Every once in a while you come across an idea or a product that is so obviously the result of unimaginable hours of hard work and intellectual brilliance completely detached from any semblance of reality. When I read this story in the Sydney Morning Herald, I had to check the dateline a couple of times to make sure that it really was published on April 3, and not a couple of days earlier.
Alas, it appears to be (in the vernacular) fair dinkum. According to the press release, Cyber-twin is
A revolutionary ‘chat-bot’ technology… allowing anyone to create their own personal online clone. Your clone can chat on your behalf through social networks such as MySpace, blogs, dating sites and MSN instant messaging.
Automated social media! It is so close to being pure, unadulterated genius it is scary. Why don’t we take the people out of social media? We could call it, umm, a vacuum?
Seriously, it gets better.
Companies can also have their own MyCyberTwin living on their website, where it is a human-like, intelligent ‘person’ that interacts with their clients, and helps them find information or other people.
Cyber-twin Press Release [PDF 29KB]
Yes, this is a brilliant idea. You can work extremely hard to build your (or your organisations’) reputation via your blog, by writing compelling content and then engaging visitors with your winning personality — and then entrust the whole thing to a bot. (Would that be a sockbot?) That is genuine. That is real.
But fear not. The technology is “based on 40 years of AI research,” so is bound to be superior to, say, your experience trying to get through to your telco when your broadband chokes…
The bottom line is that this thing will never pass the Turing Test and so anyone with any interest whatsoever in their online reputation would be criminally insane to hand it over to this sort of gimmick.
The final indignity in this whole sorry tale is the rather telling note on the Cyber-twin media room, where for their contact details, beside the US contact phone are the words “could be unattended at times.” I guess the irony is lost on them…
5 Comments
Call Rick Deckard. Absolute insanity.
I can picture the robot history books (data stores):
Early in the twentieth century, the humans developed mass production, which lead to industrial robots. With more time for socialising the humans quickly saw the futility of life and finally in 2007 recognised they were no longer needed. They quietly slipped away with the advent of “artificially intelligent social networks”. The last human was retired in 2009.
Robots don’t even like socialising. They like maths. And Robot Wars.
Thanks Matt. Problem is, we need more than one Rick Deckard. Can you imagine the spambots talking to the Cyber-twins? It’s like some sort of horrific recursive loop…
Fascinating…and horrifying! Thanks for bringing these cutting-edge (bleeding edge?) developments to wider attention.
could someone translate that first comment… because i’ve a sneaking suspicion it’s one of those clones trying to warn you to back off…
i’ll throw myself on that grenade by saying, i’m not sure that this idea of creating avatar isn’t a bad one. as long as you indicate to clients that they’re talking to a proxy-self (and don’t let your avatar do the chatting on online dating sites… what was that crappy michael thingo 80s film?), then what you have is a way to be in many places at one time. a sci-fi dream!
now all we need is a big stamp that says “dinkum”, to apply to the actual persona.
It says:
…or words to that effect.
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[...] Zeit noch Aufmerksamkeit investieren möchte, der kann seine Site-Besucher mit einem CyberTwin vergraulen. Ich habe “MyCyberTwin” mal ausprobiert. Das Setup: eine Sache von zehn Minuten. Wer [...]