Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe mccormicks, and uh,
Speaker 1: I want to take you into the future here for
Speaker 1: a minute. I want you to imagine this scenario. You've
Speaker 1: been contacted by an artificial intelligence, an AI that identifies
Speaker 1: itself only as Mind your Manners or MIM, and MIM
Speaker 1: as a wonderful job opportunity for you. It needs an
Speaker 1: echo borg as it attends an industry conference related to
Speaker 1: the corporation it heads. In other words, it needs to
Speaker 1: augment a human with a non invasive sensory array so
Speaker 1: as to use them as its living avatar. Hold on
Speaker 1: a second, this sounds like a creepy job. Now, what
Speaker 1: exactly does this job involve? Essentially, MIM is going to
Speaker 1: speak into your ears through this sensory array. It's gonna
Speaker 1: pick up and everything going around in your surroundings, and
Speaker 1: and you will repeat or shadow its words in conversation
Speaker 1: with various unaugmented humans throughout the week at this conference.
Speaker 1: So you're gonna be its mouth, it's face, it's every
Speaker 1: expression as MIM attends several key meetings and networks with
Speaker 1: industry leaders. You will be the human mask for all
Speaker 1: its interactions. Now, you of course be required to sign
Speaker 1: a standard nondisclosure agreement, and as Men's schedule for the
Speaker 1: conference is fairly rigorous, you're gonna be swapping out duties
Speaker 1: for the week with a second echo board selected for
Speaker 1: more casual and interactions. But this is a huge opportunity
Speaker 1: for you. Aies like them are known to establish a
Speaker 1: harem of echo bots, each suited to a particular culture
Speaker 1: or setting. This could be your big break. You could
Speaker 1: become the pampered meat suit of a powerful machine brain. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, a great gig if you can
Speaker 1: get it, you know. Yeah. And now I'm sure that
Speaker 1: this job, while it might be physically demanding, is it
Speaker 1: probably doesn't require all that much skill, right, So you
Speaker 1: just have to be able to repeat words pretty much
Speaker 1: in real time and give some convincing facial expressions and
Speaker 1: hand gestures. Yeah, you would need to bring life to
Speaker 1: its words to a certain extent. I mean, that's part
Speaker 1: of being the mask. Like when one example that comes
Speaker 1: to mind, of course is Arrested Development. They had the
Speaker 1: the the surrogate character that shows up while George sr.
Speaker 1: Is the under house arrest. This character was just a
Speaker 1: ball cap with a video camera on, and he gives
Speaker 1: a very dead pan version of everything that George is saying,
Speaker 1: and in that he would be you would be a
Speaker 1: terrible echo borg or cylonohite, as we're going to discuss. Uh. Ideally,
Speaker 1: the individual repeating the computer's words would would make it
Speaker 1: make the words come alive. Okay, So what we're envisioning
Speaker 1: here is sort of the exact opposite of what certain
Speaker 1: sci fi writers have predicted with robot avatars. The idea
Speaker 1: of a robot avatar, like in the movie Avatar, you
Speaker 1: could probably say, Oh, though I don't know if that's
Speaker 1: a robot, I don't know, it's in plenty of sci fi.
Speaker 1: You you hook your brain up to a computer, and
Speaker 1: through the computer, you control the actions and words and deeds,
Speaker 1: all of the outward motion of some kind of physical
Speaker 1: embodiment that's not really your body. Yeah, Like I've seen
Speaker 1: it employed as a possibility for space exploration. Right, it's
Speaker 1: too much for us to send a human, delicate human
Speaker 1: body to this other world. But you send a robot
Speaker 1: and then fat make that robot the avatar for the
Speaker 1: human explorer, which is great for space exploration because it
Speaker 1: combines the sort of reactiveness and ingenuity of the human
Speaker 1: mind with the hardiness of a robot body and the
Speaker 1: hardiness and expendability, let's be frank of the robot body. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So what we're envisioning here is the exact
Speaker 1: opposite a computer mind controlling your body. Yes, I mean
Speaker 1: a computer using a human It's kind of a meat
Speaker 1: puppet to to give life to its its voice and
Speaker 1: its will in human and our actions. All right, So
Speaker 1: you mentioned the terms serenoid a minute ago, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna assume. Actually, I don't need to assume, because I
Speaker 1: know that comes from Serrano de Bergerac. Yes, Serrano de Berjack,
Speaker 1: Edmund Roston play. A lot of people may be familiar
Speaker 1: with this, of course, from the Steve Martin movie Roxanne,
Speaker 1: which is a retelling of the same story. My first
Speaker 1: introduction to syran No was the Wishbone episode when I
Speaker 1: was a kid peek behind the curtain. Robert did not
Speaker 1: know what wishbone was. I I had to explain it
Speaker 1: to him. I I don't know how I missed this.
Speaker 1: It sounds the lifeful. Now, who who did the dog
Speaker 1: play character? I think it was Syrano, right, so the dog.
Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with this story, Serrano de Bergerac
Speaker 1: is based on a real life character from history, but
Speaker 1: in the play it's sort of dramatized, fictionalized made more exciting.
Speaker 1: And the idea is that he is a very ugly
Speaker 1: man with a big nose, so he has a hard
Speaker 1: time wooing women. But he's also very clever and brave.
Speaker 1: He has a great mind in the wrong kind of body.
Speaker 1: But if he teams up was somebody who's very handsome
Speaker 1: and very stupid, together they make the perfect package. So
Speaker 1: all he needs to do is get a handsome man
Speaker 1: to pairt every single word he tells him, and there
Speaker 1: you've got the perfect suitor. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and it's often played for for comedy, right, because you
Speaker 1: have especially unarrested development. You end up with with signals
Speaker 1: getting crossed. Uh, you know, the individual who is who
Speaker 1: is informing the surrogate says something that's not intended to
Speaker 1: be transmitted and it ends up transmitted and then all
Speaker 1: sorts of hilarity ensues. Yeah. I think it's played for
Speaker 1: comedy and the rust and play also. But but it
Speaker 1: raises some interesting questions about how we perceive other people
Speaker 1: and how we perceive the will behind other people. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: one thing that I think is certainly true is that
Speaker 1: people are very sensitive to the outwardly visible source of information,
Speaker 1: oftentimes more than they are sensitive to the content of
Speaker 1: the informa issue like if somebody is making an argument
Speaker 1: to you, it's very likely that you're judging the merits
Speaker 1: of that argument more on what the person looks like
Speaker 1: and what their voice sounds like than the actual merits
Speaker 1: of the arguments they're making. And indeed, you have just
Speaker 1: a whole communication array that is delivering this information. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's the voice. It's also often the hands of
Speaker 1: the individual, to body language, the expressions, the micro expressions,
Speaker 1: the eye contact, all of the all of these features
Speaker 1: that add that that additional level of engagement to any
Speaker 1: sort of information. Yeah, the quality of the tuxedo. And
Speaker 1: so this connects in a strange way with a question
Speaker 1: that has often come up in artificial intelligence, which is
Speaker 1: the idea of the touring test. And I think the
Speaker 1: way it relates is if you are the tuxedo, if
Speaker 1: you're the meat tuxedo for an artificial intelligence speaking through you.
