Ok all. Here’s the deal. I have tons to share, but I can’t share it yet as I’m waiting for confirmation on a few things. Plus I’m finishing MAPSS. Every moment. Every Day. I have a week and a day until my thesis is due. Two weeks after that everything else is due (less actually). And everything that I need to tell you all about (almost) is hanging on me finishing. So that takes total priority. I’m probably not going to blog at all other than the dates in the title bar.

Once I pass those dates, things will change fast, and a lot of news will be flowin’.

In the mean time, I’m getting my phone back from R-Shack. Except it wasn’t my originial phone. And dispite a promise that they would back up the data, they didn’t. So I lost a number of picture (which is a lesson in itself). But more importantly, I think I lost everyone’s contact number (this is especially true for MAPSS people). So when you get the chance, give me a call and say hi! so I can get you back in the phone. Conversely, drop me an e-mail with your digits.

Miss talking to you all. Will write once I’m past the 18th.

- Matt

1. Are you alive?
   yes. just completely swamped with work.
2. What’s up?
   working on the thesis and job related stuff.
3. What’s the thesis status?
   it’s going to be done. my draft is due at the end of the week.
   
4. Why haven’t you e-mailed?
   see above
   
5. Why haven’t you called?
   phone broke. radio shack is repairing it. radio shack gave me a loaner phone. that one broke too. they aren’t giving me a new loaner.
   
6. What about the job possibilities?
   Blue tie. MCC. RIT.
   
7. What’s you’re status?
   stressed
   

Things are moving along. I’m trying a new style of writing where I’m handwriting all notes and then begin typing. This seems to be helping tremendously.

One important point that Sherry Turkle raises in Life on Screen is that bots and other Artificial Intelligences (AI) can be thought of as interfaces (Turkle, 1995: In particular 102-124). Any bot can be programmed to interface with and communicate to and from backend databases. TinyMUD’s famed Julia bot is a prime example (Turkle, 1995: 89-90). Julia would, among other function, continually update a map of the MUD space, providing directions to different locations. She also served as a sort of e-mail system, storing and delivering user to user messages.

Yesterday, I encountered another bot acting as a front end interface. In this case, the nameless bot was part of Chase Bank’s automated phone service system. This nameless bot, while given a female voice, had little to no personality and few trappings of ‘humanness.’ Unlike Julia, the Chase bot was given no name. “She”¹ also didn’t appear have any colloquial responses, as opposed to Julia who can be downright sassy.

The most thought-provoking part of my interaction with the Chase bot, came about a minute into the interaction. As part of her interaction script, the bot stated:

By the way, if you know the option you want, you don’t have to wait until I finish speaking to say it. I don’t mind if you interrupt me.

I was more than a little taken aback by this. I already knew that this was the case, and in fact have known to talk over the bot for a while. But this was the first time a bot had given me permission to do this. And that started to make me think about how interacting with a service bot changed the cultural rules of the interaction. First and foremost, the notion of civility is more or less removed. It’s easy to see how, in these types of interactions, manners become inefficient. Interacting with an emotionless entity that doesn’t understand rudeness removes the possibility of abuse from the encounter.

Ironically, this eerily mirrors how robots were treated in R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the play that introduced the term “robot.” In Karl Capek’s play, the heroine, Helena, is first confronted by a robot secretary who appears to both her and the audience as completely human. To prove the secretary’s true nature the factory supervisor orders her to be disassembled and her parts brought to Helena for inspection. While Sulla, the secretary has no reaction to these orders, Helena is horrified at this notion:

Helena: You would have here killed?
Domain: You can’t kill machines.(Capek and Selver, 1923: 16)

The robot has no care about its own existence and no concept of fair or unfair treatment. And as Capek notes through the voice of the factory supervisor Domain, this is key to their efficiency:

Domain: Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. In this way he rejected everything that makes a man more expensive. In fact he rejected man and made the Robot.(Capek and Selver, 1923: 13)

Approximately 85 years after R.U.R. was first published we see how prescient the work was. Capek’s Robots were a thinly veiled allegory for the ultimately alienated and expendable proletariat. The Chase Bot fits this description perfectly. No personality, not even a name, and it gives you the permission to be rude to it, informing you that like Sulla, it doesn’t mind abuse.

