Next: Echoborgs

CYRANO:

Since, by yourself, you fear to chill her heart,
Will you—to kindle all her heart to flame—
Wed into one my phrases and your lips?

CHRISTIAN:
Your eyes flash!

CYRANO:
Will you?

CHRISTIAN:
Will it please you so?
—Give you such pleasure?

CYRANO (madly):
It!. . .
(Then calmly, business-like):
It would amuse me!
It is an enterprise to tempt a poet.
Will you complete me, and let me complete you?
You march victorious,—I go in your shadow;
Let me be wit for you, be you my beauty!

--Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmund Rostand

The deal is sealed. Cyrano will be Christian's voice, Christian will be Cyrano's face. Roxane will, unknowingly, fall in love with both. And tragically, wind up with neither. A tale as old as time.

Let's admit: it would certainly be convenient to have a Cyrano along for those moments when we're tongue-tied or feeling dull, but you can't really drag another human being along, especially one who can provide you with sparkling conversation at a moment's notice.

I may be late to the party. but it appears technology has caught up with Cyrano and Christian. Have humans caught up with technology? We've put our toe in the water. Will we drown? Or drain the pool?

You may have seen the Bruce Willis sci-fi movie Surrogates. In that film, humanoid remote-controlled robots have pretty much taken over the public arena while their human controllers lounge at home in their pajamas vegetating. An alarming prospect, but the reversal is even more spine-chilling: Robots taking over human bodies--with the humans willingly giving up their autonomy, their voice. Writers and artists are rightly indignant about AI muscling in on our territory. That may be just the start.

The first technology used in service of this goal was good old-fasioned radio, used in a number of psychology experiments in the late 1970s. Cyranoids, as they were dubbed (the name an obvious tip of the hat to Cyrano) were the brainchild of Dr. Stanley Milgram, he of the infamous Stanford Experiment and the more benign six degrees of separation. A cyranoid (or "shadower") was a person who did not speak his own words, but rather those transmitted to him via radio from another person, the "source." The underlying idea was simple and elegant: to divorce the originator of the message from its content, setting it adrift, thereby eliminating the biases of the "interactant"--the person receiving the message. 

Any black person having a phone conversayion who has heard the amazingly tone-deaf remark uttered by a white person "But you don't sound black" is familiar with this phenomenon. Racial, gender, and age stereotyping in social interactions would be effectively blunted by this cyranic device. It promised lto peel away the medium from the message, substituting any medium desired. And after all, the medium is the message.

Of course, we encounter cyranoids every day, to a greater or lesser extent. I'm talking about sportscasters, newscasters, all those people with tiny monitors  stuffed in their ears, feeding them their scripts. We can't really measure what part of what we're hearing is coming from the voices in their heads--but that's the point.

"I say it here, it comes out there."

Let's look at a modern Cyrano update. Not Roxanne

--Broadcast News. 

Oh, yes. 

We have a love triangle--a brave, intelligent, witty, yet physically unappealing reporter who's desperately in love with a beautiful, intelligent news director who in turn has fallen for a cloddish but extremely handsome newscaster. At one point, during the "Libyan incident" scene, the shadower (Albert Brooks) actually feeds the lines almost word for word (through an intermediary (Holly Hunter) to the newscaster (William Hurt).

However, these Cyranic experiments of Milgram were largely ignored. Until recently. It was only a matter of time before some mad scientist connected Cyrano and cyranoids to the Turing test. And created the Echoborg. That scientist was Kevin Corti, whose interests, according to his website, include human-computer interaction, person perception, attribution errors, AI interfaces, user trust, safety, intersubjectivity, philosophy of mind, language analysis, and organizational communication. 

So he keeps busy.

Corti, along with fellow scientist Alex Gillespie created the echoborg to study interactions between humans and AI interfaces--good old-fashioned chatbots.

So, what is an echoborg? As you've probably guessed, it's:

"...a person whose speech (and in some cases, actions) are determined wholly or in part by artificial intelligence."

In other words, its a cyranoid whose source is a chatbot. And there the danger lies. Not yet, mind you. AI still doesn't think like a human thinks. It doesn't truly comprehend what it says, not yet. It's a pattern-extraction mechanism. Experiments have shown the chatbots aren't pulling the wool over most of our eyes yet. (Of course, apparently in these experiments the interactants were asked whether they were talking to a human or a computer. I'd like to see their reaction if the game wasn't given away at first word. ) But does that matter if it can fool the interactant?  And whether that breakthrough occurs in a year or a hundred, it must be reckoned with. AI will get past the barrier of meaning. Time to start running some thought experiments, sci-fi writers. The potential for human level-thought in AI may be distant, but the potential for human deepfakes is attainable now.

But hey, experiments, shexperiments. What's your worry? Well, they've gone a step beyond already. Hey, kids, let's put on a show!

The show is called I Am Echoborg, which played for over seven years at the Arnolfini in Bristol, UK. It was billed as "a funny and thought-provoking performance created each 

night by the audience having a conversation 

with an artificial intelligence." 

Danish entrepreneur and academic Dr, Nemo D'Qrill (there's a name for a sci-fi villain) had this to say about the show: "The other day I witnessed an Echoborg in action. A recruitment AI that spoke through a human actor to interview people for a job. The actor/Echoborg was not allowed to choose her words herself, but rather had to say what the AI told her to say."

The funny thing is, all the writing I've dug up on echoborgs so far seems to put the spotlight on the computer, on the way they affect AI. I'd rather train it on the human. For instance, in the theater piece, the AI takes on the role of a job interviewer  sizing up a potential hire, an audience volunteer. But what if the parts were reversed? What if a prospective hiree was using AI to help him get a leg up on the interviewer?

The temptation should be clear. Maybe the exercise starts out as a fun way to entertain an audience or friends at parties, then is used for a job interview, a first date?  On the spot excuses for why we're late, blossoming into outright lies? Then you get lazy. You let AI field all the tough situations, and they're all tough. It's a magic pill. You develop a reputation as knowledgable, full of jokes, but apt to say the darndest things. Hey, AI isn't perfect; when it's wrong it's wrong. Besides, who's to say your interlocutor isn't another AI in human clothing? Who's to say that you're not at a convention of echoborgs studying echoborgs? You've just created another shell to protect yourself from all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Your body may not be vegetating in this scenario, but your mind is.

Of course, on social media we spar with AI every day, in the form of bots trying to friend or follow us. Thankfully, at this point bots strive too hard to please, appealing tp our baser desires (big mammaries for men, military uniforms for women). Once they learn to leaven drag with thrust, we'll all be in trouble.

The blood-freezing part of the play snippet below? The audience volunteer asks "Are we supposed to talk to the machine or to the human?" 

The answer? "They're one and the same."

There may be a little bit of the old Luddite alarmist creeping into my blog of late, especially over the sweeping changes effected by AI, I realize. Like any new tech, it will have its benefits as well as its drawbacks. I've always faced the future with relish. But this one is different. This forecasts the ceding of autonomy in the last castle keep, the castle of the mind. Perhaps it will all come right in the end, once we've made our new adjustments and accommodated our guests. But there are no more moats, no more walls once they're inside. should they prove treacherous, we shall fall as surely as Troy.

"Have I missed the mark, or, like true archer, do I strike my quarry? Or am I prophet of lies, a babbler from door to door?" 

I Am Echoborg at the Arnolfi, Bristol

An interactive AI theatre experience