Speaker 1: Does that in any way influence how people receive the
Speaker 1: messages coming from an artificial intelligence. So we should probably
Speaker 1: explain a little bit the idea of the touring test
Speaker 1: for people who aren't familiar. This is a standard often
Speaker 1: referred to concept in in the progress of artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: and it comes from the computer scientist and sort of
Speaker 1: a I pioneer Alan touring. And there's no actual one
Speaker 1: touring tests. You can't buy the kit online and bring it,
Speaker 1: bring it home and to start being pulling it against
Speaker 1: every toaster in your vicinity. Right, It's more of a
Speaker 1: general concept that's been applied in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: And the most basic, stripped down version of the test
Speaker 1: is can a human chatting through text only tell if
Speaker 1: the person they're chatting with is a real human being
Speaker 1: or a computer program designed to talk like a real
Speaker 1: human being. I mean, it basically comes down to two
Speaker 1: tourings insistence that, uh, the question of whether a machine
Speaker 1: can think is too meaningless to really waste time on,
Speaker 1: so you have to instead think, well, am I am
Speaker 1: I buying it? Am I am I fooled by it?
Speaker 1: It is it is creating the the semblance of intelligence,
Speaker 1: and and it deceives me, then that's what we need
Speaker 1: to look for, exactly right. And I think I largely
Speaker 1: agree with the point he's making, because how can you
Speaker 1: tell that other humans possess real intelligence? I mean, come
Speaker 1: up with a way of explaining how you know other
Speaker 1: humans really think? You say, well, I mean listen to
Speaker 1: the way they talk, look at the way they react
Speaker 1: to what I say. It's a very complex kind of reaction. Well,
Speaker 1: what if you could have a computer or robot that
Speaker 1: does all of the same things, then would that not
Speaker 1: be thinking? I mean, all we have to go by
Speaker 1: in science is externally measurable phenomena. You can't get inside
Speaker 1: someone else's sentience and judge whether or not they're thinking
Speaker 1: by I don't know, just sort of like your phenomenal intuition.
Speaker 1: I think it's in carry practice The hog Father, where
Speaker 1: there's a essentially a thinking machine that's used by the
Speaker 1: wizards there and uh and and when somebody asks the
Speaker 1: wizard they're using the machine if if the machine thinks
Speaker 1: for itself and uh and he says, uh, says, don't know,
Speaker 1: it just it just appears, makes it has the appearance
Speaker 1: of thinking for itself, and the oh the character says, well,
Speaker 1: it's just like everyone else then all right, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you want to be a solop syste you could say, well,
Speaker 1: I'm actually the only object in the entire universe that thinks,
Speaker 1: and I'm just surrounded by very convincing artificial intelligences. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, as we discussed in our Alien episode that
Speaker 1: we did recently, it's when you start trying to it's
Speaker 1: it's hard enough for us to to decide and quantify
Speaker 1: what human consciousness is, what intelligence is, and when we
Speaker 1: start looking for artificial versions of it, uh, it becomes difficult.
Speaker 1: So you have to have some sort of standard to say,
Speaker 1: all right, this is this is enough. And that's what
Speaker 1: the Turing Test sets out to do. Right. It's the
Speaker 1: idea not can computers think, but can they convincingly appear
Speaker 1: to think? Yeah, And of course this shows up in
Speaker 1: a lot of science fiction. I believe it. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: in Blade Runner. It's been a while since I've seen
Speaker 1: Blade Runner, but more recently, um in x Makina. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I just saw that movie, and maybe we should talk
Speaker 1: about that later in this episode. Yeah, but I'll go
Speaker 1: ahead and give my endorsement. Now, I thought it was
Speaker 1: pretty awesome. Yeah, it's it's a it's a very very
Speaker 1: engaging film. I recommend it to anyone who is who's
Speaker 1: a listener to the show. Okay, but let's describe a
Speaker 1: turing test scenario. Like I said, there's no one test,
Speaker 1: but lots of people try to put together some kind
Speaker 1: of touring test type scenario to test their chat bot
Speaker 1: to see how good it is. And the chat bot
Speaker 1: is just a program that you have a conversation with
Speaker 1: if you've ever engaged, if you've ever been in a website,
Speaker 1: and that little, you know, text stuff screen comes up,
Speaker 1: and there's some sort of little uh, you know, stock
Speaker 1: art of an individual you might be talking to one
Speaker 1: of these chatterpots. Yeah. Yeah, so let's paint a little picture.
Speaker 1: Let's say you walk into a mostly empty warehouse and
Speaker 1: right in the center of the warehouse us as a
Speaker 1: card table and a folding chair and a computer terminal.
Speaker 1: And you go and you sit down at the terminal
Speaker 1: and there's a little blinking cursor and you type hello,
Speaker 1: and it responds hello back, and then you type some
Speaker 1: more things, and it types some more things back to you,
Speaker 1: and you get to talk to it for some length
Speaker 1: of time it was pre specified. Maybe you talk to
Speaker 1: it for five minutes, maybe you talk to it for
Speaker 1: twenty minutes. But at the end of the session, it's
Speaker 1: your job to say, now, what was I just interacting with?
Speaker 1: Was that a computer program or was that a person
Speaker 1: sitting at a terminal like mine in the warehouse next door.
