Artificial companions as a new kind of interface to the future internet

www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~yorick Artificial Companions as a new kind of interface to the future Internet This research report seeks to connect the future of the Internet to a new, even though relatively developed, technology; that of computer speech and language and its embodiment in a concept I shall call an Artificial Companion. I will argue here that such entities are coming into being and that they will change fairly rapidly from the rather primitive entities now available, largely in Japan, to being entities that will lead to profound social and psychological consequences; they will also constitute a new and much more personal way of dealing with information and its so-called ‘overload ’ upon all of us. This is not a paper in social science, but rather in speculative technology: however, the underlying technologies exist already and I will briefly describe them, along with some account of the current debates over their consequences. The crucial move in the paper will be when, after describing Artificial Companions, real and possible, I go on to argue that they can be seen as links to the Internet, at least for vulnerable classes of people (the old, the young) but perhaps for all of us when faced with the coming torrent of information on the Internet, particularly information about ourselves. Most citizens will not be able to deal with this at all, let alone control or ‘own ’ it, without some assistance, and one form that assistance will take will be the persistent, personal, Internet agent, or Companion. An assumption of the paper is that the jury is still out on whether the Internet leads to greater social inclusivity or not. The modern optimistic tradition (Castells, 1996) is that it does, and one can point to the almost total penetration of modern societies by the phone, and then the mobile phone, and assume that the Internet will be the same within some relatively short period. There is increasingly little distinction between mobile phone interfaces and the Internet, as they become screen interfaces to the World Wide Web, and as the Internet begins to take over more and more of phone call transmission using the VOIP protocol and forms of the interface pioneered b