I have some issues with the Salon piece, though I think it’s being spun as something it isn’t, and probably makes more sense in the context of the book. The central thesis is that the future we see in films and sci-fi books is not the future we get, and having attended a bunch of TED style events, Mr. Taleb wants us to remember that in the end the future looks a lot like the present, just with things taken away.
The arguments Mr. Taleb makes are fair, but he may be overstating the problem, and he may not be in a position to see the more exotic future he’s arguing against.
When people write science fiction, come up with TED talks or make movies, they’re looking for a hook, an idea that fires the imagination. If Jules Verne had written about the washing machine, people would not have been slack-jawed, but you can’t deny the impact that it has had on society. The fact that the waitress, hostess or even chef at the restaurant mentioned in the excerpt might have been a minority mother of young children attests to the fact that things have changed considerably for a lot of people.
The thing that Nassim Taleb and I have in common is that we’re privileged non-repressed-minority men. For us, things have generally been good for a while, and radical change hasn’t presented in our lives. If you can afford to send your kids to a good school, Khan Academy and Wikipedia aren’t as big of an innovation as if you’re working two jobs and can barely afford to keep food on the table. Perhaps the future is the privileged past, more evenly distributed. For people it impacts, that future is pretty cool, and more cool than robotic butlers or flying cars.
I accept Mr. Taleb’s argument that people should pay more attention to the past, but to be fair, Mr. Taleb’s grandfathers were deputy prime ministers, his parents were academics, and he went to the University of Paris and The Wharton School. My parents were missionaries and I went to public school in Texas, but had access to the Internet and a computer. One of us has the ability to appreciate and understand literature and literary culture and one of us has the ability to appreciate technological innovation and create a little bit of that future.
I’d love to be more aware of literary culture, but I can’t go from where I’m at directly to Plato and Homer and appreciate it like I can appreciate a new Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson or William Gibson book. To be totally honest, I’ve even had a hard time appreciating some of Bruce Sterling’s recent work. Maybe what I need is a Code Academy or Khan Academy for Plato or Phidias, and maybe in the next few years that will happen. If the kids down on the block are comparing graffiti tags to Canova, maybe that will be the future Mr. Taleb’s looking for.
My copy of Antifragile is on it’s way from Amazon, and I’m sure I’ll appreciate it as much as I did The Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness. Hopefully this excerpt will make more sense in context.
The entries are in for the Personal Cloud Contest, the judges have considered them carefully, and the winner of the 2013 SXSW Gold Badge is… Carlos Ovalle! Read on for all the entries.
This is what computers were like before PCs. (photo by phrenologist)
40 years ago the development of the Personal Computer sparked a revolution. It took a decade for PCs to land in the home, and another decade for them to land in a majority of US homes, but it created an entire industry. Having a computer that was yours led to generations of hackers and programmers, it created Microsoft, Apple, and led to the rise of Amazon and Google.
The PC is now in decline. In 2008 the laptop outsold the desktop, and now the tablet is eating the laptop’s lunch. As form factors have shrunk and the Internet has become a more dominant element of most users experience, the computer you own that runs software you own and has explicit privacy is disappearing. We store our spreadsheets and documents in Google Drive, we post our pictures on Flickr, we store our correspondence in Gmail, we chat with our friends on Facebook or Twitter.
HP TouchPad, a $500 paper weight. (photo by traferty)
No one is learning how to program on Facebook, especially when their only device is a cell phone or tablet. It’s dangerous to store your personal pictures only in Flickr. Your Google Drive documents and Gmail email are a clever hacker away from being in someone else’s hands. On the internet, services die. Devices become orphans and eventually the content on them is lost.
Maybe it’s time for a new paradigm, something that preserves the hackability and ownership of the PC, but takes advantage of all the new technologies we’ve come up with in the last 40 years. Maybe that thing is…
The Personal Cloud Computer: The essentials of single user focus, software and data ownership, but the portability, networkability and burstability of the cloud, the display flexibility of HTML5 interfaces, the hackability of linux and the flexibility of a PaaS.
So what does the Personal Cloud Computer (PC2, maybe? Let’s try it out.) look like, specifically it’s fundamental architecture, organization and software use cases? Well, let’s start from the top…
Architecture
I think we’re looking at something like a PaaS similar to CloudFoundry, but with a UI front end like WordPress, and tuned to run apps for you, not run apps for web consumption. You’ll access it via HTTPS, it’ll be optimized for desktop, tablet and mobile, and it’ll have API access routes for stand-alone applications or hardware devices. By default your distribution may come with a set of plugins (from the desktop metaphor, these are our programs), but no one wants to be limited to one programming language, so something like CloudFoundry makes sense. You’ll be able to run plugins written in Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc. Initially each PC2 platform creator will probably have it’s own plugin spec, but developer demand will push them towards a common, unified interface spec.