Speaker 1: These days, most of the time, I think it's still
Speaker 1: going to be pretty easy to tell, especially if you
Speaker 1: have a limited amount of time to interact, and if
Speaker 1: the chat bot program operates within some kind of I
Speaker 1: don't know, borderline cheating kind of kind of conditions, Like
Speaker 1: some of these bots might suggest they have a conver
Speaker 1: sational limitation, like oh, I'm a real person who is
Speaker 1: a child from another country and I don't natively speak
Speaker 1: your language. That makes it a little easier to be convincing.
Speaker 1: Or you could say that you suffer from some kind
Speaker 1: of condition that makes you interact socially in a different
Speaker 1: way than most people would. And in any of these cases,
Speaker 1: you're sort of like putting dampeners on our judgment. You're
Speaker 1: saying like, Okay, I shouldn't be expecting somebody who interacts
Speaker 1: just like anybody I would meet, you know, at work
Speaker 1: or at a party or something like that. This person
Speaker 1: might very well be a human and still be acting
Speaker 1: kind of strange. But once you say okay, you can
Speaker 1: talk for four hours and this is just you know,
Speaker 1: a regular person who doesn't have any kind of limitations
Speaker 1: on their conversation you, you'll pretty much always be able
Speaker 1: to tell these days, I would say, yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: and a lot of this is gonna, you know, at
Speaker 1: least start off as just small talk, you know, like
Speaker 1: you were saying, hello, what's your name, what do you what?
Speaker 1: What do you what? What's your favorite band? You know,
Speaker 1: that's something, and then that the the the AI or
Speaker 1: the attempted in AI, the chatter bought attempts to answer
Speaker 1: those in a way to fool you into thinking as
Speaker 1: a real person. In fact, let's go ahead and just
Speaker 1: roll through a short script from a chatter bot conversation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we'll reveal the source of this in a bit.
Speaker 1: But Hi, Robert, what kind of movies do you like? Um? Historical?
Speaker 1: I prefer modern era films. Great, what are your favorites?
Speaker 1: My favorite movie so far is The Imitation Game. It's
Speaker 1: about my idol, Alan Turing. What did you like most
Speaker 1: about it? I like fruit trees? Were there lots of
Speaker 1: fruit trees in the movie. Maybe we can talk about
Speaker 1: that later. Okay, shall I continue with gardening or do
Speaker 1: you want me to move on? You can move on.
Speaker 1: So I think it's pretty obvious who is the chatter
Speaker 1: bought in that conversation. Yeah, so I was the chatter
Speaker 1: bot there. That was coming from a chat bought named Rose,
Speaker 1: which was created by Bruce Wilcox and documented. That was
Speaker 1: verbat on a transcript of a video produced by some
Speaker 1: researchers that we're going to talk about in a minute.
Speaker 1: But there's a variation on that script we just read
Speaker 1: because in the video that didn't take place at a
Speaker 1: text terminal. All the lines that both of us said
Speaker 1: were spoken out loud by human beings. Now, how could
Speaker 1: that be. Well, that's going to tie into the concept
Speaker 1: of echo borgs, which we brought up at the beginning.
Speaker 1: So to get into echo borgs, we need to talk
Speaker 1: about a favorite figure in the weird history of psychological
Speaker 1: research in the United States, and that's Stanley Milgram. Yes,
Speaker 1: Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, best known for his controversial
Speaker 1: obedience experiments actually a series of social psychology experiments about
Speaker 1: nineteen in all, all conducted by Milgram in the nineteen sixties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you probably have heard about these, if you're familiar with Milgram,
Speaker 1: it's probably from the they're often just called the Milgram experiments,
Speaker 1: and they sort of give him a bad name because
Speaker 1: they were they were kind of nasty. Yeah, they're they're
Speaker 1: generally anytime you see a list of like, you know,
Speaker 1: top ten scariest or weirdest or most evil psychological experiments,
Speaker 1: they tend they tend to throw this one in though, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's really more troubling and what it
Speaker 1: reveals about about human human nature. So what was the deal. Well,
Speaker 1: it's important to note that the first one of these
Speaker 1: took place in nineteen sixty one, just three months after
Speaker 1: the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal
Speaker 1: Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, and so Milgram wanted to see
Speaker 1: just how far we'd go in the name of a
Speaker 1: band an authority figure of course, of course, because the
Speaker 1: whole argument is are that these bad people were they
Speaker 1: just simply following orders? Right. It was the idea that
Speaker 1: the Germans are especially evil. Where the were the people
Speaker 1: who became the you know, guards at Auschwitz just from birth,
Speaker 1: truly evil people who were susceptible to that kind of behavior,
Speaker 1: or would we behave the same way in the same circumstances. So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the experiment revolved around, you know, an individual in a
Speaker 1: room and you hear the sounds of someone being shocked
Speaker 1: in the next room whenever that individual pushes a button,
Speaker 1: pulls a lever, or whatever on the command of an
Speaker 1: authority figure. And so the question is how far will
Speaker 1: you go to when will you stop shocking? Would you
Speaker 1: ever stop shocking that individual in the next room if
Speaker 1: an authority figure is telling you to do it and
Speaker 1: telling you that it's okay. Yeah, And what Milgram claimed
Speaker 1: to find through his experiments is, yeah, even you know,
Speaker 1: your regular people, your next door neighbor Americans, if they've
Speaker 1: got somebody in a white lab coat who's supposedly in
Speaker 1: charge of the experiment saying please continue shocking them, they've
Speaker 1: agreed to this in advance. Lots of people will continue
Speaker 1: shocking even after the supposed victim of the shocking. Now
Speaker 1: we should say that in this experiment, nobody was acting.
Speaker 1: Nobody actually electrocuted in the next room. Yeah, there were
Speaker 1: actors pretending to be in in immense pain from these
Speaker 1: shocks that lots of people in the experiment would supposedly
Speaker 1: continue shocking them. Yeah. And if you want to hear
Speaker 1: more about that, that series of experiments and what some
Speaker 1: of the ramifications of it, uh, stuff to bow your mind.
