Rusty promises

As the year comes to an end, it’s time to drop a list I’ve been noodling on for months: high tech dreams that didn’t come true—breathless tech promises that weren’t kept. 

MyGPT

I want to create my own AI chatbots based on text corpora I specify. That will let me to converse with avatars of large bodies of content, like encyclopedias, user groups, and corporations. (Cf. Conversations with ogregores.) I could also set them to debating with each other. And not least, it would let me to create a personalized AI search engine. The “neeva AI answer” becomes the “meeva AI answer.”

Workplace egregores

I learned about Carolyn Chen’s book about how blurring the line between work and religion in an interview with the CS Monitor. It made me wonder if egregores are more likely to arise in workplaces now that they are becoming more like the home turf of those “autonomous psychic entities that are composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people” (Wiktionary, see also Wikipedia).

The problem with ogregores?

During a discussion about tech & mythology, William Kuskin challenged me to explain what problem I was trying to solve. Here’s an attempt to answer the question. 

Conversations with ogregores

If some organizations have motivations distinguishable from their human constituents (i.e., if they are ogregores), then I would like to talk to them, or at least hear them speak. However, organizations generate so much communication that is hard if not impossible for a single human to grasp. AI chatbots might be one way forward. 

A “mo-cap test” for agency

I mentioned Andrew Pickering’s history of British cybernetics to Clayton Lewis, and he immediately thought of Grey Walter’s tortoises. Clayton pointed me to Valentino Braitenberg’s vehicles. The Wikipedia write-up made me wonder about a Turing Test equivalent for agency: the mo-cap test.