?) went on Jeopardy. If you started talking to Watson about cars, I bet it/he could respond with some really interesting trivia, and you could chat with it/him for a while before you realized you weren’t talking to a person.
The most visible ‘ask me a question and I’ll give you an answer’ system is Apple’s Siri. Siri can tell you what the weather’s like outside, and she’ll soon be able to tell you what year and model of car you just snapped a picture of. Siri could listen to you and tell if you’re angry, or if you had a really great day yesterday, based on your tweets and Facebook posts. Siri could team up with Mint to watch your bank account balance, and suggest that hey, you aren’t investing enough for retirement, maybe you don’t need that thing you just price compared on your phone. Maybe you should put that money into your Roth IRA instead. This is all possible because these systems have access to fantastically more data than they used to.
Jeff and Keiko are Weavrs. You create weavr bots by selecting a gender (or object), a name, and a collection of interest keywords. Then you define some emotions. _____ makes me _____ when I’m at _____. You can tell weavrs where they live, and they’ll wander around their neighborhood. They utilize public social APIs (flickr, last.fm, twitter, google local), driven by some black box keyword magic, to find and post things they like. You can add pluggable modules to weavr’s to say, post their dreams. Over time they can develop new emotions about different things. There’s even a system for programming a Monomyth into their lives.
Weavrs exist on their own. You can ask them questions, but you can’t tell them ‘I like this, post more like this.’ The developers of the Weavr platform consider this to be important. Weavrs evolve and grow without your direct hand guiding them. I can understand why they didn’t want to allow ‘more like this’ feedback. It makes the entire system more complex, but it’s obvious that having more full featured persona creation/control options is going to be a big part of the future of social bots.
Weavrs most public impact so far (at least as far as I can tell) reveals a bit about how people will likely react to this sort of thing. Author of Men Who Stare at Goats and The Psychopath Test, Gonzo Journalist Jon Ronson (@jonronson) did a bit on his video show about twitter bots. The Weavr folks found out and using the contents of his Wikipedia page, created a @jon_ronson Weavr. The result was somewhat predictable: much gnashing of teeth. There’s an excellent article about this, and Weavrs in general, on Wired UK.
Twitter has over 140 million active users. A large number of these are spam bots, designed to convert ego (retweets and replies) into $ (clickthroughs). What we don’t really know, and what may in fact be unknowable soon, is how many of these are bots of a different kind. How many of them exist just to exist. To learn, grow, develop. We heard a lot about companies creating armies of real-looking twitter accounts for nefarious purposes during the Arab Spring. It doesn’t take a lot of work, once you have a valid social model that can be fed keywords, to create a twitter bot the simulates the interest of every ‘person’ that Wikipedia has an entry for.
What we don’t hear about, and I don’t think is discussed enough, is the non-nefarious potential for these independent personas. Imagine a platform somewhat beyond Weavr. Weavr 2.0, maybe. It ties into more social platforms. It has artistic taste (or not). Maybe it takes walks through its neighborhood, and snaps out ‘photos’ from segments of google street view images. (Jeff Sym liked this picture today, while he was wandering around downtown Austin.) Maybe it goes on trips, setting arbitrary routes through hot points. Maybe my (should I even call it ‘my’ anymore, except that in some way perhaps I’m responsible for it, like a child?) Weavr that’s really into Information Security decides to take a road trip to DEF CON. Maybe because he’s also a bit of a conspiracy theorist, he decides to drop by Roswell on his way, maybe he looks around in Google Street View and takes a picture. Maybe because I’ve stirred the 3d Visu-chromasome pot, he has an appearance (and taste in clothes), so maybe he puts himself into the picture (apologies to Charles Stross).
Wolfram Alpha (that powers the ‘question/answer’ part of Siri with a >90% relevancy rate) is 20 million lines of Mathematica code. You’d need a lot less than that to do what I just outlined. You need an event parser. Easy, the events are already online. You need a map, and the ability to search for hotspots of keywords along the route or near an area. If I did a keyword search for ‘conspiracy’ between Austin and Las Vegas, don’t you think Roswell would pop up? If I did a search for clusters of photos taken in Roswell on Flickr or some other social photo site, I’m sure I’d find the geo location and general object background of something interesting. Analyze light and time of day, pose and place model, render and voila. Picture postcard. Get it printed and mailed from New Mexico with a pay-as-you-go errand service. Boom, your virtual persona just became real.