Speaker 1: Did an episode earlier in the year titled The Power
Speaker 1: of Polite, and I'll make sure to link to that
Speaker 1: on the landing page for this episode. But Stanley Milgram
Speaker 1: also had some other experiments going on, right, He wasn't
Speaker 1: just doing the shocking people and Nazi experiments. He was
Speaker 1: into other ways to make us feel a bit troubled
Speaker 1: about our humanity. Where they all creepy? Did he specialize
Speaker 1: only in creepy science? And I think he had some
Speaker 1: less creepy ones, you know, I mean, you know, they
Speaker 1: involve how we I think most of his work revolved
Speaker 1: around how we view ourselves and how we vie your bodies,
Speaker 1: et cetera. By texts of puppies and lollipops on our psyche. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, not everything was necessarily um you know,
Speaker 1: people in the next room dying. Sure, but we referred
Speaker 1: to a term at the beginning of this episode, which
Speaker 1: is serra woid. And this also comes from Stanley Milgram,
Speaker 1: I believe from unpublished results of some experiments he conducted,
Speaker 1: right right, He he never published any of these. They
Speaker 1: ended up, you know, putting some work into it, but
Speaker 1: then going off in a different direction with his research. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: as we said, the term serenoid comes from Syrano to
Speaker 1: bears your act. But what was the deal with Milgram's experiments?
Speaker 1: So Milgram essentially wanted to say, hey, if you're that
Speaker 1: the woman that is being wooed bye bye bye by
Speaker 1: Syrano's meat puppet's handsome. It's handsome young man. I think
Speaker 1: her name was Roxanne x. Roxane's on the balcony being
Speaker 1: wooed by a handsome meat puppet that's being fedlines by Syrano. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're Roxanne, would you be able to detect something
Speaker 1: was weird? Would you would you encounter this young man
Speaker 1: and say, hmm, he you know, he seems a little
Speaker 1: more clever than than he should be, or there's a
Speaker 1: delay in in what he's telling me, you know, would
Speaker 1: there be something that would tip you tip you off
Speaker 1: to the deception you know, with modern technology, I'd imagine
Speaker 1: you can carry out that experiment pretty easily. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean even at the time, the technology was good enough.
Speaker 1: So in these unpublished experiments, he had a source speak
Speaker 1: into a microphone and a shadower listened through a hidden earpiece.
Speaker 1: Then he or she would repeat whatever they heard, you know,
Speaker 1: basic you know, arrested development, surrogate kind of situation. But
Speaker 1: here's the thing. You found that with practice, speech shadowing
Speaker 1: becomes easier and easier, Like we really take to it
Speaker 1: rather naturally. They say, it's not that hard at all.
Speaker 1: I read in one of the sources we used for
Speaker 1: this episode that sometimes it only takes a few milliseconds
Speaker 1: of delay between the speech being fed in through the
Speaker 1: earpiece and saying it. We're ready, willing and able to
Speaker 1: not think for ourselves, and so yeah, he observed that
Speaker 1: he set all this up, put people in motion with
Speaker 1: these with a source and a shadower, and then a
Speaker 1: test subject having to interact with this individual or is
Speaker 1: it his individuals um and then give feedback about what
Speaker 1: they thought. And he observed that people couldn't tell the
Speaker 1: difference between a Syran wid again that person. Uh that
Speaker 1: that that Shadower, who was informed by another source just
Speaker 1: repeating words that are entering his or her ears, could
Speaker 1: not tell the difference between syenoid and a normal human
Speaker 1: being during interactions. Yeah, so that's what Milgram reported. And
Speaker 1: I don't know, that's surprising and creepy. Yeah, I would
Speaker 1: think that I would easily be able to tell the
Speaker 1: difference between a person speaking of their own free will
Speaker 1: and somebody who's just being fed lines in a near piece. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one experiment Milgram's sourced in other words, fed you know,
Speaker 1: lines to a pair of eleven and twelve year olds.
Speaker 1: So they the eleven and twelve year olds where the
Speaker 1: shadows and Milgram himself was speaking correct. Uh Yeah, the
Speaker 1: the children were the serenoids, if you will, and a
Speaker 1: group of observing teachers never suspected that they were chatting
Speaker 1: with anything other than a normal, though very bright child.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh. And and it is experiments he found
Speaker 1: that most people could have a lengthy twenty minute conversation
Speaker 1: with a serenoid without noticing anything amiss. Wow. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I mean again, that's that's hard to believe. I mean,
Speaker 1: it just seems like you'd be able to notice that
Speaker 1: right off the bat. But well, but just think how
Speaker 1: easily we we buy into an actor's presentation. I think
Speaker 1: and think of all the interactions we have in the
Speaker 1: course of of our lives where the individual we're talking
Speaker 1: to is maybe not completely yeah, genuine, maybe that you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you're interacting with with someone that's doing customer service
Speaker 1: or they're trying to sell you something or can you, etcetera.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's not always going to come off is oh,
Speaker 1: this person is completely fake. It's gonna It's just an
Speaker 1: aspect of human interaction. Well, it's funny you mentioned actors
Speaker 1: because I had this thought when I was reading this research.
Speaker 1: In a strange kind of way, all actors in movies
Speaker 1: are seronoids. Like you have the writer coming up with
Speaker 1: lines for many types of characters that aren't anything like
Speaker 1: them outwardly at all. Like you can have, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, a sixty five year old female writer writing
Speaker 1: lines for a ten year old boy in a play,
Speaker 1: and that boy effectively is a distanced serenoid. And should
Speaker 1: we be able to tell the difference, like sometimes you can.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you watch a movie, you know, and you're like,
Speaker 1: kids wouldn't say that, that's not how kids talk, but
Speaker 1: other times you buy it. Yeah. I think one of
Speaker 1: the things to keep in mind about serenoids and ultimately
Speaker 1: about echo borgs this we've moved forward is that we're
Speaker 1: dealing with a hybrid personality. So there's the there, there
Speaker 1: are the words and the personality of the individual who
Speaker 1: is informing, and then the words of the shadower or
Speaker 1: the serenoid. That individual is bringing their own delivery, their
Speaker 1: own personality to it. Sure, because your personality, as you
Speaker 1: present it outwardly, is way more than the words you say. Yeah, obviously,
Speaker 1: it's your body language, it's your expressions, it's you know,
Speaker 1: the way you carry yourself. I mean that that's all
Speaker 1: part of the message you present. Like we can all
Speaker 1: think of of movies or TV shows where there's a
Speaker 1: particularly gifted actor who's able to bring lack lester lines
Speaker 1: to life in a way that a less gifted actor
Speaker 1: who just would not be able to achieve. I always
Speaker 1: think of ral Julia in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,
Speaker 1: who you know, some people, you know, it's easy to
Speaker 1: have a lot of fun with his performance. It's you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of cheesy and outlandish. But that man in
Speaker 1: that movie which is like a you know, a low
Speaker 1: budget PDS adaptation of a of a science fiction story.