Even mongrels can be beautiful. (photo by w1n9zr0)
Logging into the UI should be as secure as possible. Maybe we’ll use two factor authentication with bearer tokens, maybe there will be a super-secure pay-for service that holds the master password for your device. However we do it, login needs to be safe, and lost password needs to be really, really, really difficult to hack. Maybe you need to round up a quorum of your friends and coworkers, and by combining bits of a key you’ve given them, they can re-generate your master reset password.
WordPress has learned that software updates are a big issue, and having the update interface be as integrated and simple as possible is a huge deal. Apple figured out that having devices live their entire lives without being tethered to a PC was an important feature. PC2’s will need something similar. Updates for the core platform and plugins should be easy, as secure as possible and baked in.
For memory consumption’s sake, we’ll probably follow the iOS model. Programs only run when you’re making requests of them. They can schedule tasks to wake themselves up with a central platform scheduler, and can run little chunks of code to check things in the background, but they don’t run continually when you’re not using them. The core platform also provides a notification/alert hub, so if your scheduled task needs to tell you something, it can push it to you.
The interface between the core and the plugins should be network-able. You’ll want the flexibility to run your PC2 in the cloud, but execute a program on your phone, or your house’s thermostat, or your car. Authentication will probably be similar to Oauth, or the two factor unique password setup that Google does. You’ll pair devices with your PC2 by entering a network identifier for your PC2 into the device, then the device will generate a random key, which you’ll punch into a devices section of your PC2 interface. If you lose your cell phone, you can go into the PC2 interface and turn off it’s access without resetting everything.
Sharing should be baked in to the platform. You’ll be able to grand read and write access to files, or between plugins, to other PC2 installs. You may even share back to centralized services, or pull from centralized services like a car sharing service or traffic updates. You could share where your car is with a city-wide traffic nexus that shares back the ability to create a route based on live traffic conditions, for instance.
Your UI would be driven like building a Facebook App. Plugins feed UI markup from back to the PC2’s display layer, and it arranges things so the UI can be optimized for a plane of tiles style desktop UI, a tablet, or a single-tile phone UI. You may even have baked in interface specifications for voice or visual interfaces, so you can control apps with your voice or eyeball movements in your Google Glass.
Not that kind of Metro.
Microsoft is probably tackling a bunch of these problems with Metro, or whatever it’s called today. I’m not sure if I trust them to succeed. These PC2 solutions would have to grow organically, defining the entire spec at once would be a recipe for disaster. Learn the lessons, but design for simplicity. Nobody’s going to be building Word on this platform in the first year or two.
A bunch of use cases now and over the next few years are going to be built around pay per use or subscription APIs (for facial detection in your lifestream videos, or machine translation, or whatever the next thing is). Having a centralized billing platform for those will be important. You’ll either have accounts with a few external services that plugins can use, or the billing and payment part will be built into the platform. You’d have an internal provider model, so plugins would be able to discover their options without needing to know the authentication or implementation details themselves.
Utilizing cloud services would be similar to subscription APIs. Being able to burst their CPU use or disk usage should be a service provided to plugins by the PC2. Your thermostat should be able to request a hadoop run to churn consumption data, utility billing rates and weather forecasts once a week. The thermostat doesn’t need to know how to spin up the hadoop cluster, but a ‘can run hadoop jobs’ component can be a part of the PC2, and it can know how to use various cloud services and be able to optimize based on price. (I’m looking at you, Amazon EC2 spot market.)
So what do we have? We have a base UI framework with robust integration options, strong login security, a networkable plugin interface, a centralized scheduler, integrated sharing, integrated API billing and a burstable cloud resource provider. We’ve created a blueprint for an Operating System, something designed for the strengths of the cloud, but something very different from what we have now. Something like Salesforce.com, but for people, not businesses.
