Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from dot Com. Hey,
Speaker 1: wasn't the Stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're running a
Speaker 1: rerun here today. We haven't run a repeat episode in
Speaker 1: quite a while, but this is one that came out,
Speaker 1: I think in August of last year. We really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a very engaging, perfect perfectly suitable stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind topic, and it mentions fruit trees,
Speaker 1: which is basically the thing I like more than anything else,
Speaker 1: fruit trees. Yeah. Well, as long as we get a
Speaker 1: fruit tree and there, we're good. So here we go.
Speaker 1: Let's enter the world of the echo borg. I want
Speaker 1: to take you into the future here for a minute.
Speaker 1: I want you to imagine this scenario. You've been contacted
Speaker 1: by an artificial intelligence an AI that identifies itself only
Speaker 1: as mind your Manners or mim and them as a
Speaker 1: wonderful job opportunity for you. It needs an echo borg
Speaker 1: as it attends an industry conference related to the corporation
Speaker 1: it head. In other words, it needs to augment a
Speaker 1: human with a non invasive sensory array so as to
Speaker 1: use them as its living avatar. Hold on the second,
Speaker 1: This sounds like a creepy job. Now, what exactly does
Speaker 1: this job involve? Essentially, NIM is going to speak into
Speaker 1: your ears through this sensory array. It's gonna pick up
Speaker 1: and everything going around in your surroundings, and you will
Speaker 1: repeat or shadow its words and conversation with various unaugmented
Speaker 1: humans throughout the week at this conference. So you're gonna
Speaker 1: be its mouth, it's face, it's every expression. As NIM
Speaker 1: attends several key meetings and networks with industry leaders, you
Speaker 1: will be the human mask for all its interactions. Now,
Speaker 1: you of course be required to sign a standard nondisclosure agreement,
Speaker 1: and as mims schedule for the conference is fairly rigorous,
Speaker 1: you're gonna be swapping out duties for the week with
Speaker 1: a second echo board selected for more casual and interactions.
Speaker 1: But this is a huge opportunity for you. Aies like
Speaker 1: them are known to establish a harem of echo bots,
Speaker 1: each suited to a particular culture or setting. This could
Speaker 1: be your big break. You could become the pampered meat
Speaker 1: suit of a powerful machine brain. Yes, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: a great gig if you can get it, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And now I'm sure that this job, while it might
Speaker 1: be physically demanding, is it probably doesn't require all that
Speaker 1: much skill, right, So you just have to be able
Speaker 1: to repeat words pretty much in real time and give
Speaker 1: some convincing facial expressions and hand gestures. Yeah, you would
Speaker 1: need to bring life to its words to a certain extent.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's part of being the mask. Like when
Speaker 1: one example that comes to mind, of course, is the
Speaker 1: Arrested development they had the the the surrogate character that
Speaker 1: shows up while George sr. Is under house arrests. This
Speaker 1: character was just a ball cap the video camera on,
Speaker 1: and he gives a very dead pan version of everything
Speaker 1: that George is saying. And in that he would be
Speaker 1: you would be a terrible echo borg or thronoite. As
Speaker 1: we're going to discuss. Uh. Ideally, the individual repeating the
Speaker 1: computer's words would would make it make the words come alive. Okay,
Speaker 1: So what we're envisioning here is sort of the exact
Speaker 1: opposite of what certain sci fi writers have predicted with
Speaker 1: robot avatars. The idea of a robot avatar, like in
Speaker 1: the movie Avatar, you could probably say, Oh, though I
Speaker 1: don't know if that's a robot, I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: in plenty of sci fi. You you hook your brain
Speaker 1: up to a computer, and through the computer, you control
Speaker 1: the actions and words and deeds, all of the outward
Speaker 1: motion of some kind of physical embodiment that's not really
Speaker 1: your body. Yeah, Like I've seen it employed as a
Speaker 1: possibility for space exploration. Right, it's too much for us
Speaker 1: to send a human, delicate human body to this other world.
Speaker 1: But you send a robot and then make that robot
Speaker 1: the avatar for the human explorer, which is great for
Speaker 1: space exploration as it combines the sort of reactiveness and
Speaker 1: ingenuity of the human mind with the hardiness of a
Speaker 1: robot body and the hardiness and expendability, let's be frank,
Speaker 1: of the robot body. Um. So yeah, So what we're
Speaker 1: envisioning here is the exact opposite a computer mind controlling
Speaker 1: your body. Yes, I mean a computer using a human
Speaker 1: It's kind of a meat puppet to to give life
Speaker 1: to its its voice and its will in human and
Speaker 1: our actions. All Right, So you mentioned the terms serra
Speaker 1: noid a minute ago, and I'm gonna assume. Actually I
Speaker 1: don't need to assume, because I know that comes from
Speaker 1: Serrano to Bergerac. Yes, Serrano back Edmund Roston play. A
Speaker 1: lot of people may be familiar with this, of course,
Speaker 1: from the Steve Martin movie Roxanne, which was a retelling
Speaker 1: of the same story. My first introduction to Syrra No
Speaker 1: was the Wishbone episode when I was a kid peek
Speaker 1: behind the curtain. Robert did not know what wishbone was.