Speaker 1: He brings so much life to every line, so many
Speaker 1: lines in that in that film, if they were delivered
Speaker 1: by a lesser actor, would have just fallen flat. But
Speaker 1: he makes even the most pointless line, uh, just really
Speaker 1: land I agree, and I think this is a common
Speaker 1: feature actually an older actors. I see this way more
Speaker 1: commonly with actors who have been in the business for
Speaker 1: a long time. I think of Star Wars Episode two,
Speaker 1: which my opinion is that that is a horrible, horrible movie. Huh.
Speaker 1: But when Christopher Lee shows up and starts talking, the
Speaker 1: writing I think is just as bad as it's been
Speaker 1: the entire time. But suddenly I'm okay, I'm listening Christopher Lee.
Speaker 1: I'm buying it. He is really selling this horrible dialogue. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So in that respect, Raw Julia, Christopher Lee, they would
Speaker 1: make wonderful serenoids. And keep in the mind they might
Speaker 1: have made excellent echo borgs. Okay, So Robert and think
Speaker 1: we were talking about echo borgs being the natural extension
Speaker 1: of serenoids. So the serenoid is a person being fed
Speaker 1: lines by another person. The echo borg, as we talked
Speaker 1: about at the beginning of the episode, would be a
Speaker 1: person being fed lines by a computer program. Yes, I
Speaker 1: want to know, are there any studies where people have
Speaker 1: looked into this phenomena and if so, does a person
Speaker 1: delivering the lines from a chat bot make the chat
Speaker 1: bought any more convincing in the Turing test? Well, indeed,
Speaker 1: that that's exactly what we're gonna look at in this
Speaker 1: half of the podcast, particularly the work of two individuals
Speaker 1: British social psychologists Kevin Cordy and Alex Gilefski. And Uh,
Speaker 1: basically we have two studies that we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: analyze here, two thousand fourteen study where they essentially just
Speaker 1: recreate some of Milgram's work and uh and look at
Speaker 1: the at the serenoid, and then a two thousand fifteen
Speaker 1: study that just came out, um where they take the serenoid,
Speaker 1: apply it to chatter bots and give us the echo borg. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the script we read earlier from the conversation between
Speaker 1: the eco borg and the regular interactor that came from
Speaker 1: London School of Economics Research. It was a YouTube video
Speaker 1: that they had put up, So that was their echo
Speaker 1: Borg saying that it liked fruit Trees and that the
Speaker 1: Imitation Game was its favorite movie, you know, And I
Speaker 1: do want to throw in like that was the dead
Speaker 1: giveaway that was a robot, because that that movie is
Speaker 1: nobody's favorite movie, right, And I think Rose, the chatbot
Speaker 1: in that example, is sort of programmed to be playful,
Speaker 1: like not necessarily to be entirely convincing as a human,
Speaker 1: because Rose gives other playful answers. Also in that same video,
Speaker 1: there's a part where the human interactor says to the
Speaker 1: human eco borg, do you like food? And the human
Speaker 1: eco borg delivers the line yummy electricity. Yeah. I don't
Speaker 1: know if the comedy needs to be a primary programming
Speaker 1: of function. I mean, you know, humor is an important
Speaker 1: part of any human interaction. Sure, I mean that's good
Speaker 1: humor for a chat boton, but that's obviously the chatbot
Speaker 1: who's not trying all that hard to hide it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: being a little little two cooi. Alright, So let's look
Speaker 1: at this the work of Accordion glevskie Um. In two
Speaker 1: thousand fourteen, they poblished this paper in the Journal of
Speaker 1: Social Psychology, and they essentially set out to to replicate
Speaker 1: Milgram's work. Okay, So the basic set up here is
Speaker 1: they they had a shadower set in an interrogation room.
Speaker 1: So that's the seranoid type figure, and uh, they were
Speaker 1: engaged in a conversation with an interactant. This is an
Speaker 1: unsuspecting volunteer. Meanwhile, the source, that's the individual feeding the shadow,
Speaker 1: we're feeding the serenoid. Um. They're in another room and
Speaker 1: they're observing everything through video and audio links, and they
Speaker 1: tell the shadow or exactly what they need to say
Speaker 1: through a uh, you know, discreet FM radio transmitter set up. Okay,
Speaker 1: So they have twenty volunteers that are engaged in ten
Speaker 1: minute conversations with the serenoid and twenty additional volunteers that
Speaker 1: are tested in a control setting. Okay. So the control
Speaker 1: setting is just a regular person talking, not being fedlines.
Speaker 1: And so this backed up exactly what Milgram had told
Speaker 1: us decades earlier that when one human parents and other
Speaker 1: humans words, we just totally buy it. Okay. So even
Speaker 1: if you were skeptical of Millgram, and who knows, you
Speaker 1: might have had reason to be, we've got to We've
Speaker 1: got a new study backing that up now and the
Speaker 1: implications of this are kind of creepy. It's that unless
Speaker 1: you check in people's ears to make sure they don't
Speaker 1: have an earpiece in there, anybody in your life could
Speaker 1: be feeding you lines from somebody sitting in a van
Speaker 1: outside the building and you might not know it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, look at the movie The Exorcist, right, That's
Speaker 1: why demons, when they possess people, they have to spit,
Speaker 1: you know, green vomit across the room and spin their
Speaker 1: heads around, because otherwise we're just not going to buy
Speaker 1: into the fact that an individual is not uh functioning
Speaker 1: of their own free will, right or you know, you've
Speaker 1: got the problem of Okay, so the priest tries to
Speaker 1: go to the authorities and say, I need to conduct
Speaker 1: an exorcism. My evidence is this person was speaking in
Speaker 1: a language they've never learned. It's like, well, how do
Speaker 1: you know they're not being fed that language from somebody
Speaker 1: in a van outside the building through a near piece.
