Will Max Headroom finally be a reality?
By Ryan Tuttle on Saturday, April 7th, 2007
I know many of you have been waiting on this since they canceled the series (Max Headroom) in ‘88. Here is something that just hit on Znet that brings us one step closer:
“Researchers from Illinois and Florida are developing a networking system which will create virtual representations of real people to improve our knowledge. They will use artificial intelligence and natural language processing software to enable us to interact with these avatars. The goal of the project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is to give us the possibility to interact with these virtual representations as if they were the actual person, complete with the ability to understand and answer questions. We should see the results at the beginning of 2008 — if the researchers succeed.”
The concept of virtual teachers is really cool, but I would imagine it’s a stone’s throw* away for more advanced entertainment applications… which, of course, is a hop-skip-and-a-jump* away from advancements in marketing.
*technical terms for iterations in close succession.
Do you think they’ll make it so that he stutters every so-so-so-so often?
Your funny little joke actual brings up a good point. I do think as AI progresses, programmers will build in some sort of human flaws. It will be a lot less creepy if the computer takes a second to respond in certain situations. A user may even feel more confident that the computer understood a difficult question if it responses “Let me think about that for a minute.”, instead of answering right away.
Some of these AI computer responders are already showing up in my AIM chat program. These ‘Bots’ are named;
moviefone
shoppingbuddy
AOLyellowpages
If they aren’t in your AIM now you could add them as a pal and start communication with them! The shoppingbuddy is elementary but, you can tell it you are looking for electronics between the prices of $40-$60. It will respond with a database query type response that links to online stores, in the future I expect it to be more ‘Human’.