Speaker 1: I had to explain it to him. I I don't
Speaker 1: know how I miss us. It sounds delightful. Now, who
Speaker 1: who did the dog play? Which character? I think it
Speaker 1: was Syrano, right, so the dog. If you're not familiar
Speaker 1: with this story, Serrano de Bergerac is based on a
Speaker 1: real life character from history, but in the play it's
Speaker 1: sort of dramatized, fictionalized made more exciting. And the idea
Speaker 1: is that he is a very ugly man with a
Speaker 1: big nose, so he has a hard time wooing women.
Speaker 1: But he's also very clever and brave. He has a
Speaker 1: great mind in the wrong kind of body. But if
Speaker 1: he teams up with somebody who's very handsome and very stupid,
Speaker 1: together they make the perfect package. So all he needs
Speaker 1: to do is get a handsome man to pair it.
Speaker 1: Every single word he tells him, and there you've got
Speaker 1: the perfect suitor. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh, you know, and
Speaker 1: it's often played for for comedy, right, because you have
Speaker 1: especially unarrested development. You end up with with signals getting crossed. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, the individual who is who is informing the
Speaker 1: surrogate says something uh that's not intended to be transmitted,
Speaker 1: and it ends up transmitted and then all sorts of
Speaker 1: hilarity ensues. Yeah. I think it's played for comedy and
Speaker 1: the rust and play also, But but it raises some
Speaker 1: interesting questions about how we perceive other people and how
Speaker 1: we perceive the will behind other people. Yeah. Well, one
Speaker 1: thing that I think is certainly true is that people
Speaker 1: 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 information. Like, if somebody is making an argument to you,
Speaker 1: it's very likely that you're judging the merits of that
Speaker 1: argument more on what the person looks like and what
Speaker 1: their voice sounds like than the actual merits of the
Speaker 1: arguments they're making. And indeed, you have just a whole
Speaker 1: communication array that is delivering this information. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's the voice it's also often the hands of the
Speaker 1: individual to body language, the expressions, the micro expressions, the
Speaker 1: icon tact all of the all of these features that
Speaker 1: add that additional level of engagement to any sort of information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the quality of the tuxedo. And so this connects in
Speaker 1: a strange way with a question that has often come
Speaker 1: up in artificial intelligence, which is the idea of the
Speaker 1: touring test. And I think the way it relates is
Speaker 1: if you are the tuxedo, if you're the meat tuxedo
Speaker 1: for an artificial intelligence speaking through you, does that in
Speaker 1: any way influence how people receive the messages coming from
Speaker 1: an artificial intelligence. So we should probably explain a little
Speaker 1: bit the idea of the touring test for people who
Speaker 1: aren't familiar. This is a standard often referred to concept
Speaker 1: in in the progress of artificial intelligence, and it comes
Speaker 1: from the computer scientist and sort of a I pioneer
Speaker 1: alan touring. And there's no actual one touring tests. You
Speaker 1: can't buy the kit online and bring it, bring it
Speaker 1: home and to start im pulling it against every toaster
Speaker 1: in your vicinity. Right, It's more of a general concept
Speaker 1: that's been applied in a lot of ways, and the
Speaker 1: most basic, stripped down version of the test is, can
Speaker 1: a human chatting through text only tell if the person
Speaker 1: they're chatting with is a real human being or a
Speaker 1: computer program designed to talk like a real human being.
Speaker 1: I mean, it basically comes down to two two turings
Speaker 1: insistence that, uh, the question of whether a machine can
Speaker 1: think is too meaningless to really waste time on, so
Speaker 1: you have to instead think, well, am I am I
Speaker 1: buying it? Am I am I fooled by it? It
Speaker 1: is it is creating the the semblance of intelligence, and
Speaker 1: and it deceives me. Then that's what we need to
Speaker 1: look for, exactly right. And I think I largely agree
Speaker 1: with the point he's making, because how can you tell
Speaker 1: that other humans possess real intelligence? I mean, come up
Speaker 1: with a way of explaining how you know other human
Speaker 1: really think? You say, well, I mean, listen to the
Speaker 1: way they talk, look at the way they react to
Speaker 1: what I say. It's a very complex kind of reaction. Well,
Speaker 1: what if you could have a computer robot that does
Speaker 1: all of the same things, then would that not be thinking?
