Humans and Robots | Part 4 (Final): Are we robots or avatars?

:: This article is the Part 4 and final part of a series covering our future as Replicants. (Part 1, Part 2) and Part 3 are waiting for your discovery ::

Final Twist: Are we all robots?

Would you be fooled by a robot? Here is the final twist: a few weeks ago, I sent a message to a friend on Twitter and received an immediate reply. It was friendly but sounded somewhat generic, so I sent him a thank-you email asking if the message was from his reply bot. It turned out it wasn’t and he was flabbergasted enough to wonder publicly on Twitter if he was so boring and predictable for me to call him a bot. I explained the story to him, but the conclusion for me is: I thought he was possibly a robot when he was actually human. It reminded me of a comic strip I read years ago where some kind of weird super-hero suddenly stopped moving to pretend, as an absurd joke, that he was made of plastic. In the same vein, can humans pretend to be robots?

Thinking again, I wondered how the situation with my friend could have happened. Then I realized that much of daily conversations are actually quite robotic. Much of what we say, from greetings and even casual questions or statements are repeats of past conversations or information we read or heard here or there, and easily scripted. This was what the Twitter-bot creator realized; he even added some language twist to make his bots sound more “unique”. The disembodiment and ability to time messages on Twitter made it even more effective. How much of our daily conversation is truly personal and original? What would be the percentage of robotic talk? Your estimate and views are welcome at benjamin @ plus8star.com with the topic “Humans and Robots”.

Now that you might be pondering how robotic people around you are – I just came back from Tokyo and great service seems to go hand in hand with robotic behavior – you will surely be happy to add on top of this another idea: people can be avatars too! Thanks to our friends from Asiajin and WSJ who found great examples in Japan and China of people selling their time online. It is a more granular way than working for a company and surely has a certain eerie feeling of randomness.

– By Benjamin @ +8*

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