Until this point my focus on Bots as interface has been focused on situations where they might maintain the illusion of humanness. However, my encounter with the Chase bot and in particular how identifying it as an AI allows it to be mistreated under typical conversational practices has led to question that theory. Perhaps, the promise of an efficient interaction is enough to allow the removal of human interaction. Perhaps.

¹ - I begrudgingly apply female gender designations because this bot was given a neutral female voice and I have found that constantly referring to bots as it tends to become difficult to read/parse.

Bibliography

Capek, Karel, and Selver, Paul. 1923. R.U.R. (Rossum’s universal robots) A play in three acts and an epilogue. London: H. Milford Oxford University Press.
Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Today, while mowing the lawn at Dre’s house I had an interesting experience. As I stopped to take a break, I noticed Lila, one of Dre’s cats, sitting in the kitchen window. When I walked to the window to say hi, Lila appeared to get very skittish¹. She shifted position and began to furiously smell the window. At first this behavior puzzled me. As far as I could tell, I wasn’t making any motion that could be interpreted as threatening. So what was causing this reaction?

Then it occurred to me: Lila was sniffing so furiously because she couldn’t smell me through the window. So, for her, a key sensory identifier was missing. Perhaps she was experiencing cognitive dissonance or some feline version of Freud’s Uncanny. Either way, I suspect that she didn’t know how to resolve the fact that the entity in front of her looked like me but had no smell. I had essentially become a “bot” to her: something that appear to simulate myself without manifesting all of the necessary components to be me.

¹ - Admittedly Lila is often very skittish, so I could be completely misinterpreting her behavior.

Today I made the mistake of updating Yahoo!Messenger. While v7 seems to work quite nicely, it removes the “follow this chatter” feature that has been so useful to me. And with that my research capabilities ground to a halt. The reason is that without that feature, I can’t track a bots movement through different rooms.

Thankfully, after a bit of googling, I came up with:

http://www.oldversion.com/

Old Version collects and archives previous versions of popular public software products. And within minutes I was able to download the version of Messenger that I’ve been using.

So should you, in the course of your research, come up with need to track down a previous software version, I’d start your search at Old Version.

Sept 26 - I must file for graduation
Oct 14 - My draft thesis is due
Nov 4 - Final thesis due
Nov 18 - All remaining grades are due
Dec 2 - Bound thesis due
Dec 9 - Pass go and collect diploma

I think I can do this!

Dre and I got back from Vermont last night. We took a brief vacation there to visit law school friends of hers and the Vermont Raptor Center.

I’ve got a month to get my rough thesis draft in.

And I’ve yet to receive my back vaction pay from Kodak.

I’m back in Chicago for a few days on a quest for books. As I mentioned I struck out in Rochester and so I decided to take a road trip. Tomorrow I return to the Reg and to $1 Latte’s. Woo Hoo. And hopefully find the references that I’ve been looking for!

That’s the theme of my life. I’ve been trying to track down a couple books that I need for my thesis. So far I haven’t had a lot of luck. While some are held by the U of R, I can’t currently get at them. So now I’m checking the libraries of other local colleges. It’s a brave new world we live in, and most card catalogs are online. I do get jealous of today’s teens who have far more immediate access to information than I ever did. I think that, at least from the access to information standpoint and that’s help in learning, it’s a great time to be growing up.

I’ve put in for a couple temp jobs a google that a friend hipp’d me too. And I’ve submitted for a few more jobs. As Tom Petty sings, the waiting is the hardest part. Starry Nites jsut posted for more jobs, if I don’t get something within the next week or so, I’m probably going to go for that.