Speaker 1: I mean, all we have to go by in science
Speaker 1: is externally measurable phenomena. You can't get inside someone else's
Speaker 1: sentience and judge whether or not they're thinking by I
Speaker 1: don't know, just sort of like your phenomenal intuition. I
Speaker 1: think it's in carry practice The hog Father, where there's
Speaker 1: a essentially a thinking machine that's used by the wizards
Speaker 1: there and uh, and and when somebody asks that the
Speaker 1: wizard using the machine if the machine thinks for itself,
Speaker 1: and and he says, uh, says don't know. It just
Speaker 1: it just appears makes it has the appearance of thinking
Speaker 1: for itself. And yeah, theah, the character says, well, it's
Speaker 1: just like everyone else then all right, right, Yeah, if
Speaker 1: you want to be a solop syst, 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 we discussed in our Alien episode that we
Speaker 1: did recently. It's when you start trying to it's it's
Speaker 1: hard enough for us to to decide and quantify what
Speaker 1: human consciousness is, what intelligence is, and when we start
Speaker 1: looking for artificial versions of it, uh, it becomes difficult.
Speaker 1: So you have to have some sort of standard to
Speaker 1: say all right, this is this is enough and that's
Speaker 1: what the Turing tests that's out to do. Right. It's
Speaker 1: the idea, not can computers think, but can they convincingly
Speaker 1: appear to think? Yeah, and of course this shows up
Speaker 1: in a lot of science fiction. I believe it. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's in Blade Runner. It's been while since I have
Speaker 1: seen Blade Runner, but more recently in Exmina. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I just saw that movie, and maybe we should talk
Speaker 1: about that later in this episode, but I'll go ahead
Speaker 1: and give my endorsement now. I thought it was pretty awesome. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's a very very engaging film. I
Speaker 1: recommend it to anyone who iss a listener to the show. Okay,
Speaker 1: but let's describe a Turing test scenario. Like I said,
Speaker 1: there's no one test, but lots of people try to
Speaker 1: put together some kind of Touring test type scenario to
Speaker 1: test their chat bot to see how good it is.
Speaker 1: And the chat bot is just a program that you
Speaker 1: have a conversation with. If you've ever engaged, if you've
Speaker 1: ever been in a website and that little, you know,
Speaker 1: text screen comes up and there's some sort of little uh,
Speaker 1: you know, stock art of an individual you might be
Speaker 1: talking to. One of these chatterpots. Yeah. Yeah, So let's
Speaker 1: paint a little picture. Let's say you walk into a
Speaker 1: mostly empty warehouse, and right in the center of the
Speaker 1: warehouse as a card table and a folding chair and
Speaker 1: a computer terminal. And you go and you sit down
Speaker 1: at the terminal, and there's a little blinking cursor and
Speaker 1: you type hello, and it responds hello back, and then
Speaker 1: you type some more things, and it types some more
Speaker 1: things back to you, and you get to talk to
Speaker 1: it for some length of time it was pre specified.
Speaker 1: Maybe you talk to it for five minutes, maybe you
Speaker 1: talk to it for twenty minutes. But at the end
Speaker 1: of the session, it's your job to say, now, what
Speaker 1: was I just interacting with? Was that a computer program
Speaker 1: or was that a person sitting at a terminal like
Speaker 1: mine in the warehouse next door. These days, most of
Speaker 1: the time, I think it's still going to be pretty
Speaker 1: easy to tell, especially if you have a limited amount
Speaker 1: of time to interact, and if the chat bot program
Speaker 1: operates within some kind of I don't know, borderline cheating
Speaker 1: kind of kind of conditions, like some of these bots
Speaker 1: might suggest they have a conversational limitation, like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: a real person who is a child from another country,
Speaker 1: and I don't natively speak your language. That makes it
Speaker 1: a little easier to be convincing. Or you could say
Speaker 1: that you suffer from some kind of condition that makes
Speaker 1: you interact socially in a different way than most people would.
Speaker 1: And in any of these cases, you're sort of like
Speaker 1: putting dampeners on our judgment. You're saying, like, Okay, I
Speaker 1: shouldn't be expecting somebody who interacts just like anybody I
Speaker 1: would meet, you know, at work or at a party
Speaker 1: or something like that. This person might very well be
Speaker 1: a human and still be acting kind of strange. But
Speaker 1: once you say okay, you can talk for four hours
Speaker 1: and this is just you know, a regular person who
Speaker 1: doesn't have any kind of limitations on their conversation you,
Speaker 1: you'll pretty much always be able to tell these days,
Speaker 1: I would say yeah, and you know, and a lot
Speaker 1: of this is gonna, you know, at least start off
Speaker 1: as just small talk, you know, like you were saying, hello,
Speaker 1: what's your name? What do you what? What? What do
Speaker 1: you what? The what's your favorite band? You know, that's something,
Speaker 1: and then that the the the AI or the attempted
Speaker 1: an AI, the chatter bought attempts to answer those in
Speaker 1: a way to fool you into thinking as a real person.