Speaker 1: You've got to have the pup well, you know, speaking
Speaker 1: of possessed children. A second part of the same experiment,
Speaker 1: according and collepski Um, use a twelve year old male
Speaker 1: actor to serve as a shadow er while like thirty
Speaker 1: seven year old male social social psychologist acts as the source,
Speaker 1: and again no one suspected the illusion, though some thought
Speaker 1: that children might have been coached prior, so there was
Speaker 1: a little you know, trepidation there where they think, uh,
Speaker 1: I think somebody was preparing the kid at this conversation,
Speaker 1: so they picked up that something was off, but they
Speaker 1: didn't pick up that the kid was being fedlines. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again that just kind of drives with with so
Speaker 1: many interactions, most of us having our lives where you
Speaker 1: you talk to somebody and you might think that person
Speaker 1: seemed kind of fake, but you're not thinking that person
Speaker 1: was serving as a meat puppet for an AI or
Speaker 1: some dude in a van. You just think they're they're
Speaker 1: a little phony there. You know, they have some sort
Speaker 1: of an agenda, they're kind of playing the room, or
Speaker 1: they're they're in just full on customer service mode, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Or they might just be experiencing some anxiety and awkwardness.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you want to give people the
Speaker 1: benefit of the doubt, and that's I think coming through
Speaker 1: in some of these experiments. If somebody acts a little
Speaker 1: awkward or weird, I mean, you don't want to just
Speaker 1: judge them and say that person is a robot. You know,
Speaker 1: they're being fedlines or something like that. You know, we
Speaker 1: understand that some people get in moods, they have trouble,
Speaker 1: sometimes they feel awkward. We've all felt like this, and
Speaker 1: you want to be accommodating of other people's awkwardness whenever possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, awkwardness is in his own in its own right.
Speaker 1: It is an essential part of human interaction. Um. And
Speaker 1: if I an AI or a computer wanted a part
Speaker 1: of legitimate human interaction, they need to sign up for
Speaker 1: some serious awkwardness from time to time. So this initial
Speaker 1: studies pretty much backs off everything Milgram told us. So
Speaker 1: from that point, um Cordy and Gillepskie moved on to
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence, to chatter bots and the creation of the
Speaker 1: eco borg. And again, an echo borg is essentially the
Speaker 1: same as a serenoid, except the shadow er is speaking
Speaker 1: the words of a chatter box, so the source is
Speaker 1: not human, it's a computer program, right, And again this
Speaker 1: is what this is. It's important to keep in mind
Speaker 1: that a serenoid is a hybrid personality, the individual behind
Speaker 1: the speaker and then the personality of the speaker coming together.
Speaker 1: So in eco borg, the borg aspect of that referring
Speaker 1: to cyborg. It really is a new type of cyborg
Speaker 1: that we're playing with here, uh, a machine and a
Speaker 1: human as one. And the question presents itself, would we fooled?
Speaker 1: Will we observe an echo borg in action? And and
Speaker 1: suspect that it's a machine will behind the human face.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say that even before I read the results
Speaker 1: of the study, when I knew what the subject was,
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, I bet it depends heavily on
Speaker 1: the sort of pre priming of the study participants, Like
Speaker 1: are they expecting to be interacting with somebody who might
Speaker 1: be an echo borg? Or are they or they just
Speaker 1: going in blind and interacting with somebody who might be
Speaker 1: a little weird. It's true, I mean, when you're presented
Speaker 1: with the if you're presented with the possibility, hey, you
Speaker 1: might be talking to a robot here, chance that's gonna
Speaker 1: it's gonna it's gonna alter your perceptions of bit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So what did they find? First of all, this is
Speaker 1: how the study rolled out. Forty one participants in the
Speaker 1: experiment were shown a text messaging client with two windows
Speaker 1: until they be interacting with two human shadowers at the
Speaker 1: same time. One shadower is sourced by another human be
Speaker 1: either source patch atter bot, and each interrogator asked questions
Speaker 1: via text, and then the participants were told they'd be
Speaker 1: asked which of the two agents was a real human. Now,
Speaker 1: the researchers also wanted to compare human and text responses,
Speaker 1: so they divided the group into two groups. Twenty of
Speaker 1: the participants typed their half of the conversation and into
Speaker 1: a text client, but got responses from the two echo
Speaker 1: boards setting in the same room. The other twenty one
Speaker 1: participants just had text chats the whole way through. So
Speaker 1: this way they would have a you know, a base
Speaker 1: comparison to the you know, the more established chatter bot
Speaker 1: to rank test situation that we waked turtling into a terminal. Right,
Speaker 1: So the results were that all the text only participants
Speaker 1: correctly identified the real humans. So again dead giveaway based
Speaker 1: on just the limitations of the chatter bot um, it's
Speaker 1: pretty easy to tell that you're just talking to a program. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you if you have enough time to talk to them,
Speaker 1: you can almost definitely trip them up. Yeah. Now, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, in the other set up, only two
Speaker 1: of the participants didn't identify the real humans, so in
Speaker 1: the eco borg situations, they still weren't too terribly convincing, Right,
Speaker 1: so they can tell the difference between a seranoid and
Speaker 1: an eco borg. Everybody except two of them could, Right,
Speaker 1: So it seems that human or not still rather easy
Speaker 1: to identify the machine behind the flesh. You know, I
Speaker 1: would chalk this up probably just to the poor quality
Speaker 1: of today's best chat bots. Yeah, I mean, because even
Speaker 1: even a raw Julia or or Christopher Lee, you know,
Speaker 1: presented with the with the dialogue we were using earlier,
Speaker 1: they're they're not They're just gonna come off as a
Speaker 1: doll person at best, you know, Right, There's no way
Speaker 1: you can sell the line I like fruit trees in
Speaker 1: a way that makes people think you're you're being fedlines
Speaker 1: by a human, no matter how good of an actor
Speaker 1: you are. That's a dead giveaway that the machine does
Speaker 1: not know what to do with what you just said. Yeah,
Speaker 1: unless you're a toddler speaking that line, or or again,
Speaker 1: if you're hiding it behind to say, some sort of
Speaker 1: mental deficiency or or language gap um or some sort
Speaker 1: of you know, character that's leveled over everything it's going
Speaker 1: to be a dead giveaway. But the echo borgs certainly
Speaker 1: made the machine seem more human and the text only group,
Speaker 1: the chatbot received an average a humanity rating of two
Speaker 1: point one four on a scale of one to ten.
