Robot Panelists, AI and the Future of Identity
#sxsw #robots
John Romano
Author & Researcher
The Digital Beyond
Stephen Reed
@stephenlreed
Bruce Duncan M Ed
Managing Director
Terasem Movement Foundation LifeNaut Project
Bina48
Robot Panelist
  • Rich Personal Data Store + Powerful AI = Virtual You
  • If AI was advanced enough, it could start expressing its own opinion
  • What will it take to create a sentient robot? Do we want to? And where are we in the process?
  • Exponential development: each step gets bigger as you go up the stairs.
  • Accelerating evolution of our tools.
  • It took 400,000 years from fire to bronze. It took 6,000 years from bronze to an iphone in your pocket.
  • is the state of AI today fire or bronze?
  • We are going to approach the singularity.
  • The moment that happens, we will be unable to see beyond. We will have people smarter than us. We can’t anticipate what they would do.
  • Stephen Reed: Texai:
    • A system you can teach useful things
    • Robots are making inroads into the bluecollar workplace.
    • AI makes inroads into whitecollar workplace.
    • Create the mind of a child, and then educate it.
    • We’ll see a demonstration of natural language 
  • Bruce Duncan
    • has a robot that works for him: Bina48
    • Goal with lifenaut is to archive human mind and upload into a robot
    • Mindfiles & Androids
    • Early mind uploading: cave paintings
    • Human beings have a need to upload: to share what’s on their mind.
    • Sum of all social media data can be used to reconstruct personality.
    • https://www.lifenaut.com/
    • Given a saturated datase or “mind file” that can be used by a future AI to be able to replicate your consciousness
    • In the future, you will be expected to have an avatar that is not just off the shelf, but can interact with people and act as you in certain circumstances.
    • http://yes.thatcan.be/my/next/tweet/
    • Genes / Memes / Bemes
    • Digital mindfiles capture bemes:
      • mannerisms
      • personality
      • language
    • What’s in it?
      • digital video/photos
      • blogs and diaries
      • psych tests and lists
      • Bainbridge surveys
      • sensecam data
      • feedback as others see me
    • Terasem Hypothesis: In the future, these reanimated personalities will be able to be imported into biological, nano-technological, and/or robotic bodies.
    • Bina48: first android based on a mindfile
  • Q: Merging mind files?
    • We made a science fiction film based on this: http://2bmovie.com/
    • We have multi-user mind files: to recreate a historical person, or a deceased family member.
  • Q: Did you have any children see Bina48 and how did they react?
    • We had an 8th grade intern, and he just sat down and talked to Bina48. He wasn’t phased by the technology at all.
  • Q: In layman’s terms, what is happening?
    • We use Dragon Naturally Speaking to do voice to text conversion.
    • We take the text input and feed into two databases.
    • One is a chatty database
    • One is a personality database
    • They compete to provide the best answer.
    • The sentences are stored in small pieces. She rarely gives the same sequence of sentences twice.