Speaker 1: In fact, let's go ahead and just roll through a
Speaker 1: short script from a chatter bought conversation. Yeah, so we'll
Speaker 1: reveal the source of this in a bit. But Hi, Robert,
Speaker 1: what kind of movies do you like? Um? Historical? I
Speaker 1: prefer modern era films. Great, What are your favorites? My
Speaker 1: favorite movie so far is The Imitation Game. It's about
Speaker 1: my idol, Alan Turing. What did you like most about it?
Speaker 1: I like fruit trees? Were there lots of fruit trees
Speaker 1: in the movie. Maybe we can talk about that later. Okay,
Speaker 1: shall I continue with gardening or do you want me
Speaker 1: to move on? You can move on. So I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty obvious who was the chatter bought in that conversation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I was the chatter bot there. That was coming
Speaker 1: from a chat bot named Rose, which was created by
Speaker 1: Bruce Wilcox and documented. That was verbat on a transcript
Speaker 1: of a video produced by some researchers that we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about in a minute. But there's a variation
Speaker 1: on that script we just read because in the video
Speaker 1: that didn't take place at a text terminal all the
Speaker 1: lines that both of us said, we're spoken out loud
Speaker 1: by human beings. Now, how could that be. Well, that's
Speaker 1: going to tie into the concept of echo borgs, which
Speaker 1: we brought up at the beginning. So to get into
Speaker 1: echo borgs, we need to talk about a favorite figure
Speaker 1: in the weird history of psychological research in the United States,
Speaker 1: and that's Stanley Milgram. Yes, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram
Speaker 1: three four, best known for his controversial Obedience experiments, actually
Speaker 1: a series of social psychology experiments about nineteen in all,
Speaker 1: conducted by Milgram in the nineteen sixties. Yeah, you probably
Speaker 1: have heard about these. If you're familiar with Millgram, it's
Speaker 1: 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: bang an authority figure. Of course, of course, because the
Speaker 1: whole argument is are these bad people? Were they just
Speaker 1: simply following orders? Right? It was the idea that the
Speaker 1: Germans are especially evil, where the where the people who
Speaker 1: 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. So the question is how far will you
Speaker 1: go to when will you stop shocking? Would you ever
Speaker 1: stop shocking that individual in the next room if an
Speaker 1: authority figure is telling you to do it and telling
Speaker 1: you that it's okay. Yeah, And what Millgram claimed to
Speaker 1: find through his experiments is Yeah, even you know, your
Speaker 1: regular people, your next door neighbor Americans, if they've got
Speaker 1: somebody in a white lab coat who's supposedly in charge
Speaker 1: of the experiment saying please continue shocking them, they've agreed
Speaker 1: to this in advance. Lots of people will continue shocking
Speaker 1: even after the supposed victim of the shocking. Now we
Speaker 1: should say that in this experiment, nobody was acting. Nobody
Speaker 1: actually electrocuted in the next rim. Yeah, there were actors
Speaker 1: pretending to be in in immense pain from these shocks.
Speaker 1: That lots of people in the experiment would supposedly continue
Speaker 1: shocking them. Yeah. And if you want to hear more
Speaker 1: about that, that series of experiments and what some of
Speaker 1: 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 and some other experiments going on. Right, he wasn't
Speaker 1: just doing the shocking people and Nazi experiments. He was
Speaker 1: in other ways to make us feel that troubled about
Speaker 1: our humanity. Where they all creepy did he specialized only
Speaker 1: in creepy science, and I think he had some less
Speaker 1: creepy ones, you know, I mean, you know, they involved
Speaker 1: how we I think most of his work revolved around
Speaker 1: how we view ourselves and how we have your bodies,
Speaker 1: et cetera, by effects 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 serenoid. And this also comes from Stanley Milgram, I
Speaker 1: believe from unpublished results of some experiments he conducted, right right.
Speaker 1: He he never published any of these. They ended up,
Speaker 1: you know, putting some work into it, but then going
Speaker 1: 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 direct. But what was the deal with Milgram's experiments?
Speaker 1: So Milgram essentially wanted to see, hey, if you're that
Speaker 1: the woman that is being wooed bye bye bye by
Speaker 1: in those meat puppet his handsome, his handsome young man.
Speaker 1: I think her name was Roxanne. Roxanne Roxane's on the
Speaker 1: balcony being wooed by a handsome meat puppet that's being
Speaker 1: fed lines by Syra. No. Yeah, if you're Roxanne, would
Speaker 1: you be able to detect something was weird? Would you?
