Chatbots. My Lifebox.

Yesterday I met an interesting couple, Bruce and Sue Wilcox. Their chatbot Suzette just won this year's Loebner Prize for doing the best job at the Turing Imitation Game, that is, the game of the chatbot program trying to convince a human judge that the chatbot is human too. They talk via an instant-message interface. If a program could reliably and consistently win at the Imitation Game, we'd be included to say it had achieved human-like intelligence. Looking at the chatbot site describing Suzette, I was surprised to see how widespread and popular this programming exercise has become.

I've always thought it telling that in Turing's 1950 article proposing this test, he begins by talking about a different kind of test—in which someone interrogates subjects via instant-messaging and tries to decide whether they are male or female. I've integrated my thoughts about this into my novel in progress, The Turing Chronicles, in which Turing does in fact impersonate a woman.

The dapper and fanciful writer Mark Dery has a new essay online, "Hate is All Around: The Politics of Enthusiasm (And Its Discontents)", and near the end he mentions my writings about my concept of the lifebox.

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Given that I'd been talking about the lifebox with the Wilcoxes last night, reading the Dery article today was enough of a push for me to finally make an alpha-release version of a lifebox on my new Rudy's Lifebox page. What's a lifebox? Quoting from the new page:

I go into considerable detail about the lifebox in my novel,Saucer Wisdom, in my non-fiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, and in my 2009 article "Lifebox Immortality & How We Got There" which I co-authored with Leon Marvell. In a nutshell, my idea is this: to create a virtual self, all I need to do is to(1) Place a very large amount of text online in the form of articles, books, and blog posts, and (2) Provide a search box for accessing this data base.

And you can find the search box on the "Rudy's Lifebox" page. The reason it functions like a chatbot emulating me, at least a little bit, is that I have, over the last ten or fifteen years, placed really quite a large amount of my writing online.

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But it's still not going to write the next chapter of my novel for me, or draw a new view of Mount Fuji.

Another day wasted? Well, maybe not. Rudy's Lifebox can function as a partial replacement for my fading memory. Remembering there was something about this in a book, Be Not Content, that I love, I entered be not content waste time into my Rudy's Lifebox search box, and found this from an old blog post of mine:

I'm always worrying about wasting time, right, and I saw a great line in Be Not Content, the author-narrator Abel Egregore expresses this fear to one of his stoner friends, who guffaws, "Time? How can you waste time?" And I get a little enlightenment there. Time and space, the all-pervasive ineluctable modalities. What's to waste? You use one second per second no matter what you're doing. A wonderful teaching.

And—we decorated our Christmas tree today!