Bots, people, & the messy in-between

Happy Thanksgiving! This week we dive deep into the uncanny valley, trying to find where a person ends and a bot begins, and how the distinction is perhaps becoming less and less meaningful. Read on to discover the inherent bot-ness of bots, the ways in which we’re already becoming cyborgs, and how to give gifts this holiday season that protect your loved ones’ privacy.

— Matt & Alexis

1: Stop trying to make machines be like people

Last week, Alexis published an essay on a topic she’s been exploring for a while: how we design interactions between humans and machine intelligence. She uses three archetypes — C3PO, Iron Man, and R2D2 — to describe different models for these interactions. C3PO is the model that’s most familiar, where we try to make machines act like humans, and she argues that it’s a fundamentally uninteresting approach that’s doomed to fail most of the time. Iron Man, or using machines to augment ourselves, is a somewhat more compelling model that lets us use computational capabilities to give ourselves superpowers. But where things get deeply weird, delightful, and full of possibility is when we look at R2D2, a model which suggests machine intelligence as a strange companion species that we can treat as a creative collaborator:

“Collaborating with machine intelligence means being able to leverage their particular, idiosyncratic way of seeing and incorporate it into creative processes… it lets us delight in the strangeness of…