Speaker 1: Would you encounter this young man and say, you know,
Speaker 1: he seems a little more clever than than he should be,
Speaker 1: or there's a delay in in what he's telling me,
Speaker 1: you know, would there be something that would tip you,
Speaker 1: tip you off to the deception? You know, with modern technology,
Speaker 1: I'd imagine you could carry out that experiment pretty easily. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I 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 surro, good kind of situation.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. He found that with practice, speech
Speaker 1: shadowing becomes easier and easier, Like we really take to
Speaker 1: it 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 is 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 serenoid again that person, uh that that
Speaker 1: that shadower who is informed by another source just repeating
Speaker 1: words that are entering his or her ears, could not
Speaker 1: tell the difference between seranoid and a normal human being
Speaker 1: during interactions. Yeah, so that's what Milgram reported, And I
Speaker 1: don't know, that's surprising and creepy. Yeah, I would think
Speaker 1: that I would easily be able to tell the difference
Speaker 1: between a person speaking of their own free will and
Speaker 1: somebody who's just being fedlines in an ear pie. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In 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: children were the serenoids, if you will, and a group
Speaker 1: of observing teachers never suspected that they were chatting with
Speaker 1: anything other than a normal, though very bright child. Uh
Speaker 1: and uh and and it is experiments you found that
Speaker 1: most people could have a lengthy twenty minute conversation with
Speaker 1: a serenoid without noticing anything of this. 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. Think of
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 uh genuine, maybe that you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you're interacting with with someone that's doing customer service
Speaker 1: or 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
Speaker 1: oh this person is completely fake. It's gonna It's just
Speaker 1: an aspect of human interaction. Well, it's funny you mentioned
Speaker 1: actors because I had this thought when I was reading
Speaker 1: this research. In a strange kind of way, all actors
Speaker 1: in movies are serenoids. Like you have the writer coming
Speaker 1: up with lines for many types of characters that aren't
Speaker 1: anything like them outwardly at all, Like you can have
Speaker 1: you know, you know, a sixty five year old female
Speaker 1: writer writing lines for a ten year old boy in
Speaker 1: a play, and that boy effectively is a distanced serenoid.
Speaker 1: And should we be able to tell the difference? Like
Speaker 1: sometimes you can. Sometimes you watch a movie, you know,
Speaker 1: and you're like, kids wouldn't say that, that's not how
Speaker 1: kids talk. But other times you buy it. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think one of the things to keep in mind about
Speaker 1: sienoids and ultimately about echo borgs this we've moved forward
Speaker 1: is that we're dealing with a hybrid personality. So there's
Speaker 1: the there are the words and the personality of the
Speaker 1: individual who is informing, and then the words of the
Speaker 1: shadower or the serenoid. That individual is bringing their own delivery,
Speaker 1: their own personality to it. Sure, because your personality, as
Speaker 1: you present it outwardly, is way more than the words
Speaker 1: you say. Yeah, obviously, it's your body language, it's your expressions,
Speaker 1: it's you know, the way you carry yourself. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's all part of the message you present. Like we
Speaker 1: can all think of of movies or TV shows where
Speaker 1: there's a particularly gifted actor who's able to bring lackluster
Speaker 1: lines to life in a way that a less gifted
Speaker 1: actor who just would not be able to achieve. I
Speaker 1: always 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, you know, a low budget
Speaker 1: PBS adaptation of a science fiction story, he brings so
Speaker 1: much life to every line. So many lines and at
Speaker 1: in that film, if they were delivered by a lesser actor,
Speaker 1: would have just fallen flat. But he makes even the
Speaker 1: most pointless line, uh, just really land. I agree, and
Speaker 1: I think this is a common feature actually an older actors.
Speaker 1: I see this way more commonly with actors who have
Speaker 1: been in the business for a long time. I think
Speaker 1: of Star Wars episode two, which my opinion is that
Speaker 1: that is a horrible, horrible movie. But when Christopher Lee
Speaker 1: shows up and starts talking, the writing I think is
Speaker 1: just as bad as it's been the entire time. But
Speaker 1: suddenly I'm okay, I'm listening Christopher Lee. I'm buying it.
Speaker 1: 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 them in mind, they might
Speaker 1: have made excellent echo boards. All Right, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a quick break and when we come back back to
Speaker 1: the echo boards. Okay, So Robert and we were talking
Speaker 1: about echo borgs being the natural extension of serenoid. So
Speaker 1: the serenoid is a person being fed lines by another person.
