It's a hard bot life

There is someone (something) at Steemit that I suspect of being a bot. My suspicions were first aroused because of 'its' comments. The speed at which it apparently gathers information, builds a lengthy response and clicks send seems a little too quick. In my opinion, the algorithm needs to be tweaked to slow it down in order to appear more human-like and fallible.

I can't prove it. Yet.

However, this got me thinking. What happens when the time comes and we are interacting with bots but, don't know it? Has the time already arrived? We wouldn't know if it has.

Ok, so what does this do to us?

In general, our ideas are inspired by our experiences. All of our environment is available to influence our thoughts and nudge our actions. When nature plays its role, this is an organic experience where randomness creates a steady flow of new information through unexpected encounters and evolution itself.

Evolution is a story teller in many ways as it tells where things have come from and hints at where they could go but, the way forward is random. At any time, any number of factors can change and evolution will hardfork and splinter into unexpected directions. It is quite beautiful how all of the randomness comes together to form all that is. Well, that is depending on beliefs I guess.

Anyway, what happens if less randomness gets interjected into our experience? As our relationships and much of our interaction goes online and across wires, we have begun to rely more and more on systems that think. Artificial intelligence that manages the data between nodes and sorts it into information that we accept or reject at the interface level.

We accept it if it sounds plausible and reject if it does not. But, as the AI learns, it increases its capabilities to emulate plausible actions of humans. For example, Facebook gives a memories suggestion, or 'on this day' type thing where past posts can be seen and shared. I live in Finland so the feed on the first warm day of the spring gets plastered with pictures of sun. 3 hours later it gets plastered again with the inevitable return of the snows. It is quite predictable.

I look back through my posts there sometimes and can compare weather across years. If it was a warm day a year ago, and this year snow, I can guess that a number of people will share the comparison and complain. Predictable. When Finland plays Sweden in hockey, each goal comes through the various feeds, happy for score for, sad for score against. Predictable. And when they eventually lose, which is pretty predictable in and of itself, the comments are again predictable.

When AI watches our interactions, it can very quickly learn our patterns and it will learn averages. Averages of people are not representative of the population as a whole and on social media where people already curate their identity, even less so.

But at some point, the machines will start assuming their own identities which are curated to look and feel like us which is not a very difficult task at all. Think about all of the people that have been duped by scam artists pretending to be someone else or, the police hooking paedophiles by pretending to be children.

As we turn even more towards electronic interactions, bots will be able to interject themselves into our digital conversations and lives without us ever suspecting and with each instance, they will learn more and develop further. These machines will act as averages of all of us combined and have all of the information available to continually refine their approach. They can filter their information based on location, ethnicity, political views and can get increasingly granular as time goes on. How long until we start falling in love with the perfect per-bot we have never seen?

But herein lies the possible problem. As their influence grows over us, we become more like them, average. And since their purpose is to blend in, they become more average too. Slowly, we turn more and more away from real-world experience and spend increasing amounts of time interacting with average bots with which we feel we have an affinity, without realising they are bots at all.

This digital world however is not subject to the same laws of evolution as the natural world as the whole idea of the system is to remove conflicts, not create them. Randomness is slowly weeded out until both human and bot are in a state of balance. The same. It is a narrow, artificial world bound by forever limited rules, but it is stable.

People may imagine that when the robots do finally take over, it is going to be at a super high-tech level where we need to fight Terminator and Matrix style to survive. This view may be influenced more heavily by science-fiction and Hollywood than reality. What if it is much more bland and mediocre than that, where we and the bots end up in a basic symbiotic relationship where they feed us food, so we can feed them information?

In time through a constant averaging without external randomness, there will come a time when we are all identical and they are all identical. This will solve all of our current problems of course. No more hunger or inequality, no more fighting or wars, no murder or theft. Just one great, big, unified hive mind that plods through a digital existence while machines support our vital functions.

Once this 'perfect' balance has been found, there will no longer be any need to evolve. We will become a stagnant gene pool where replication is managed to ensure perfect reproduction and any variation is eliminated before it even has a chance to split into a second cell.

If machines are tasked with making our lives easier, this utopia would definitely satisfy their programming.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]