Organization
I think there will be a bunch of companies and groups creating platforms like this. Some will flourish, some will die. Early adopters will bear the brunt of the pain, but they’ll put up with it for the advantages, just like they always do. I think most of the successful groups will look like Automattic. WordPress is an easy example to point to, they’ve done really well financially and still embrace the open source model. They make money from their hosted solution, but you can install it yourself if you want. I don’t worry that they’re going to hire a new VP really focused on ‘maximizing value’, and make a deal with Microsoft so their mobile UI is only optimized for Windows Phone. I know they have an open source ethos from the top down, so I trust them.
But in the beginning someone’s going to have to start cobbling these things together into a value-providing alpha. Will it be me? Will it be you?
It doesn’t take too much imagination to think of things that a platform like this could provide, but it takes the right combination of experience and imagination to get it off the ground. Most of the people who would get this kind of platform are early adopters who are already involved in the cloud. They may run VMs in a couple different clouds, they may have written integration and maintenance software. The first programs they’re going to build will be things that the PC2 is uniquely suited for, namely tying together your internet of things, and running consuming and consolidating services.
Your PC2 may be a great place to tie all your home automation and quantified self stuff together. You may have zigbee’s and the Nest and your Withings scale and your Expereal app and your food logger and your Fitbit. You may like the services, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know if you walked more on days when it was cold, or what combination of exercise, travel and food intake led to your greatest happiness. That’s data I’d want to keep long term, long after those respective companies bite the dust. That’s a perfect PC2 application. It’s big data for people.
The PC2 could also be a great place to host personal Weavr type bots. It’s an always-on platform that has API access, both free and paid, and the UI options mean you could get a back-channel or tweaking interface to your weavr in your car, or on your cell phone.
With Tropo or Google Voice, your PC2 could be the center of your personal message hub. You could call your PC2 and ask it things, Siri-style, or other people could call it and you could intelligently channel them to what they need to get to. All the audio data would live in your own cloud storage, so if you wanted to run analytics on it 5 years down the road, you could. Hey, voice-driven twitter-style sharing with just your friends, call in, record a clip, and it gets sent to all your buddies.
Someone will eventually build an office suite for the PC2. It will start simple, and then it will get smarter. With easy cloud access you’ll be able to run Wolfram Alpha style processing on your data, on demand. Once the (open source) software’s written once, everyone can use it, they just have to pay for the CPU horsepower.
The PC2 initially wouldn’t have more memory or CPU demand than a low end VM or cell phone, which means that if you didn’t want to pay for a cloud server, or had already used your free Amazon EC2 option, you could run your PC2 on, oh… a Raspberry Pi.
TL;DR
PC2’s are a response to a market opportunity, and a technological tipping point. People need tools to thrive, and their PCs are turning into services they rent. All the pieces are in place for a new approach, nothing new really needs to be invented. The only thing that remains is to start writing code and see if this is something people actually want. Of course, that’s the hardest part.
I’m giving away a SXSW 2013 Gold Badge to the person who has the most innovative idea about how a person could use the cloud. The contest is open till midnight November 25th, so you can talk to your family and friends over Thanksgiving, come up with some great ideas, and maybe get a chance to see Elon Musk, Joi Ito, Nate Silver and many others at SXSW Interactive and Film, 2013.
You know those nights when you get an idea just as you’re going to bed, and it’s a fight to decide whether to try and sleep or to get up and see if you can get it working? Tonight I had one of those ideas. Specifically, I was thinking about creating a Markov Chain text generator where the corpus was all the emails I’d written since 1996. Then you’d be able to load that page and see something pop out that would be somehow, kind-of, maybe like an email I would write.
Well, it turns out getting just the text you’ve typed in email is really hard, because it’s mixed in with all kinds of replies and cut and paste and signatures… suffice to say, it wasn’t going to work without some heavy manual editing. Thankfully, it turns out I have a pretty good source of prose in the posts I made to The WELL since joining in 1997. A few extract commands later, some python magic from shabada, and voila:
There’s an older gentleman who works at the Lowes near my house. He’s a fixture of the place. If you saw him walking down the street you’d either say “There goes a mountain man,” or “That guy looks like he should work at a home improvement store.” He’s a floor customer service representative, and seems as comfortable in lumber as he does in plumbing or lawn and garden. He isn’t pushy, always has an interested, kind look in his eyes. You’ll often see him explaining a pipe fitting or how to install a ceiling fan to a young couple, their eyes narrowed, their brows furrowed, nodding, furiously taking mental notes. Unfortunately, they can’t put him in their cart and take him home.
