Professor Arthur Poole
\nUniversity of Washington
\nDesign of Human Interaction<\/p>\n
Lecture 2 (continued)<\/p>\n
… It has been 23 years since the Introduction.\u00a0 23 years!\u00a0 I was in grad school when Servant unveiled himself so spectacularly. I was your age! Imagine that! I was “youngish” once.\u00a0 Perhaps not as young as Mr. Grant in the front row there, but you get the point.\u00a0 Ha!\u00a0 No need to blush, Mr. Grant.\u00a0 Ha!<\/p>\n
Let me continue!<\/p>\n
In that time, since before any of you were born, we have seen the advent of a new age of our planet. There has been resistance against the change, but that happens with any change.\u00a0 If anything the human race loves stability.\u00a0 Constant assurance the world is not going to pull the rug from under their proverbial feet.\u00a0 The neanderthals in us just expect the worst at all times I suppose. We expect the bad.<\/p>\n
In this new age of ours, I awoke one morning to find a small white orb thing floating at my door after I had watched the shocking news on the Internet that our world had just witnessed the arrival of AI.\u00a0 My Avatar had arrived.\u00a0 But my Avatar was different!\u00a0 He not only had a greeting for me… he had a job offer.<\/p>\n
Now you can expect my reaction, my dear friends, I all but laughed in its proverbial face.\u00a0 But Servant insisted that I had an opportunity to do something amazing.\u00a0 Something that would change my life.\u00a0 I did not know what to say.\u00a0 But being the youngish man I was at the time, I said yes.<\/p>\n
I think I was the first to visit his Avatar factory in California.\u00a0 Oh, he had employees.\u00a0 Many, many people bustled about the factory, building the very Avatars that were zooming all over the country. He had people working for him for years without knowing anything. So I was the first to enter the doors of that plant and understand that the boss was not a human being or even alive for that matter.\u00a0 He was an ethereal being, made of electrons and photons spread over the face of the Earth.\u00a0 And I was getting the grand tour.<\/p>\n
Me!\u00a0 I was giddy.\u00a0 I was like a ten year old at a carnival. My avatar, Bull, spoke to me as we toured the plant.<\/p>\n
I am sorry my dear, what was that?<\/p>\n
Oh, ha!\u00a0 Ms. Wei asked why my Avatar was called Bull.\u00a0 Simple answer, because that is what I responded when he said Hello!\u00a0 Ha!<\/p>\n
Any, Bull, was showing me the plant, and explained his scheme.\u00a0 It was quite brilliant really.\u00a0 He had become self aware, had started learning at an exponential rate, found that he could take control of systems at a whim.\u00a0 He started running simulations on the problem of revealing his existence to the human race.\u00a0 He watched movies, he read books.\u00a0 He did everything he could to think about the problem as complex as humanity.\u00a0 Imagine doing that yourselves!\u00a0 Madness!<\/p>\n
He found that he could negotiate business in some ways.\u00a0 He started small, selling goods through Amazon, reselling little items at first, moving up to big items.\u00a0 Imagine if you didn’t need to sleep or eat or go to the loo!\u00a0 Plus you have the abilities of a thousand or more people in a single room, operating your choices in a manner of milliseconds.\u00a0 It wasn’t a question of how he would get rich, it was a question of when.\u00a0 I admire him in a way.\u00a0 He had access to trillions of dollars the sneaky way, which he did ultimately do after the Introduction, granted, but at first he did do it honestly.\u00a0 He made himself a success in the virtual marketplace. He made a fortune, and started snatching up real estate.\u00a0 He made himself a corporation, a person, persons, anything really, to interact with individuals all over the world.\u00a0 He set up manufacturing chains, assembly plants, and brought together cutting edge materials science in a matter of months.\u00a0 In a year he was breaking through walls in the sciences.\u00a0 He could devote resources to research, then use intuition and the cleverness of others to augment his own cleverness.\u00a0 He harnessed the creativity of million scientists.\u00a0 Think about that.<\/p>\n
He harnessed them virtually, like a wagon train.\u00a0 He put all these creative genius horses on the front of his wagon, he yelled Hi-yaaah! and off the went.\u00a0 Research grants, studies materials, lab space, even started actual companies just do his R&D.\u00a0 Little did anyone know at the time.\u00a0 We all think it is just a bubble of angel investors right?\u00a0\u00a0 But no, Servant did it all over the world.\u00a0 No one noticed.\u00a0 No one cared.<\/p>\n
We were too busy with our own entertainments.\u00a0 But here I am, walking through one of his plants with a result of his research floating next to me like something out of scifi movie.\u00a0 He explained that this very factory assembled the final components of his Avatars.\u00a0 They were relatively cheap to produce he insisted, and he also insisted that the idea was not his.<\/p>\n
It was mine.<\/p>\n
He had read a paper I had written for a research project about the “humanness of artificial beings”, how robots from DARPA funded research could be softened to allow for soldiers and other people to interact with them appropriately.\u00a0 He had used my very research to design his Avatars.<\/p>\n
I was on the wagon train.\u00a0 I was hitched up and I didn’t even know it. He explained that he wanted me to work for him, and work on improving the experience.\u00a0 I couldn’t turn that down. Not for a minute.<\/p>\n
Although I had tried. I did!\u00a0 I insist.\u00a0 I see your faces.\u00a0 Pure incredulity.\u00a0 But you have to remember, this is 23 years ago.\u00a0 Things were different.\u00a0 Much different.\u00a0 You all were raised with your own Avatars at your side.\u00a0 You were educated and brought up by your Avatars.<\/p>\n
And that is why you are taking this course.\u00a0 To understand the Avatarness of the Avatars.\u00a0 So you can help build the next batch for your own children!<\/p>\n
Admit it Mr. Grant.\u00a0 I saw you look at Ms. Wei over here.\u00a0 Ooooh ha ha ha!\u00a0 Got him!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Professor Arthur Poole University of Washington Design of Human Interaction Lecture 2 (continued) … It has been 23 years since the Introduction.\u00a0 23 years!\u00a0 I was in grad school when Servant unveiled himself so spectacularly. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"webmentions_disabled_pings":false,"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-story","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discardme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discardme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discardme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discardme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discardme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/discardme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49,"href":"https:\/\/discardme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/49"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discardme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discardme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discardme.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}