Personality capture and emulation

215 Pages·2014·3.02 MB·English

by  William Sims Bainbridge (auth.)

Human-Computer Interaction Series
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William Sims Bainbridge
Personality Capture and
Emulation
1 3
William Sims Bainbridge
Arlington, VA
USA
ISSN 1571-5035
ISBN 978-1-4471-5603-1 ISBN 978-1-4471-5604-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-5604-8
Springer London Heidelberg New York Dordrecht
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013951525
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Contents
1 Background ................................................................................................ 1
1.1 A Question of Immortality .................................................................. 2
1.2 D epth Psychology ............................................................................... 5
1.3 A Wider Depth Psychology ................................................................. 7
1.4 Q uestionnaire Research ....................................................................... 11
1.5 S ubcultures of Survival ....................................................................... 14
1.6 F ive Scenarios ..................................................................................... 18
1.7 C hapters. .............................................................................................. 22
References .................................................................................................... 23
2 Massive Questionnaires ............................................................................. 25
2.1 M achiavellianism ................................................................................ 26
2.2 E thnographic Questionnaires .............................................................. 33
2.3 T he Year 2100 ..................................................................................... 38
2.4 T he Semantic Differential ................................................................... 42
2.5 S ociability ........................................................................................... 47
2.6 C onclusion........................................................................................... 48
References .................................................................................................... 49
3 Mobile and Ubiquitous Capture ............................................................... 51
3.1 Psychology’s “Big Five” ..................................................................... 52
3.2 B ig Five Pilot Studies.......................................................................... 56
3.3 O nline Android Application ................................................................ 58
3.4 M obile Pilot Studies ............................................................................ 62
3.5 A Mobile Game Machine .................................................................... 66
3.6 Ubiquity of Meaning ........................................................................... 70
3.7 C onclusion........................................................................................... 73
References .................................................................................................... 73
4 Recommender Systems .............................................................................. 75
4.1 T he Universal Human Condition ........................................................ 76
4.2 C ultures and Subcultures ..................................................................... 81
4.3 I ntegrating Preference with Another Variable ..................................... 84
v
vi Contents
4.4 I ndividuals and Categories .................................................................. 87
4.5 A Culinary Pilot Study ........................................................................ 91
4.6 S ubcultures and Networks ................................................................... 94
4.7 E mulating Preferences ........................................................................ 96
4.8 C onclusion........................................................................................... 98
References .................................................................................................... 98
5 Cognitive Abilities .................................................................................... 101
5.1 C onsciousness ................................................................................... 102
5.2 N eural Nets ........................................................................................ 107
5.3 A Personalized Expert System .......................................................... 112
5.4 C hronic Intestinal Stasis .................................................................... 118
5.5 C onclusion......................................................................................... 123
References .................................................................................................. 123
6 Autobiographical Memories .................................................................... 127
6.1 V iews and Interviews ........................................................................ 129
6.2 C yrus the AΙ Boswell ........................................................................ 133
6.3 E pisodic Memories ............................................................................ 136
6.4 M igration Memories in Survey2000 ................................................. 139
6.5 S ophisticated Issues .......................................................................... 144
6.6 C itizen Social Science ....................................................................... 145
6.7 C onclusion......................................................................................... 148
References .................................................................................................. 148
7 Text Analysis ............................................................................................. 151
7.1 H istorical Linguistics ........................................................................ 153
7.2 G eneral Inquirer ................................................................................ 156
7.3 O ther Lexicon Approaches ................................................................ 160
7.4 A uthor Emulation .............................................................................. 164
7.5 T hus Spoke Nietzsche ....................................................................... 167
7.6 P roblematic Transcendence ............................................................... 170
7.7 C onclusion......................................................................................... 173
References .................................................................................................. 174
8 Virtual Worlds .......................................................................................... 177
8.1 An Electronic Obituary ..................................................................... 179
8.2 A vatar Statistics ................................................................................. 183
8.3 Virtual World Wikis ........................................................................... 189
8.4 S econd Life Gesture .......................................................................... 195
8.5 C onclusion......................................................................................... 202
References .................................................................................................. 202
Appendix ......................................................................................................... 205
Glossary .......................................................................................................... 207
Chapter 1
Background
As people make greater and greater use of computers at work and in their daily
lives, fragments of each person’s identity infiltrate the global information system
with potentially revolutionary consequences. Visionaries like Ray Kurzweil, Frank
Kempelmann, and Robin Hanson have suggested that some time during this cen-
tury people may become immortal by being computerized [1–4]. This may happen
through uploading to the net, emulated as avatars in a world that has become largely