While most tasks, like installing a ceiling fan or wiring a dimmer switch, aren’t fundamentally complex, until you understand the principles they can seem arcane and risky. Lots of subject areas are like this: Computers, carpentry, construction, decorating, training your pet, arranging flowers, tracking your business expenses, creating a household budget, replacing your car’s battery, gardening, clearing a drain, hemming a skirt, the list goes on and on.
Many of these skills are taught to us by our parents, aunts and uncles, or grandparents. Some of us are lucky enough to had this introduction to a wide range of skills, or are able to call one of these experienced elders to come over when we stumble onto one we haven’t dealt with before. The less lucky of us may not have had as much time with our elders, may not have that sort of relationship with them or may not be able to call on them due to distance or passing.
I think that we have a general human need for elder advice and guidance, and I think augmented reality is going to herald a paradigm shift in serving that need.
There are a lot of people reaching retirement age around the world. A lot of them are facing the end of their planned careers whether they like to or not. They often aren’t suited to the uncertainties of the new economy, and the businesses they work for want them to step aside so younger people can take their place. Many, or even most, of them can’t afford to stop working, though, so they often end up at low paying menial jobs because they don’t have a modern skill set. They have deep knowledge and experience in a field, and they have experience explaining their field, since they often trained the generation of workers after theirs.
On the other end, there are millions of us who haven’t tackled these problems before, but will scoop up the latest gadget, are living at a very high speed, and are in love with customized, personalized, authentic experiences. We make friends with the taco truck guy, we fret about the viability of his business, and shake our heads sadly if he closes down. We want the world to work how it feels it should. Experience plus careful workmanship should equal success.
Imagine if there was a marketplace of subject matter experts. Retired or semi-retired plumbers, gardeners, electricians, mechanics, decorators, seamstresses, florists, stylists, bakers, teachers, cooks. The list could be as long as your arm. Each one of them has an iPad or a big TV and a remote (maybe both). They list their expertise and a price for their time. Maybe they fill out a profile of their work experience, ala LinkedIn.
You’re sitting at home. Suddenly the sink drain clogs, or the air conditioner stops blowing cold air, or your wife starts dropping hints about a souffle for her birthday, or your kid wants to take homemade bread to school, or you need to install a ceiling fan.
You put on your Google Glasses (or iGlasses or whatever other brand of see-through AR may exist in a year and a half), and place a quick order. You might have gotten an hour or two as a gift, maybe when you spent $500 at the home improvement store. You use a super-streamlined job-posting interface, probably speaking to it to describe your problem (lets call it a souffle), and in a few moments you have a handful of candidates who are online and available.
You hit the order button and a retired baker in some other state gets a bing-bong on their iPad. They sit down, review your profile, decide you’re a decent sort, and hit accept. You instantly see their face in the corner of your Google Glasses, and they can see what you’re seeing from the Glasses camera. They introduce themselves, you describe your problem, and you go to work together to solve it. They watch you as you work, use their iPad to draw diagrams over your vision, NFL commentator style, or shift the camera around and demonstrate with their hands.
Once the souffle’s in the oven, they recommend some pairings based on their experience, which you’ll get in a voice-transcribed recording of the interaction dropped in your email. You thank them, and say goodnight. You bookmark them for future reference, and leave some feedback.
It’s a win-win, you get access to subject matter experts and a real, authentic experience. They get to pass on their knowledge, and get paid for it. The technology only enhances an interaction that is already possible, but inconvenient.
Imagine if something like this was part of everyday life. You could gift your kids with a dozen hours when they go to college. You could pick up the basics of a new skill every month, entirely project based, no Dummies books collecting dust, just human interaction.
This seems like one of those no brainers. You mix Skype or Facetime, oDesk, retirees and the growth of home based businesses with the enabling technology of augmented reality, and this pops out. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.
Note: This is a long, rambling, train of thought post. The tl;dr version is: Emotional connection to bots happens, we get sad when things we care for go away, so there’s a big ethical risk associated with human-acting bots living in unportable platforms. We members of the ‘Bot 2.0’ community need to address this before we get too far.
A little over a year ago I started playing a cloud-based iPhone game called GodVille. GodVille describes itself as a Zero Player Game. You take the role of a god, you create a hero, and you send that hero out into the game world to fight on your behalf. Your hero is an independent being. When you come back to check on them, they will have recorded an entertaining diary of monsters fought, treasures collected, and items sold, all without your input. You only have four influence options on your hero: you can encourage them, which makes them heal faster, discourage them, which makes them fight better, shout down at them, and activate some of the items they pick up.