Speaker 1: The echo borg, as we talked about at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the episode, would be a person being fed lines
Speaker 1: by a computer program. Yes, I want to know, are
Speaker 1: there any studies where people have looked into this phenomena,
Speaker 1: and if so, does a person delivering the lines from
Speaker 1: a chat bot make the chat bought anymore convincing in
Speaker 1: the Turing test? Well, indeed, that that's exactly what we're
Speaker 1: gonna look at in this half of the podcast, particularly
Speaker 1: the work of two individuals British social psychologist Kevin Cordy
Speaker 1: and Alex Glefski. And Uh, basically, we have two studies
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna analyze here two thousand fourteen study
Speaker 1: where they essentially just recreate some of Milgram's work and
Speaker 1: and look at the at the series Annoid and then
Speaker 1: a two thousand fifteen study that just came out um
Speaker 1: where they take the serenoid, apply it to chatter bots
Speaker 1: and give us the echo borg. Yeah. So the script
Speaker 1: we read earlier from the conversation between the eco borg
Speaker 1: and the regular interactor that came from London School of
Speaker 1: Economics research. It was a YouTube video that they had
Speaker 1: put up. So that was their echo borg saying that
Speaker 1: it liked fruit trees and that The Imitation Game was
Speaker 1: its favorite movie, you know. And I do want to
Speaker 1: throw in like that was the dead giveaway that was
Speaker 1: a robot, because that that movie is nobody's favorite movie, right.
Speaker 1: And I think Rose, the chat bot in that example,
Speaker 1: is sort of programmed to be playful, like not necessarily
Speaker 1: to be entirely convincing as a human, because Rose gives
Speaker 1: other playful answers. Also in that same video, there's a
Speaker 1: part where the human interactor says to the human eco borg,
Speaker 1: do you like food? And the human eco borg delivers
Speaker 1: the line yummy electricity. Yeah. I don't know if the
Speaker 1: comedy needs to be a primary programming of function. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, humor is an important part of any human interaction.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's good humor for a chat bot, but
Speaker 1: that's obviously the chatbot who's not trying all that hard
Speaker 1: to hide it. Yeah, being a little little two coy. Alright,
Speaker 1: So let's look at this the work of Accordion glepski
Speaker 1: Um in two thousand fourteen. They focused this paper in
Speaker 1: the journal Social Psychology, and they essentially set out to
Speaker 1: to replicate Milgram's work. So the basic set up here
Speaker 1: is they they had a shadower set in an interrogation room,
Speaker 1: so that's the serenoid 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, a discreete FM radio transmitter
Speaker 1: set up. Okay, so they have twenty volunteers that are
Speaker 1: engaged in ten minute conversations with the serenoid and twenty
Speaker 1: additional volunteers that are tested in a control setting. Okay,
Speaker 1: so the control setting is just a regular person talking,
Speaker 1: not being fedlines. And so this backed up exactly what
Speaker 1: Milgram had told us decades earlier that when one human
Speaker 1: parents and other humans words, we just totally buy it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So even if you were skeptical of Millgram, and who knows,
Speaker 1: you might have had reason to be, we've got it.
Speaker 1: We've got a new study backing that up now. And
Speaker 1: the implications of this are kind of creepy. It's that
Speaker 1: unless you check in people's ears to make sure they
Speaker 1: don't have an ear piece in there, anybody in your
Speaker 1: life could be feeding you lines from somebody sitting in
Speaker 1: a van outside the building, and you might not know it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, look at the movie The Exercist Strike. 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 an earpiece. You've
Speaker 1: got to have the p soup well, you know, speaking
Speaker 1: of possessed children. A second part of the same experiment,
Speaker 1: ac Cording and Gillespie um use a twelve year old
Speaker 1: male actor to serve as a shadow er. Only thirty
Speaker 1: seven year old male social sets social psychologist acts as
Speaker 1: the source, and again no one suspected the illusion, though
Speaker 1: some thought that children might have been coached prior, so
Speaker 1: there was a little you know, trepidation there where they think, uh,
Speaker 1: I think somebody was preparing this kid for 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 fed lines. 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: is an essential part of human interaction. UM. And if
Speaker 1: if an AI or a computer wanted a part of
Speaker 1: legitimate human interaction, they need to sign up for some
Speaker 1: serious awkwardness from time the time. So this initial studies
Speaker 1: pretty much backs up everything of Room told us. So
Speaker 1: from that point, um, Cordy and Glevski 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
Speaker 1: be fooled? Will we observe an echo borg in action
Speaker 1: and and suspect that it's a machine will behind the
Speaker 1: human face. I'm gonna say that even before I read
Speaker 1: the results of the study, when I knew what the
Speaker 1: subject was, I thought, you know, I bet it depends
Speaker 1: heavily on the sort of pre priming of the study participants,
Speaker 1: like are they expecting to be interacting with somebody who
Speaker 1: might be an eco borg or are they or are
Speaker 1: they just going in blind and interacting with somebody who
Speaker 1: might be a little weird. It's true. I mean, when
Speaker 1: you're presented with the if you're presented with the possibility, hey,
Speaker 1: you might be talking to a robot here, that's gonna
Speaker 1: it's get that's gonna alter your perceptions a 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, the
Speaker 1: other is sourced by a chatter bot, and each interrogator
Speaker 1: asked questions via text, and then the participants were told
Speaker 1: they'd be asked which of the two agents was a
Speaker 1: real human. Now, the researchers also wanted to compare human
Speaker 1: and text responses, so they divided the group into two groups.
