Earlier in the year my partner Ron Nief and I put our annual Parents’ Advisory on the World Wide Web. These are 20 questions that new parents would have to answer over the next 20 years. One of them was, “Can I have a virtual dog for my next birthday?”
Well, a virtual dog sounds awfully sci-fi, and I can’t say for sure that they’ll be worthy presents in just 20 years. But I’m fairly sure they’re coming.
They’ll look and feel and act as much like a real dog as possible. They’ll speak English (or French or Greek or Chinese). Above all, they’ll be programmed so that, the longer they “know” you and are members of your household, the more they can learn about you. In other words, they’ll be programmed so that they can learn new things on their own.
Now you might object that no red-blooded American boy or girl would ever want such a thing. Yet the MIT social scientist Sherry Turkle recently noted that her kids, upon seeing a bunch of turtles at a zoo, didn’t care whether they were virtual or real. In fact, they were virtual, and the kids loved them.
What’s next — robot live-in lovers?
But here’s what’s really scary: These algorithms, however they’re housed, can actually learn on their own. They can change their own programming. Thus it’ll probably be a good idea for your great-grandchildren to get along with their devices. You don’t want them getting sore at you, because they can do all sorts of things without your own programming permission—like the scheming computer HAL in the movie 2001 Space Odyssey, which now seems less fantastic than ever.
I’m Tom McBride, and that’s my perspective.