While it isn’t a very interactive game, it’s still a compelling experience. I check on my hero every day or two, look for interesting items to activate, and encourage him as much as I can.
Your GodVille hero can’t permanently die. They can be killed, but they’ll just wait around in the ground, writing notes in their diary until you resurrect them. (They’ll get tired of waiting for you and dig themselves out after a few days.) Not killing these bot-like characters is common in online games, permanent death is generally reserved for the hardcore modes of single player releases. (A really interesting article in wired.co.uk postulates that the free to play model is driving this, because developers don’t want to give you an excuse to walk away from their microtransactions, or get the feeling that your money was wasted.)
Once sufficiently powerful, your GodVille hero can adopt a pet, it’s own sub-bot that helps it fight and gains it’s own levels. My hero adopted a pet earlier this year. Over the a few weeks I watched the pet (a dust bunny named Felix) fight along side my hero, shield him from attacks and help heal him. The pet went up in level, gained some abilities, and everything was going just peachy.
Then I opened the app one day, and the pet was dead. My hero was carrying around Felix’s corpse. I went to the web and searched for pet resurrection, but found it wasn’t possible. Sometimes the hero will pay to have the pet resurrected, sometimes they’ll just bury them. After a grieving period, they’ll adopt a new one.
Felix’s death had a lot more of an emotional impact on me than I expected. I didn’t know Felix, I never met it, it really only existed as a few hundred bytes of data on a server somewhere. I’ve had more interactions with lamps in my house than I did with Felix. If you tip a lamp I really like off a table and shatter it into a million pieces, I may be angry, but I likely won’t feel an immediate emotional loss.
A Lamp with Feelings
Felix’s death was hard because I’d made an emotional connection to him, watching him interact with my hero. His death highlighted my powerlessness in the game. I can resurrect my hero, within the confines of the game mechanic, but I can’t resurrect his pet. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, I can’t bring Felix back to life.
Someday, inevitably, GodVille will shut down. People will move on to other projects, the server bill won’t get paid, iPhone apps won’t be the hot thing anymore. My hero, his diary and pet will disappear, and because he only lives inside the GodVille system (and being part of that system is a fundamental aspect of who he is), he will be gone forever.
Bruce Sterling at SXSW 2010 (photo by jonl)
Bruce Sterling gave a great talk about this at SXSW in 2010, about how the Internet doesn’t take care of it’s creations. We build and throw away. Startups form, grow like crazy, and if they don’t sufficiently hockey stick, they close. Or they get popular but not popular enough, and the team gets hired away to bigger players. Either way, the service shutters, the content and context disappears, history is lost. If it’s bad to have this happen to your restaurant checkins and photos, how much worse is it when it happens to virtual beings you’ve created an emotional attachment to? As creators, if we encourage platforms like this, roach motels where content comes in and never comes out, what does that say about us?
Eighteen and a half years ago I created my first character on a text based multiplayer internet game called Ghostwheel, hosted by my first ISP, Real/Time Communications. Ghostwheel was a MOO, an Object Oriented version of a Multi-User Dungeon, the progenitor of today’s MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. In a MOO you can create characters, build environments and objects, talk to other people, fight, and even create bots.
Real/Time Communications hosted Ghostwheel on a small server in their data center, a 486 desktop machine. People from all over the world connected to that server, created characters, and wove shared stories together over the early boom years of the internet.
A Late 90’s Austin Ghostwheel Austin Meetup
Eventually Real/Time Communications lost interest in hosting and maintaining Ghostwheel (and eventually Real/Time itself disappeared), so we took it elsewhere. As someone with colocated servers and ISP experience, I ended up hosting it on one of my machines. It now lives in a cloud VM, and even though the players have left for newer, more exciting destinations, everything they created, the characters, the setting, the dusty echoes of romances and feuds and plots all still exist. It still exists because someone with the wherewithal got their hands on it, and cared enough about it to keep it going, and it exists because MOO is an open source platform that doesn’t depend on one company being in business.
While piecing together the thoughts for this post it occurred to me the that the MOO server could probably be compiled on some modern linux based smartphone. They have more than enough CPU power and memory, and even a 3G connection is fine for text. I could conceivably load Ghostwheel on one and carry it around in my pocket. A whole world, nearly a thousand characters, tens of thousands of rooms and objects, dozens and dozens of species of monsters, all living in my pocket. I could hand it to people and ask them about the weight of a world. Every time I think about that it blows my mind. There’s definitely the kernel of something new and weird there.