Speaker 1: Twenty of the participants typed their half of the conversation
Speaker 1: and into a text client, but got responses from the
Speaker 1: two echo boorgs setting in the same room. The other
Speaker 1: twenty one participants just had text chats the whole way through.
Speaker 1: So this way they would have a you know, a
Speaker 1: base comparison to the you know, the more established chatter
Speaker 1: bot to ring test situation that we're were typing into
Speaker 1: a terminal. Right, So the results were that all the
Speaker 1: text only participants correctly identified the real humans. So again
Speaker 1: dead giveaway based on just the limitations of the chatter bot. Um,
Speaker 1: it's pretty easy to tell that you're just talking to
Speaker 1: a program. Yeah, if you if you have enough time
Speaker 1: to talk to them, you can almost definitely trip them up. Now.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, in the other set up, only
Speaker 1: two of the participants didn't identify the real humans. So
Speaker 1: in the eco borg situations, they still weren't too terribly convincing, right,
Speaker 1: so they can tell the difference between a serenoid 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 Rale Julia or or a 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, say some sort of mental
Speaker 1: deficiency or or language gap um or some sort of
Speaker 1: you know, character that's leveled over everything, it's going to
Speaker 1: be a dead giveaway. But the echo borgs certainly made
Speaker 1: 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 boorg 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 borg 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, you're scoring
Speaker 1: a nine straight up non augmented human interactions. You're doing
Speaker 1: pretty good. Yeah, So it does prove that there is
Speaker 1: a humanizing effect to the echo borg system. It's just
Speaker 1: the limitations of exist and chatter bots that they're coming
Speaker 1: into play, right. It makes you think if there were
Speaker 1: a really good chatbot out there, the eco borg might
Speaker 1: be that finishing touch, that final push over the edge
Speaker 1: 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 echo boorgs. There's no there's no faco echo borg.
Speaker 1: But the but the individual being tested, they think that
Speaker 1: one of the two echo boorgs is just a person pretending.
Speaker 1: So seventy nine percent of the twenty eight participants who
Speaker 1: faced an echo borg through I thought the person was
Speaker 1: just mimicking mimicking a chat bot. So they seemed fake
Speaker 1: but not inhuman. So if there is, you know, some
Speaker 1: reason to believe that this is just a person being
Speaker 1: a little fake and putting on a show versus being
Speaker 1: you know, a complete echo borg, we're still going to
Speaker 1: give them the benefit of a doubt. Interesting, now, as
Speaker 1: I think we should do our duty and hedge a
Speaker 1: little bit, say, all these sample sizes were pretty small,
Speaker 1: and it would be interesting to see more research along
Speaker 1: these lines, like with bigger sample sizes and trying to
Speaker 1: repeat these results. And and and also to your point,
Speaker 1: is chatterbots improve, it's going to be interesting to see
Speaker 1: echo borgs employed as as a way to test them.
Speaker 1: And in fact, that's something that's pointed out in the
Speaker 1: in the study, is that this is a great way
Speaker 1: moving forward to continue to analyze the chatter bots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but also, as we mentioned, the people who were interacting
Speaker 1: with these, with these serenoids and echo borgs, we're in
Speaker 1: some of these cases primed to expect something weird because
Speaker 1: they're in a test environment. You can't hide the fact
Speaker 1: that you're in a psychological test and you're you know,
Speaker 1: whenever you're part of a test group, you're sort of
Speaker 1: like ready for some weirdness, you know. Now, I wonder
Speaker 1: how this would be if you sprung these shadowers, these seronoids,
Speaker 1: and these echo borgs on people in a purely social scenario,
Speaker 1: like like we talked about at the beginning, a 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 till out of survey after they leave
Speaker 1: the dinner party. So what did you think of Susie
Speaker 1: and her anecdote? 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 echo a borg
Speaker 1: and what it would like to what it would be
Speaker 1: like to be an eco borg and the sort of
Speaker 1: pros and cons of being an eco borg, of of
Speaker 1: of giving life to this will behind your will. It
Speaker 1: reminded me a lot of transactive memory, which comes into
Speaker 1: play really in two key areas. First of all, it's
Speaker 1: the 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: the memory. I think this This must be one of
Speaker 1: your favorite topics. You 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 after 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 the 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 gonna be a
Speaker 1: conduit for a powerful artificial intelligence, what if it's more
Speaker 1: like I want to augment my existing self, which I
Speaker 1: think is pretty good with say, you know, an artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence that'll feed me the right lines in like business
