The Man Machine — could Westworld become a reality?

There’s a myth about Teutonic techno titans Kraftwerk that during their heyday they would perform simultaneous gigs in different cities. Each performance would be represented by one human member of the band supplemented by three of their iconic robots. The audience apparently couldn’t tell the difference between human and automaton. No surprise really, given the band had spent the best part of its career trying to emulate robots both in sound and physical form. The slow human transition from man to machine had been realised.

This was all nonsense, but as with all things: ‘when the legend becomes fact, print the legend’.

Questions of authenticity in art aside, this raises an interesting quasi-philosophical question. How, as humans, do we react to machines? Moreover, how should we react? Famed producer, ex-Roxy member, and self-proclaimed ‘non-musician’ Brian Eno once (and this is true) developed a rudimentary programme to sequence musical frames, set it running then popped out for lunch. When he came back a recording was present — all produced by his computer, a set of pre-determined algorithms and the result of random intervention. Although highly listenable and organic in sound (at least to my biased ears), the act of production was the art itself. If we strip away the context we have an emotive piece of music that resonates on a very human level.

The Pinocchio effect

So, where am I going with this? Artificial Intelligence (AI) and bots are both current tabloid term du jours. The Government’s new report on robotics and AI proved to be catnip for some of the more sensationalist news outlets, claiming this was the first sign of a robot uprising and that AI would steal our jobs.

Again, this is nonsense, but the truth is we’ve been interacting with technology — and moreover emoting with robots — for much longer than we realise, and I feel we’re innately programmed (excuse the pun) to project our human understandings onto them.

I recently attended a bot developer meet-up in East London and met the conversation designer behind Pegg — the first ever accounting bot launched by Sage earlier this year. The whole point of having a person specifically tasked with designing conversations, denoting syntax and giving the bot a tone of voice was to make the bot easier and more enjoyable for users to interact with. To give it personality.

A conversation designer is therefore tasked with ascribing humanness to a machine. For me, the upshot is that it’s not that a bot wants to be a real boy, but that we, as users, want it to be a real boy.

I’ve been watching the new JJ Abrams reboot series of Westworld — without going down the dystopian rabbit hole of robot hosts running amok around a theme park, it’s notable that there is a character who is a conversation and narrative designer, who ascribes humanness where we want to seek humanness. There’s a particularly telling moment when a human guest asks whether a host is robot, or human, the response… “if you can’t tell, does it matter?” This indistinguishable nature is the future of bots.

Let’s just ignore the idea of robots going berserk. It’s not going to happen.

By Nik Jeffries (@njeffries), Account Manager, Bite