Not My Base

It’s a con I first witnessed over a decade ago, a message saying Hotmail would start charging for its service unless people signed the attached petition and passed the email on to all their friends. Since then, I’ve seen the scam attributed to practically any free online service, but the truth is, the contents of the spam are very rarely ever true, and its more often the case that someone’s playing dirty tricks with your emotions.

This morning I logged into FaceBook and witnessed an all new low. People, people who I previously considered quite intelligent, were joining a group titled “I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACE BOOK FROM JULY 9TH 2010!“. Now I’m going to resist explaining for the umpteenth time who I can tell just from face value that the group’s a con, because quite frankly, if you’re still falling for this tripe after being raised by the internet itself, I believe we’re past the point of convincing you otherwise.
Now this sort of group isn’t new to FaceBook, but it’s what’s unique about the discovery that really diminishes my faith in humanity, so much so that I’m tempted to give sheep a slightly more elevated status in my appreciation for how gullible and conformist people can be. Curious, I clicked the link in the quest for references. I wanted to know where people were getting the idea from that FaceBook would actually charge £3.99 per month. £3.99. THREE NINETY NINE, as if the ridiculous figure couldn’t make the stench of deceit any more potent. Sorry. Will resume resisting.

So anyway, I step through the door- with a pocket full of posies- to see what blighted doom lay on the other side. The answer? Football. Suddenly everything is explained, and from this point on, I’m going to find it very hard to express myself; I am officially speechless. A single post by the groups creator reads:

UEFA Champions League
This is the group that is devoted to the UEFA Champions league. It has the results, upcoming fixtures, standings, schedules, teams, players, scores and news. We also want to hear the opinions of fans…

OK, so lets take it one step at a time. As I write this, there are currently 2,043 “likes” and 5,325 comments. At first I expected the usual 50:50 split of people whining in hysterics about how they’ll never conform (oh the irony), to people trying to explain that it’s all a hoax and there’s nothing to worry about. Then I re-read the initial post, and thought maybe there’d actually be some discussion about football. Again, I was amazed. Firstly not a single comment about football; people were actually responding to a post they hadn’t even read! Less amazing was that my initial ratio prediction was way off. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off all the way beyond the Urals somewhere. Not a single sceptic to try explaining the hoax. Maybe like me they’ve realised there’s just no hope any more, and they have better things to do (like blog about it - hah!). I was staring at 100% hysteria, examples (named and shamed), I’ve picked out the most amusing, ironic and moronic:

Matt ‘Crisis Mc’ Spooner - FUCK YOU!!!

Johnny Campbell - Yea great idea facebook, charge us millions who use a service that crashes freezes, and can’t connect to brilliant move…not!!!!!, tell you what when you get all these and more issues sorted maybe we will cosider a small fee to use, but at the time being no way, my space is shite bebo is even worse twitter is bollocks, so get a grip facebook i will leave the day you charge, cheerio

Florence Owusu Afriyie - WHILST WE ARE PAYING TO ENHANCE AND LEVEL UP ON OUR GAMESON FB, I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 FROM JULY 2010 TO USE FACE BOOK, NO WAY!!!!!!!!

Nicola Parslow - No way I’d rather spend £48 a year towards visiting friends in the real world!

Michael Soulfunky Grierson - you can kiss my arse you greedy fuckers …i join to make a site called freebook …cunts

Though in humanity’s defence, I have just seen this, and can breathe once more:

Peter Davis - You stupid people, Facebook are NOT charging, over a million conned already by this group. How many of you are going to come away from this fiasco with your credit card details and passwords intact?

Peter Davis, a high-five is being fed-ex’d to you right now.

I WILL NOT PAY £3.99 A MONTH TO USE FACE BOOK FROM JULY 9TH 2010! has over 1 million members, and no where does it explain that FaceBook has or has not made such a proposition, and a quick check on Google (who I refuse to pay 10p per search for, starting next month) shows that FaceBook never did make such a proposal. This is a perfect example of how the masses can form a mountain of opinion from a molehill of something which barely even qualifies as rumour. It makes me cringe.

The truth is, companies like FaceBook and Google make their money by being free for the end user. By being a free service, anyone with an internet connection has access to it, which makes the site more attractive to investors and advertisers, which combined make more revenue than a market equilibrium on the end-user’s side could ever achieve. To charge as much as just a few pennies would be detrimental (think of the huge ratio of users who are probably too young to even have a card to make the online payment with); £3.99 per month is, as 1 million people have just demonstrated, suicide, which is exactly why it would never happen.

Before getting started, I’ll let you watch the video, and then discuss it afterwards:

My first reaction to this was to wonder how much of the scene was scripted. Even the most developed interactive bots still struggle to put a comprehensive sentence together, let alone with the addition of emotion and gesture. Though MicroSoft must be taking this seriously or else the whole project is a waste of time. So my conclusion is that yes, we are looking at real A.I. when we look at Milo, but chances are, the A.I. created so far has been specialised - and is probably only adequate enough - for the purposes of the demo we’ve just watched. Ask him to comment on the weather or your make-up, and well, dare I say a BSoD probably couldn’t be more wished for as a convenient way of ending the awkward silence.

But let’s look at the bigger picture. When I say this, I think, how BIG is this bigger picture? This could end up in numerous places. Imagine a PC game based in a medieval of fantasy setting, similar to Oblivion. You’re about to enter a forest on a mission to rescue some damsel in distress, but you know the forest is teeming with dangerous wildlife, and bandits. At your side, you have not just one squire, but a small band of brothers. Being able to give orders verbally without having to click generic, limited options is one thing, but having to use emotion and gesture to give a pre-battle motivational speech which could entirely sway the mood of the battle, or even convince nearby eavesdroppers to join in (or if done badly, scare them off), that would bring gaming to an whole new level never even imagined.

But where next, outside of the gaming world? A boy that could actually genuinely tell you that your dress looks good and recommends what colour shoes to go with it? A virtual teacher to take over the job of substitute teacher in nursery? A.I. of this level may also have its therapeutic qualities, I’m sure there’s an opportunity for helping autistic children somewhere here.

But I’d say if there was a line, this would be it. The social consequences of anything further could be disastrous. An A.I. bot capable of doing all of the above, would be very human indeed, I can imagine youngsters in a few generations time being brought up unable to distinguish humans in the real world from characters on their TV screen. Loners would become more lonely, as they no longer need friends at all, when they can just load one up from their hard drive.

If your onscreen friend insulted you, you could just delete him, or if you’re tech enough, could reconfigure or script him (or perhaps if the AI’s sophisticated enough, just tell him, and he’d never even accidentally do it again). If you’d like a new friend with a specific personality, you could make one on the spot, and then when you want him to go away, he would do so without asking “why, what’s up?”.

Now imagine the frustration of not being able to do this with real-world friends. I’m starting to think perhaps this could backfire and turn non-autistic people autistic. It seems that with mankind’s ongoing quest for perfection, we’ve given up altogether and moved on to create a super-species which could, in generations to come, ruin everything it is to be human.

And who knows, but why not, while on the topic of humanity… a character capable of performing virtual sexual favours. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the aim of the project after-all; seriously, who could possibly work at MS, on a project such as this in particular AND have a girlfriend? Think about it. If such A.I. ever went commercial, there is no doubt in my mind that there will be a whole load of characters to chose from, as-well as functionality to design your own.

Well, I probably shouldn’t say such things about the team behind this project, and probably speak out of jealousy, as I honestly wish I was there working on this project with them. When I complete my masters in artificial inteligence, I think I found the place where I want to go. This is the current apex of AI technology, without going as far as to rely on robotics.