So back to my point, as I’ve talked about before there’s a whole species of autonomous bots appearing around us that we relate to as nearly human. Like my GodVille character, we don’t have direct control over them, their autonomy being one of the things that makes them seem more human. They’re coming, they’re awesome, and I think in a few years they’ll be as common as Facebook accounts.
The most exciting work I’ve seen in this field is from the good folks at Philter Phactory and their Weavrs system. Weavrs are social bots defined by location, work and play interests, and groups of emotional tags. The Weavrs system hooks into Twitter, generates its own personal web pages (kind of like a bot-only mini-Tumblr) for each weavr, and is extensible through API driven modules called prosthetics. Some example prosthetics include the dreams prosthetic, which folds images the weavr has reposted into strange, creepy kaleidoscopes.
Weavrs are easy to create, they produce some compelling content, and they’re fun to watch. I’ve created a few, my wife has one, several of my friends have them. Interest is picking up from marketing and branding agencies, and where the cool hunters go, tech interests will inevitably follow.
The thing that’s starting to concern me is the possibility that Bots 2.0 could end up being another field like social networking where the hosted model gets out ahead of ownership and portability. What happens when the service hosting our bots disappears? What happens to all it’s posts, it’s images, it’s conversations? (I suppose I wouldn’t be qualified to work at a cloud provider if I didn’t have strong feeling about data portability.)
Weavrs as a whole isn’t open source, but it has lots of open source bits. Philter Phactory is trying to run a business, and I don’t begrudge them that. They have the first mover advantage in a field that’s going to be huge. I’m sure data portability is on their radar, but it’s a lot easier to prototype and build a service when you’re the only one running it. Conversely, it’s a lot easier to scale out a platform designed to be run stand-alone than to create a stand-alone version of a platform.
Once a few more folks start to realize how interesting and useful these things are, I think we’re going to see a Cambrian Explosion of social bots, and I’m sure plenty of entrants in the field won’t be thinking in terms of portability. They’ll be thinking about the ease of centralized deployment and management, and the reams of juicy data they can mine out of these things.
I remember in the early 2000’s feeling a similar excitement about self publishing (blogging). It was obviously going to be something that was going to be around forever once it was perfected. You could see the power in it’s first fits and starts, and it was just going to keep getting better. I think there are more than superficial similarities between self publishing platforms and social bot platforms, in fact.
Thinking back on that evolution, I think the archetype that we should hope for would be the WordPress model. I remember Matt Mullenweg visiting the Polycot offices in 2004 or so. He was passionate, had a great project on his hands, and I’m embarrassed to say that we weren’t smart enough to figure out a way to help him with it. Matt, Automattic and the WordPress community have done a great job of managing the vendor lockin problem while still providing a great hosted service people are willing to pay for. They get the best of both worlds, the custom WordPress sites and associated developer community, millions of blogs hosted by ISPs, the plugin developers, and still get to run a nicely profitable, extremely popular managed service. If wordpress.com goes away (god forbid), someone will still be maintaining the core codebase, and you’ll be able to export your data and run your own instance as long as you like. (Just remember to register your own domain name.)
I hope that the social bot community evolves something similar. I think that platforms are coming online to encourage that, and I think the people in the field are smart and recognize the ethical implications. Maybe in a year you’ll be able to run your bots on a hosted service or, if you’re motivated, run your own bot server and fiddle with it’s innards as you please. Who knows, you may even run them on your smartphone.
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.
Last night was the February OpenStack Austin meetup. I took my handy little Canon S95 with me to record the proceedings for those of us who couldn’t make it. Here are the two videos from last night, and a special bonus video from December’s meetup.
Unfortunately the S95 doesn’t handle auto-exposure well with the super-bright projector image, so the camera keeps under and over exposing these videos. Hopefully it won’t be too distracting, maybe next time I’ll bring a camera with more manual control.
First, Matt Ray from OpsCode talked about the history of OpenStack and Chef and the knife tools for managing OpenStack. YouTube Link
Zaid Sawalha from Rackspace talks about how OpenStack Keystone became an incubated OpenStack project, and lessons learned from their experience. YouTube Link
Zaid Sawalha from Rackspace talks about OpenStack Keystone’s implementation and development, plus a little QA. YouTube Link
Bonus! Blake Yeager from HP Cloud talks about Deployment strategies at the December 8th meetup. YouTube Link
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.