virtual. Of course science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, and
John Brunner have long suggested this possibility, and it may be a false hope, given
how limited our ability to simulate human cognition is after more than half a cen-
tury of progress in artificial intelligence [5]. However, even very limited personality
capture and emulation could have profound implications.
Personality capture is the process of entering substantial information about a
person’s mental and emotional functioning into a computer or information system,
in principle sufficiently detailed to permit a somewhat realistic simulation. This
term draws an analogy with the widely used technique called motion capture, in
which the movements of a human being are entered into a computer, usually by
some kind of machine vision system, so they can be used to program realistic im-
ages of people in movies and videogames. If motion capture records the motions
of a person, personality capture records the emotions, attitudes, opinions, beliefs,
values, habits, perceptions and preferences of a person.
The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science once used personality cap-
ture in exactly the sense intended here, but the term has not yet become firmly root-
ed in the lexicons of either computer science or social science, and it’s not currently
used on the institute’s website [6]. Altiris, a software company, used the term to re-
fer to the process of migrating a person’s files and software preference settings from
one computer to another, and after Symantec acquired Altiris, this usage appeared
on many pages of the Symantec website [7]. The abstract of a computer science
journal article about modeling a person’s interpretations of images begins: “Person-
alizing web search engines, a crucial issue nowadays, would obviously benefit from
the system’s ability to capture such an important aspect of a user’s personality as
W. S. Bainbridge, Personality Capture and Emulation, Human-Computer Interaction Series, 1
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-5604-8_1, © Springer-Verlag London 2014
2 1 Background
visual impressions and their communication.” [8] Clearly, computer science is on
the verge of adopting the term personality capture, and I suggest that social science
consider doing so as well.
Some research connects personality capture to motion capture. For example, re-
searchers have developed computer vision systems that can scan a person’s facial
expressions into a software system that performs emotion extraction to duplicate
these expressions graphically in an electronic “clone.” [9, 10] Several kinds of
conventional software already perform limited forms of personality capture. For
example, a person who wants his or her word processor to handle speech to text
dictation must train the speech recognition software by reading long samples of text
aloud, thereby capturing the parameters of his or her own unique voice. Whenever
we set the preferences on complex software, we personalize it to some extent. Some
recommender systems construct computer models of the individual’s preferences,
in order to target advertising more effectively, but incidentally preserving and emu-
lating an aspect of the person.
Recognizing that human personality can express itself in many different modali-
ties, and people are a collection of fragments as much as they are a unity, this book
will explore many distinct technologies. It will show conclusively that some of
them really do achieve personality capture and emulation, in a limited but signifi-
cant manner. The full meaning of these technologies becomes apparent only when
we imagine integrating them, to capture and emulate an entire personality. That not
only presents huge scientific and engineering challenges, but also takes us some
distance into the realms of fantasy.
1.1 A Question of Immortality
In the year 2001, which astronomers consider the first year of the twenty-first centu-
ry and when the influential 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey wrongly imagined
that computers would be able to duplicate human intelligence, Communications of
the ACM published a special issue on the next thousand years of computing. The
first article, “Digital Immortality,” was written not by a science fiction author, nor
by a crazy pseudoscientist, but by two of the acknowledged leaders of the computer
science profession, Gordon Bell and Jim Gray. They begin by noting that immortal-
ity is a spectrum of kinds and degrees of preservation, emulation, and activation of
a human personality:
Digital immortality, like ordinary immortality, is a continuum from enduring fame at one
end to endless experience and learning at the other, stopping just short of endless life. Pre-
serving your ideas is one-way immortality—allowing communication with the future. End-
less experience and learning is two-way immortality—allowing you, or at least part of you,
to communicate with the future in the sense that the artifact continues to learn and evolve.
Current technology can extend corporal life for a few decades. Both one-way and two-way
immortality require part of a person to be converted to information (cyberized) and stored
1.1 A Question of Immortality 3
in a more durable media. We believe that two-way immortality, where one’s experiences
are digitally preserved and which then take on a life of their own, will be possible within
this century. [11]
Gordon Bell’s Wikipedia page summarizes his stunning but apparently conventional
career: “An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 1960–1966,
Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of En-
gineering 1972–1983, overseeing the development of the VAX. Bell’s later career
includes entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF’s Computing
and Information Science and Engineering Directorate 1986–1987, and researcher at
Microsoft Research, 1995-present.” [12]
Since co-authoring the article on cyberimmortality, Bell has worked on a project
at Microsoft called MyLifeBits: “Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of
articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations,
home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally.
He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, televi-
sion, and radio.” [13] At lunch one day I asked him if the goal of the project was to
develop tools that would help ordinary people capture their life’s experiences, and
he replied that Microsoft did not intend to produce software of this kind. On a dif-
ferent occasion, a colleague with extensive expertise in the area of digital preserva-
tion called MyLifeBits an example of “write-only memory”—a joke implying that
nobody would ever access all the data Bell was saving about his life. However, as
inspiration and a demonstration project, MyLifeBits is a significant contribution to
the development of cyberimmortality.
According to his own Wikipedia page, Jim Gray was “an American comput-
er scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 ‘for seminal contributions to
database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system
implementation.’” [14] The barriers to a technological response to human mortality
are reflected in the mystery of Gray’s disappearance in the Pacific Ocean early in
2007. He had sailed in his yacht to scatter his mother’s ashes, then vanished, and
extreme computer-assisted attempts to find his boat failed utterly.
A fundamental question in talking about immortality is what you actually con-
sider your own personal identity to be. Are you your body? Or are you your unique
attitudes, opinions and beliefs? Your memories? Your deeds, reputation, and legal
status as a citizen, or the social roles you play? Are you a unique locus of transcen-
dental consciousness, or an already immortal soul? Technological preservation can
be more successful with some of these than with others, and you will have to decide
which are most important to you personally.
From one perspective, even a perfect duplicate of you, capable of self-awareness
and of impersonating you in public, is not really you. William F. Temple’s 1951
novel, Four-Sided Triangle, concerns the duplication of a woman so that the two
men who love her will each have a copy, leading of course to tragic results [15]. If
the woman had put her copy into cryonic suspension, we would still be reluctant to
say she had found a way to preserve herself—her very own unique self.