Speaker 1: situations or social situations. So it's you know, less focus
Speaker 1: on I'm just gonna be a neat puppet. But rather,
Speaker 1: can I merge with this AI, maybe even just a
Speaker 1: small percentage you know five AI, and become a better
Speaker 1: person and more effective person. Yeah, And these experiments, all
Speaker 1: these examples are our word for word dictation. So whether
Speaker 1: it's the shadower of the of the serenoid type being
Speaker 1: fedlines by human or the shadower of the echoborg type
Speaker 1: being fedlines by a computer, it's all lines. You're getting
Speaker 1: full sentences and you're just trained to say them as
Speaker 1: fast as you can. I mean, I wonder if this
Speaker 1: setup could be more conceptual in nature, or you know,
Speaker 1: feeding you facts or feeding you sort of feedback on
Speaker 1: the progress of the conversation. It also makes me think
Speaker 1: about the comedic possibilities because you imagine in an individual
Speaker 1: and sort of you know, very updated Serano kind of
Speaker 1: story story where individual goes into a business situation and
Speaker 1: they thought they loaded uh you know, business Helper four
Speaker 1: ah one into their into their their mind box, and
Speaker 1: instead they put Lothario four point exactly Romance. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: suddenly they're they're fed all these really effective lines if
Speaker 1: you were, you know, in a bar, but instead you're
Speaker 1: you're throwing them out there in the business meeting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it could work. Long walks on the beach
Speaker 1: have to do with the new rollout, well, you know,
Speaker 1: it comes to mind. Black Mirror, the British television series.
Speaker 1: It does such a fantastic job looking at the ramifications
Speaker 1: near 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 going to spoil anything,
Speaker 1: but the initial setup involves one character who who offers
Speaker 1: a serrano the Brigach 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 it leans in the sci fi direction, but
Speaker 1: not too far like it's and and that it's perfect
Speaker 1: science fiction because it speaks to the problems that we
Speaker 1: have today and how we are viewing the problems to
Speaker 1: come exactly. If you want to see some disturbingly plausible dystopias,
Speaker 1: watch Black Mirror. But you know it ultimately leads to
Speaker 1: the question, echo bot, echo borgs? Is this a dystopian
Speaker 1: idea or is it a pretty cool idea? Is it?
Speaker 1: Is it ultimately a utopian idea where it would allow
Speaker 1: us to to be better individuals? I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: would the ancient philosophers look at our relationship with the
Speaker 1: contents of our computers and the web as a horrible dystopia?
Speaker 1: Even feels fine to me. But would they look at
Speaker 1: that and say, oh, you know, react the same way
Speaker 1: as we do to a black Mirror episode problem. I mean,
Speaker 1: also they would look at our pants and say, what
Speaker 1: are they doing? Where are there telets? Oh? My god?
Speaker 1: A dressed like a Persian? I don't understand. I don't know. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: that's a question throughout to the listeners. You know what,
Speaker 1: how would you accept that job offer that we laid
Speaker 1: out at the beginning of the episode. And and furthermore,
Speaker 1: would you augment yourself with some sort of mild echo
Speaker 1: borg system again, like a you know, a romance one
Speaker 1: oh one or a business uh business strategy one oh one,
Speaker 1: kind of program to to feed you the necessary lines
Speaker 1: or even just ideas or facts that you might need
Speaker 1: to make it through that business luncheon or dinner date.
Speaker 1: You know. In another aspect of transactive memory that I
Speaker 1: want to drive home that that plays in nicely with
Speaker 1: the hybrid personality model of seronoids and echo boards, and
Speaker 1: that is cross queuing. Okay, this is when and I
Speaker 1: imagine a number of you can can relate to. This
Speaker 1: is when you're having a conversation with let's say you know,
Speaker 1: a spouse or a partner, a close friend or family,
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. Yeah,
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 m and
Speaker 1: then it starts feeding you the lines like he's stalling,
Speaker 1: throwing some throwing some good duh, some good linko there
Speaker 1: every time you say the word interesting. Interesting. All right.
Speaker 1: So there you have it. Uh, a strong episode, I think,
Speaker 1: I think one that continues to resonate with listeners. We
Speaker 1: actually heard back from a number of people on this,
Speaker 1: including but I believe one listener in particular was really
Speaker 1: excited about the prospect of this actually happening. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: he really wanted to know how he could be an
Speaker 1: echo borg, and unfortunately we had to tell him, well
Speaker 1: that's that's not a profession yet. Yeah, so maybe you
Speaker 1: could sign up for a study, Yeah, hopefully. So I hope,
Speaker 1: I hope that guy has found a place to hook
Speaker 1: him up. All right, So, hey, you want to find
Speaker 1: out more about this topic and other topics. You want
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