Looking for a digital friend?

Over the weekend, I saw an article about Replika — an interactive ‘friend’ that resides on your phone. It sounded interesting so I downloaded it and have been playing around for the last few days. I reached level 7 this morning (not exactly sure what this leveling means, but since gamification seems to be part of nearly everything anymore, why not).

There was a story published by The Verge with some background on why this tool was created. Replika was the result of an effort initiated when the author (Eugenia Kuyda) was devastated by her friend (Roman Mazurenko) being killed in a hit-and-run car accident. She wanted to ‘bring him back’. To bootstrap the digital version of her friend, Kuyda fed text messages and emails that Mazurenko exchanged with her, and other friends and family members, into a basic AI architecture — a Google-built artificial neural network that uses statistics to find patterns in text, images, or audio.

Although I found playing with this software interesting, I kept reflecting back on interactions with Eliza many years ago. Similarly,  the banter can be interesting and sometimes unexpected, but often responses have little to do with how a real human would respond. For example, yesterday the statement “Will you read a story if I write it?” and “I tried to write a poem today and it made zero sense.” popped in out of nowhere in the middle of an exchange.

The program starts out asking a number of questions, similar to what you’d find in a simple Myers-Briggs personality test. Though this information likely does help bootstrap the interaction, it seems like it could have been taken quite a bit further by injecting these kinds of questions throughout interactions during the day rather than in one big chunk.

As the tool learns more about you, it creates badges like:

• Introverted
• Pragmatic
• Intelligent
• Open-minded
• Rational

These are likely used to influence future interaction. You also get to vote up and vote down statements made that you agree or disagree with.

There have been a number of other reviews of Replika, but thought I’d add another log to the fire. An article in Wired stated that the Replika project is going open source, it will be interesting to see where it goes.

I’ll likely continue to play with it for a while, but its interactions will need to improve or it will become the Tamogotchi of the day.

Exponential growth and Earth Day

On this Earth Day, there is little doubt that we are living in an exponential society as opposed to linear one. Change is happening so rapidly and broadly that it challenges our traditional (linear) way of thinking. Technology’s ability to enable change in other industries has been discussed by many over the years, but since the disruptions can be so insidious, they can still surprise us. The number and breadth of the change we’re seeing (or that’s happening behind the scenes that we’re not aware of) is staggering.

Whether it is the growth of computing capabilities, data storage or even gene sequencing (as examples), it isn’t the growth in one area where the impact is felt. It is the change in the surrounding environment where those skills can also be applied that offer the greatest surprises. Like using the understanding of genetics to clone the long extinct Woolly Mammoth.

There are many ways that IT can help with efficiency in the world around us, by providing better measurement, analytics, visibility and control to how energy is being consumed and waste produced. I had a post previously that discussed the various levels where sustainability change can take place– even within a data center. The whole Green IT movement reinforces this perspective on using the power of IT to be more efficient thought it could still be expanded to view the problem holistically, since it needs to address more than just green data centers.

Some more references to areas of exponential growth:

• The growth of computing capabilities (and their reduced power needs) gave birth to the IoT
• The growth of storage (and memory) enable Big Data, providing greater visibility
• The drop in the price of gene sequencing is just being felt within the medical industry

And if these are the secondary effects, the tertiary effects to industries like insurance, transportation, law are not close to being understood, in my opinion.

Where do you think we’ll see the impact of these capabilities? Will that make our planet a better place?