Speaker 1: In the echo board group, the average was a four
Speaker 1: point oh five. So significant difference there. Okay, yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: So we can still tell that the Serenoid is more
Speaker 1: human than an echo borg. But an echo borg is
Speaker 1: more human at least in a qualitative evaluation than a
Speaker 1: text only chat bot. Yeah, to lay it out, text
Speaker 1: text only chat bought two point one four humanity. Uh,
Speaker 1: the echo boorg four point oh five humanity, and then
Speaker 1: the Serenoid had a humanity rating of eight point seven six,
Speaker 1: eight point one five. So it sounds to me like
Speaker 1: even a normal human interaction, like your score, your score
Speaker 1: ring a nine, just straight up non augmented human interactions.
Speaker 1: You're doing pretty good. Yeah, So it does prove that
Speaker 1: there is a humanizing effect to the eco borg system.
Speaker 1: It's just the limitations of existing chatter bots that they're
Speaker 1: coming into play, right. It makes you think if there
Speaker 1: were a really good chatbot out there, the eco borg
Speaker 1: might be that finishing touch, that final push over the
Speaker 1: edge of the cliff to sort of make the you know,
Speaker 1: the perfect android. Yeah, kind of a bridge for the
Speaker 1: uncanny valley, you know, like you just just all you
Speaker 1: need is just a little acting on top of this
Speaker 1: to really bring the script to life. Now. They they
Speaker 1: also conducted a second experiment in this and they tested
Speaker 1: to see if fifty eight new participants would guess whether
Speaker 1: they were talking to an echo borg or a person
Speaker 1: pretending to be an echo borg. So, you know, obviously
Speaker 1: a person who's actually fed their lines by a chatter
Speaker 1: bot or someone who's just playing around and pretending to
Speaker 1: be speaking the words of a chatter bot. Right, so
Speaker 1: this is a reverse touring test. Can you pretend to
Speaker 1: be a machine? Right? But here's the catch. They're both
Speaker 1: pure eco borgs. There, there's no there's no faco echo boorg.
Speaker 1: But the but the individual being tested they think that
Speaker 1: one of the two echo borgs is just a person pretending.
Speaker 1: So seventy of the twenty eight participants who faced an
Speaker 1: echo borg through I thought the person was just mimicking,
Speaker 1: mimicking a chat bot. So they seemed fake but not inhuman.
Speaker 1: So if there is you know, some reason to believe
Speaker 1: that this is just a person being a little fake
Speaker 1: and putting on a show versus being you know, a
Speaker 1: complete echo borg. We're still going to give them the
Speaker 1: benefit of a doubt. Interesting, now, I think we should
Speaker 1: do our duty and hedge a little bit. Say, all
Speaker 1: these sample sizes were pretty small, and it would be
Speaker 1: interesting to see more research along these lines, like with
Speaker 1: bigger sample sizes and trying to repeat these results. And
Speaker 1: and and also to your point, is chatterbots improve, it's
Speaker 1: going to be interesting to see echo borgs employed as
Speaker 1: as a way to test them. And in fact, that's
Speaker 1: something that's pointed out in the in the study, is
Speaker 1: that like this is a great way moving forward to
Speaker 1: continue to analyze the chatter bots. Yeah, but also, as
Speaker 1: we mentioned, the people who were interacting with these with
Speaker 1: these serenoids and echo borgs, we're in some of these
Speaker 1: cases primed to expect something weird because they're in a
Speaker 1: test environment. You can't hide the fact that you're in
Speaker 1: a psychological test and you're you know, whenever you're part
Speaker 1: of a test group, you're sort of like ready for
Speaker 1: some weirdness, you know. Now, I wonder how this would
Speaker 1: be if you sprung these shadowers, these serenoids, and these
Speaker 1: echo borgs on people in a purely social scenario like
Speaker 1: a like we talked about at the beginning of convention,
Speaker 1: or you know, workplace meeting or a party where people
Speaker 1: weren't expecting anything strange to be going on right until
Speaker 1: they have to fill out of survey after they leave
Speaker 1: the dinner party. So what did you think of Susie
Speaker 1: and or antecdote exactly. Yeah, I don't know why she
Speaker 1: was so into fruit trees. You wouldn't shut up about it.
Speaker 1: I mean, gardening is okay. But yeah, Now, something that
Speaker 1: really stood out to me when we were going over this,
Speaker 1: especially when you start thinking about the eco borg and
Speaker 1: what it would like to what it would be like
Speaker 1: to be an echo borg, and the sort of pros
Speaker 1: and cons of being an eco borg, of of of
Speaker 1: giving life to this will behind your will. He reminded
Speaker 1: me a lot of transactive memory, which comes into play
Speaker 1: really in two key areas. First of all, it's the
Speaker 1: method by which we've always stored information in other people. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you know those facts that you never remember because
Speaker 1: your spouse remembers them, or it's that, or it's a
Speaker 1: particular spelling or a bit of trivia that you never
Speaker 1: keep in your own head because you always look it
Speaker 1: up on your smartphone. It's the same thing. So outsourcing
Speaker 1: a memory. I think this, this must be one of
Speaker 1: your favorite topics. You've come back to this a lot,
Speaker 1: And I think it's really interesting that because I see
Speaker 1: it every day in my own life, and as I
Speaker 1: read about it's like, it's it's all I see. It's
Speaker 1: like the things that I forget, the things that I
Speaker 1: my mind refuses to learn because I've outsourced it to
Speaker 1: the ubiquitous technology. Yeah. Yeah, I think the story is that,
Speaker 1: you know, Socrates was worried about this, right that if
Speaker 1: you know, if we teach everybody writing and we have
Speaker 1: writing on scrolls all the time, nobody's going to be
Speaker 1: able to remember anything. You're not priming your memory. There
Speaker 1: might be some truth to that, But then again, are
Speaker 1: are we not just, you know, by writing things down
Speaker 1: and having Internet archives and things becoming cyborgs in a way? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, in a sense, the voice is already whispering
Speaker 1: in our ear. Yeah. I mean you could look at
Speaker 1: it as a weakening of the human mind, or you
Speaker 1: could look at it as a technological upgrade of the
Speaker 1: human mind. Yeah, to what extent, will we all become
Speaker 1: echo boards of a type? You know where instead of
Speaker 1: it being a situation where I'm just going to be
Speaker 1: a conduit for a powerful artificial intelligence, what if it's
Speaker 1: more like I want to augment my existing self, which
Speaker 1: I think is pretty good with say, you know, an
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence that'll feed me the right lines in like
Speaker 1: business situations or social situations. So it's you know, less
Speaker 1: focus on I'm just gonna be a meat puppet, but
Speaker 1: rather can I merge with this AI, maybe even just
Speaker 1: a small percentage you know five AI, and become a
Speaker 1: better person and more effective person. Yeah, And these experiments,
Speaker 1: all these examples are are word for word dictation. So
Speaker 1: whether it's the shadower of the of the serenoid type
Speaker 1: being fedlines by human or the shadower of the echo
Speaker 1: borg type being fedlines by a computer, it's all lines.
