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2014 | Buch

Personality Capture and Emulation

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Personality Capture and Emulation is the gateway to an amazing future that actually may be achieved, enabling the preservation and simulation of human personalities at progressively higher levels of fidelity. This challenge is no longer the province merely of uninhibited visionaries, but has become a solid field of research, drawing upon a wide range of information technologies in human-centered computing and cyber-human systems. Even at modest levels of accomplishment, research in this emerging area requires convergence of cognitive, social, and cultural sciences, in cooperation with information engineering and artificial intelligence, thus stimulating new multidisciplinary perspectives. Therefore this book will inspire many specific research and development projects that will produce their own valuable outcomes, even as the totality of the work moves us closer to a major revolution in human life. Will it ever really be possible to transfer a human personality at death to a technology that permits continued life? Or will people come to see themselves as elements in a larger socio-cultural system, for which a societal information system can provide collective immortality even after the demise of individuals? A large number and variety of pilot studies and programming projects are offered as prototypes for research that innovators in many fields may exploit for the achievement of their own goals. Together, they provide an empirical basis to strengthen the intellectual quality of several current debates at the frontiers of the human and information sciences.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter
1. Background
Abstract
Leading computer scientists as well as technology visionaries have predicted that eventually human personalities will be archived and simulated through information systems. This chapter anchors those ideas in the history of the personology movement at Harvard University in the mid twentieth century and in the parallel questionnaire research tradition in social psychology and sociology. Despite the faded reputation of psychoanalysis, and the rise of cognitive science, depth psychology in modernized form must be central to this novel response to death. Administration of afterlife questions from the General Social Survey to members of a radical group show how cultures and subcultures both shape individuals. Thus, capture must involve not only the individual, but to some degree the surrounding society as well, and emulation must benefit other people. Five scenarios for the future of personality capture and emulation range from radical to modest: (1) Transmigration: the transfer of human personalities to a new substrate at high fidelity, (2) Apotheosis: creation of an idealized functioning model of an individual person, (3) Progeny: representing a person through multiple agents during the lifetime as well as afterward, (4) Incorporation: providing partial immortality by embedding a person into the collective memory of the community, and (5) Personalization: adjustment of an individual’s tools to reflect personal beliefs, values, and skills.
William Sims Bainbridge
2. Massive Questionnaires
Abstract
Traditional political scientists, sociologists, and social psychologists had developed a standard survey research methodology that asked a relatively small number of questions of a large number of people, in order to represent the population at large and to test global theories. Personality capture will often reverse that equation, at the extreme asking tens of thousands of questions of a single individual. As illustrated by the MACH scales, influential social psychology questionnaire item batteries based on the writings of Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, often in the past items were derived from the thinking of a very few people. Now, online ethnographic questionnaires, containing open-ended items where respondentswrite their own text, can enlist hundreds or thousands of people to create a very large questionnaire containing a wide range of viewpoints. Illustrations offered include ones on beliefs about life after death (90 items), adjectives describing a person (1,600 items), and predictions concerning the world in the year 2100 (2,000 items). The chapter also shows how computer administration of large questionnaires, employing a well-designed user interface, can be a practical means for completing them comfortably, over a number of response sessions.
William Sims Bainbridge
3. Mobile and Ubiquitous Capture
Abstract
Prior to the twenty-first century, essentially all research on human personalities was conducted by means of interviews, questionnaires, and laboratory studies, rather than collecting data out in the wide world that humans inhabit. Aside from the artificiality imposed by these methods, they also limited the amount of data that could be obtained about any given individual. Now that millions of people carry mobile devices, we can begin to escape those limitations, by carefully developing the range of new methods that have become possible. This chapter reports a landmark study that administered a traditional 100-item psychological questionnaire via an Android app, within 1 week obtaining data from 3,267 respondents. The items were self-descriptions designed to measure the Big Five personality dimensions, and a factor analysis limiting the results to five dimensions confirmed that they did. But relaxing this limit revealed fully 15 dimensions of personality. The chapter embeds this main study in pilot studies, including one in which people rate each other in terms of the Big Five, others expanding the Semantic Differential to record a wide range of qualities, and one using a pocket computer to record 46,000 ratings by one individual, categorizing 2,000 situations in terms of 20 emotions plus the three traditional dimensions of the Semantic Differential. The chapter concludes with demonstration studies of how a Nintendo 3DS portable game machine can be used to administer the equivalent of intelligence tests in the field, and provide the photographs to rate a person’s possessions in terms of the Semantic Differential.
William Sims Bainbridge
4. Recommender Systems
Abstract
