My Service Bot from Techsploits column by Annalee Newitz in Metro."[Peter] Plantec's book is a guide for creating what he calls V-people: social bots that businesses can use to replace service workers or game players online. Programmed Ask Jeeves-style to answer questions in a way that sounds natural and to deploy friendly facial expressions at the right moments, V-people are the bank tellers and customer-service reps of the future. According to Plantec and researchers like Cory Kidd at MIT, people warm up to V-people fairly quickly after their initial moment of disbelief that the person talking to them and smiling is just a program. Kidd conducted a series of psychological experiments last year showing that people respond to animated and automated creatures in almost exactly the same way they respond to humans..... Plantec writes in his book that his main concern about the ethics of using V-people in customer service situations is that users tend to credit machines with more honesty and innocence than they do their fellow humans. In trial runs of his V-people, he reports that users 'took what the V-person said as truth or error but never considered that the character was trying to deceive them. ... After all, how could a virtual human have ulterior motives ... how could they have any motives at all?" [Metro 01-15-04]
posted by Marcus Zillman |
5:26 AM