These personas would be great for directed research: I need a ‘me’ who lives in Amsterdam and loves to take pictures and eat cheese, since I’m going there in 6 months and I want to get a feel for the place. What if you created a relationship engine. X is my Y, I’m in love with Z. You could have your own little soap opera that evolves online every day. It ties itself into current events. It evolves in ways you can’t predict, because it feeds off the now.
I’m going to ignore the whole ‘but if you don’t know they’re fake’ problem for now. On one hand, that’s kind of the point. On the other, it sucks to be duped. In the future (and present) you can’t trust anything you see. It’s probably time to get over any assumption of authenticity.
One thing that’s nagging at me, though, is death. A lot of us know people on twitter or Facebook who’ve died. In the coming years a lot more of us will. We’ll be reminded of birthdays, of past events, things will pop up in our timeline because someone commented a few years later. Their memory continues to exist, but in a concentrated form. Unless their profile’s deleted completely, they continue to exist. If there was a collection of directed, trained bots behind the scenes, they might even continue to post. They might be posting things relevant to their interests 10 or even 20 years later, if the systems keep running that long. As it is, Jeff and Keiko will only ‘die’ if Weavr shuts down. If they had control of their own codebases and knew how to set themselves up as a lightweight every-2-hour process on a system somewhere, maybe they could pay for their own existence through clickthroughs and blog ads… indefinitely.
Weavrs want to continue to exist, as well. Right now you can clone them, in the future they may, after some length of existence, spawn some kids with variations on their ‘genetic makeup’. Some kids will be interesting, attract attention and flourish, some will be too boring or too weird and disappear. The parent weavr continues to exist through it’s children.
There’s the school of thought that all people have several people inside of them. You have a ‘masculine’ take-charge person, maybe a ‘feminine’ artistic, caring person, maybe a young zany person and an older, wiser person. They all make up you, but maybe with these technologies one day soon you’ll be able to manifest them more concretely. You could have an inner circle of very directed Weavrs. Maybe to maximize their inventiveness you’ll make deals with them. More freedom for them, wider results sets for you. The deal with your wise, older persona, in exchange for the investment tips and long-range perspective, is that it gets to virtually go down to Florida every winter. Maybe your virtual young, wild persona, in exchange for keeping you up to date on the latest fashion trends and music recommendations, gets to stay out late and virtually attend hot underground shows. They’re not just agents, they’re symbiotes.
These autonomous net entities, these ghosts in the social web or e-horcruxes, whatever you’d like to call them, aren’t going back in the box. We have to learn to deal with them, and due to social connectedness and meaning being a currency in our society, whoever figures out how to utilize them best is going to have an advantage. Businesses and marketeers will take advantage after the artists finish tinkering. Someone’s already using Weavrs to create market segment identities (PDF) for the cities in China with more than a million people (there are 150 such cities, too many to look at individually).
We’re all familiar with code that runs ‘for us’. Flickr, McAfee, these services run with our content or on our computers, but they don’t really run for just us, and they don’t exist independently… yet. One groundbreaking thing that Weavr is moving towards is removing the AI logic from the content (Weavrs pull from the web and post back to it, but they don’t exist in a walled garden like Flickr, they exist outside of it and talk to it via APIs). Eventually I think we’ll see some open source or self-runnable version of this, an agent that lives wherever you want. Once my dependency on an outside software provider for the black box is gone, I’m free to integrate whatever bits I like (fork that thing on GitHub!), and work towards a social agent that can exist for as long as someone keeps the lights on.
Postscript 1:
I just had a weird thought. Irma and I have noticed that our Weavrs post a lot of things we’re interested in (or find cool/neat). Since we created them, they feel like an extension of ourselves, so there’s a personal ownership angle to the things they post. “Oh,” I say, “this bot is like me.” I don’t say that when my friends post things, though. I don’t say, “Wow, this social appendage of me is like me.” I suppose someone really ego centric would say that, but we consider our friends to be independent entities. We know we don’t control them, and unless they’re our brothers or sisters, we probably didn’t have a hand in how they initially developed. Our Weavrs, on the other hand, feel like an extension of ourselves. I’m not sure what that means, but it’s a weird thought on individuality and influence domains.
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