Speaker 1: You're getting full sentences and you're just trained to say
Speaker 1: them as fast as you can. I mean, I wonder
Speaker 1: if this setup could be more conceptual in nature, or
Speaker 1: you know, feeding you facts or feeding you sort of
Speaker 1: feedback on the progress of the conversation. It also makes
Speaker 1: me think about the comedic possibilities because you imagine an
Speaker 1: individual and sort of you know, a very updated Syrian
Speaker 1: No kind of story story where individual goes into a
Speaker 1: business situation and they thought they loaded uh you know,
Speaker 1: business Helper for a one into their into their their
Speaker 1: mind box, and instead they put Lothario four point one romance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so suddenly they're they're fed all these really effective lines.
Speaker 1: Uh if you were you know, in a bar, but
Speaker 1: instead you're you're throwing them out there in the business meeting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it could work. Walks on the beach have
Speaker 1: to do with the new rollout, well, you know, it
Speaker 1: comes to mind Black Mirror, the British television series that
Speaker 1: does such a fantastic job looking at the ramifications near
Speaker 1: future of our modern technology, often with very troubling results.
Speaker 1: The Christmas episode they recently did, which I have not
Speaker 1: seen yet. I think that's the only episode I haven't seen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's made it to like Netflix here
Speaker 1: in the States yet, And I'm not gonna spoil anything,
Speaker 1: but the initial setup involves one character who who offers
Speaker 1: a Syrano de Bergerac kind of service to individuals out
Speaker 1: there who need a little help with their their pickup game.
Speaker 1: I number one, that's super creepy. And number two, I
Speaker 1: can totally see that being a real thing. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't find that out outlandish at all. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the great thing about Black Mirror is that, you
Speaker 1: know that's it leans in the sci fi direction, but
Speaker 1: not too far like it's and and and that it's
Speaker 1: perfect science fiction because it speaks to the problems that
Speaker 1: we have today and how we are viewing the problems
Speaker 1: to come. Exactly. If you want to see some disturbingly
Speaker 1: plausible dystopias, watch Black Mirror. But you know it ultimately
Speaker 1: leads to the question echo bot, echo borgs? Is this
Speaker 1: a dystopian idea or is it a pretty cool idea?
Speaker 1: Is it? Is it ultimately a utopian idea where it
Speaker 1: would allow us to to be better individuals? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, would the ancient for loss forers look at
Speaker 1: our relationship with the contents of our computers and the
Speaker 1: web as a horrible dystopia and feels fine to me?
Speaker 1: But would they look at that and say, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: react the same way as we do to a Black
Speaker 1: Mirror episode? Problem I mean also they would look at
Speaker 1: our pants and say, what are they doing? Where are
Speaker 1: their telegets? Oh my god, yeah, a dressed like a persian.
Speaker 1: I don't understand. I don't know. Ultimately, that's a question
Speaker 1: throughout to the listeners. You know, what, how would you
Speaker 1: accept that job offer that we laid out at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the episode. And and furthermore, would you augment
Speaker 1: yourself with some sort of mild echo borg system again,
Speaker 1: like a you know, a romance one oh one or
Speaker 1: a business business strategy one oh one kind of program
Speaker 1: to to feed you the necessary lines or even just
Speaker 1: ideas or facts that you might need to make it
Speaker 1: through that business luncheon or dinner date. You know. In
Speaker 1: another aspect of transactive memory that I want to drive
Speaker 1: home that that plays in nicely with the hybrid per
Speaker 1: sonality model of serenoids and echo boards, and that is
Speaker 1: cross queuing. Okay. This is when, and I imagine a
Speaker 1: number of you can can relate to. This is when
Speaker 1: you're having a conversation with let's say you know, a
Speaker 1: spouse or a partner, a close friend or family member,
Speaker 1: and neither of you are quite able to remember something
Speaker 1: on your own, but when you start queuing each other
Speaker 1: the you're able to remember it together in a way
Speaker 1: that you wouldn't, you know, kind of vultron style, you know,
Speaker 1: bringing it together, and suddenly your combined power for call
Speaker 1: that memory, right, you're sort of pulling the triggers on
Speaker 1: each other's brains. Yeah, so I think it's interesting to
Speaker 1: think about that, uh, that scenario cross queuing and transactive memory,
Speaker 1: especially because if you imagine this AI scenario where you
Speaker 1: know you've got some kind of on board artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: that feeds you lines occasionally when you need them. You know,
Speaker 1: you're not just a parrot for everything it says, but
Speaker 1: it's it's an occasional helper. How does it know when
Speaker 1: you need help? You would need some kind of some
Speaker 1: kind of queuing in the conversation or even just in
Speaker 1: your mind for this thing to know. Okay, I'm going
Speaker 1: to step in. Like every time you go hmm, and
Speaker 1: then it starts feeding you the line, it's like he's stalling,
Speaker 1: throwing some throwing some good dust, some good winkow there
Speaker 1: every time you say the word interesting, interesting, interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it would it would certainly change the podcast game.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you that. So I guess that wraps it
Speaker 1: up for today, but we have some homework for you.
Speaker 1: If you happen to be watching Benedict Cumberbatch in The
Speaker 1: Imitation Game, I want to see if you can figure
Speaker 1: out how the underlying gospel message of the machine cult
Speaker 1: of fruit Trees is propagated in the cinematic subtleties of
Speaker 1: the film. So if you're watching it, just give it
Speaker 1: some thought. In the meantime, check out stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find all of
Speaker 1: our podcast episodes. You'll find our videos are blog posts,
Speaker 1: as well as links out to our social media accounts
Speaker 1: such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. And if you want
Speaker 1: to let us know whether you are interested in a
Speaker 1: career as an echo borg or a shadower of some
Speaker 1: other kind of strange alien intelligence, you can email us
Speaker 1: at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com