What is Common for Multiple Personality Disorder, BMW and Voice Assists?
‘At TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, BMW today premiered its digital personal assistant for its cars, the aptly named BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant… the announcement comes only a few weeks after BMW also launched its integration with Amazon’s Alexa.
So what can the BMW assistant do? Once you are in a compatible car, you’ll be able to control all of the standard in-car features by voice. Think navigation and climate control (“Hey John, I’m cold”), or check the tire pressure, oil level and other engine settings.
You also can have some more casual conversations (“Hey Charlie, what’s the meaning of life?”), but what’s maybe more important is that the assistant will continuously learn more about you. Right now, the assistant can remember your preferred settings, but over time, it’ll learn more and even proactively suggest changes.”
And now it’s coming…
…Why have three assistants in the car, after all. All that “Hey Alexa,” “Hey Charlie,” “Hey Cortana” is going to get a bit confusing after all. But BMW argues that each one has a specialty. For Alexa that may be shopping while Cortana is all about getting work done and the BMW [assist, Charlie or John] is all about your car…”
Excuse me? 3 voice assists in a single car?
You know what was my very first thought? ‘…Oh, this smells like a classic personality disorder!’
Have you ever heard about a novel ‘The minds of Billy Milligan’ written by Daniel Keyes? This novel ‘…portraying Billy Milligan, the first person in U.S. history acquitted of a major crime by pleading multiple-personality disorder. The novel was originally published in 1981, written by Hugo Award winning author Daniel Keyes, who received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Brooklyn College in 1950.’
Billy Milligan had 10 main personalities, loud and dominant, and ±14 undesirable and quite.
Boy! 24 personalities! 24 different people from extremely sophisticated and educated Englishman Arthur, a lesbian Adalana, who cooks and cleans house for the others, and writes poetry up to Christine, age three little and always scared girl.
Some personalities freely shared consciousness, and doctors quickly learned of their existences. Other 14 alters were no longer allowed “on the spot” (that is, to hold consciousness) and only revealed themselves after Milligan was sent to the hospital.
Do you see it now also? Cortana as a lil scared girl always standing in a corner responsible for your work, wise and grounded lesbian Alexa taking care of your household and ‘extremely sophisticated and educated Englishman ‘ John or Charlie, talking always about your tires and oil pressure.
Main questions for me in the BMW scenario are: Why would you do this to a driver’s mind? and Which assist will learn the driver in the end?
3 different assist means 3 different databases stored on different servers/clouds. Am I right? Please, feel free to challenge me in this, I would be glad to learn more. But this is how I understand it so far.
So, how 3 different systems with 3 different databases (let’s assume purely and slowly exchanging data due to a low level of available now 4G connectivity channels) are learning driver’s habits and preferences? Though collecting data and learning from this is, as far as I know, a key to the success of any assist (as a machine learning basic principles).
So who is learning? The one which is currently in a ‘spotlight’ and active? Will Charlie share collected data and learned driver’s habits with Alexa? How Cortana (responsible for work to be done) gonna tell to John her learnings that the pack is going on a business trip on a daily base so the car has to be refueled?
So yeah… go get one new triple-minded BMW. But remember… there is no treatment for Dissociative identity disorder. And you never know who will step into the light spot when a server backend gonna fail or get hacked.
(Dramatic music in the background. Curtains closing)
PS: I hope this solution is just a stepping stone on the way to merging assistants into one personality but for now, it looks creepy and opening Pandora Box of edge cases and questions.
PSS: just in case the movie based on this story is called “Split”