Integration of two existing research traditions, one in computer science and the other in social science, could become the basis for a new convergent discipline of potentially revolutionary significance, cultural science. Recommender systems are a well-developed part of online commerce, targeting advertising to specific customers on the basis of the individual’s probable preferences, but they have not yet seen much use across the social sciences. At the same time, quantitative research methodologies for studying culture, such as preference questions in sociological questionnaires and anthropological databases like the Human Relations Area Files are generally ignored outside very narrow academic communities. Recommender systems are already well-prepared to emulate an individual’s preferences, but only within the narrow range of the particular commercial products covered. Pilot studies using the Netflix database show that it is possible to categorize movies in culturally-relevant terms. Other studies using data from questionnaires administered to college students show how preferences for academic subjects can be connected to gender and political orientation, and factor analyzed to reveal academic subcultures. Food preferences and preferences for fiction reading, plus studies of preference concordance across friendships and within ethnic groups, illustrate a range of other directions that a new, rigorous cultural science could explore.
William Sims Bainbridge
5. Cognitive Abilities
Abstract
Psychologists generally recognize that the century-old measure called IQ or intelligence quotient is a gross over-simplification, and individuals differ in many ways in their abilities to process information and take appropriate action. It is difficult if not futile to separate an individual’s personality from intellectual skills, because the two interact closely to define character and determine behavior. Central to both is consciousness, which is not some mystical concept but the very real functioning of short-term working memory, mediating between instantaneous perception and long-term memory. Human differences are illustrated by a pilot study contrasting an individual with average working memory with one who may be considered to have eidetic or photographic memory. Consideration of two kinds of neural networks, back-propagation and direct reinforcement, show how artificial intelligence could emulate the intellectual skills of a particular person. Two other demonstration studies show how an individual’s skills could be captured inside an expert system. Capture and emulation of a wide range of forms of skillful cognition demand development of appropriate theories, research methods, and emulation technologies, as well as approaches to integrate them.
William Sims Bainbridge
6. Autobiographical Memories
Abstract
In contrast to several other aspects of human personality, the individual’s memories of lifetime experiences have not been the focus of intensive social science research in recent years, even though a strong tradition of cognitive science research on episodic memories exists. It should be possible to remedy this gap by the use of information technology to collect, manage, and retrieve information from individual human beings. For example, artificial intelligence boswells can be created to interview people about their memories, assemble them into a biography, and answer questions about the individual’s life. This chapter begins with the example of educational software that uses very simple programming techniques to simulate interviews with members of a radical group, The Process Church of the Final Judgment. Then it highlights the classic work from around 1983 by Janet Kolodner, who created a system called CYRUS that simulated the autobiographic memories of two American diplomats, after which it critiques Roger Brown’s concept of flashbulb memories. After establishing this background, the chapter delves into a vast trove of written descriptions collected via an online survey, to which thousands of people contributed their memories of a personally significant residential move. The conclusion considers how existing oral history projects combine the memories of many individuals, and imagine how they might be expanded greatly through application of citizen social science assisted by teams of AI boswells.
William Sims Bainbridge
7. Text Analysis
Abstract
Natural language processing (NLP) is an advanced yet somewhat stagnant field in computer science, so this chapter considers its limitations, both current and future, at the same time as exploring its applications in personality capture and emulation. Historical linguistics is the study of the history of language, and using language variations to study other aspects of history, thereby establishing a basis for understanding the modern situation. Very early in the history of NLP, software called General Inquirer performed computerized analysis of text to count the use of words that belong to categories significant in the classification schemes of standard social-psychological theories, but theory-based NLP has been overshadowed by brute force methods. The chapter illustrates the value of theory by using General Inquirer and a specially developed lexicon method to analyze a sample of influential books that expressed the personalities of their authors. The idea of author emulation is then sketched, starting with the idea of editing existing novels to give them different topics while retaining the authors’ styles. The world of etymologist and pre-existential philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, then illustrates the challenge of achieving death transcendence by means of computer processing of text documents, unless artificial intelligence can be advanced to the point at which it really does duplicate human mental processes.
William Sims Bainbridge
8. Virtual Worlds
Abstract
Internet-based virtual environments, such as the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game World of Warcraft or the non-game Second Life, are excellent environments for both capturing and emulating human personalities. The fact that these are not unreal, but actual regions of the real world is illustrated by the case of Sean Smith, one of the US diplomats killed in Benghazi in 2012, who was also the diplomat named “Vile Rat” in EVE Online, one of the highest quality and most innovative MMOs. Data on avatar statistics from World of Warcraft and Battleground Europe show how human behavior is automatically recorded in MMOs, in rather fine detail. A survey of the specialized MMO wikis for manygameworlds show how collaborative information resources also capture personalities, in the form of knowledge and patterns of interest, and providing advice to other human beings is already a form of emulation. The chapter concludes with a demonstration pilot project in which an avatar based on a girl who died in 1870 can collect, assemble, and re-programgestures in Second Life, recognizing that physical movements express much about a personality. Even if digital immortality remains beyond our technical reach, the methods outlined in this book can be used to design personalized information systems or semi-autonomous artificial intelligence assistants, and perhaps even to develop new forms of education and psychotherapy that help a person evolve through improved self-emulation.
William Sims Bainbridge
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Personality Capture and Emulation
verfasst von
William Sims Bainbridge
Copyright-Jahr
2014
Verlag
Springer London
Electronic ISBN
978-1-4471-5604-8
Print ISBN
978-1-4471-5603-1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5604-8

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