By Dick Pelletier
Say goodbye to TV remote controls and the computer mouse and
keyboard. By as early as 2010 to 2015, a computerized image of your
choice displayed on wall-size screens throughout the house will be
available to hear your commands and speak to you in perfect human
voice. 
Selecting TV programs will be easy. Turn on any display screen
in the house and your personal avatar appears. “Hi Dick, what can I
do for you?” “I want to see Sunday’s ‘Desperate Housewives’.” “Here
it is Dick, and I won’t reveal the ending, enjoy.”
Avatars will also interface with PCs, which will signal the end
for most of our mouse-clicking and typing. Simply say, “Computer,
display last night’s email; good, reply to my sister, tell her
Friday’s OK; and invite the family to my house next Saturday for
dinner; now ring David in Japan on Skype.”
Most people think that interactive systems like this are a long
ways off, but two trends are quickening the pace. Improved
speech-recognition and interactive voice-response systems now mimic
normal-spoken language more accurately – and today’s computer
graphics can create 3-D avatars with an uncanny “real” look.
Continue Reading
Recently Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute created
an artificial intelligence program to run within the platform of
Second Life. The researchers are studying the interactions that
occur with real people 
through
their avatars. The RPI students created
the program to maneuver the avatar and understand some fairly
straight forward questions, asked in English.
Operators of Second Life don’t seem concerned about
synthetic agents lurking in their world. John Lester, Boston
operations manager for Linden Lab, said the San Francisco-based
company sees a fascinating opportunity for AI to evolve. “I think
the real future for this is when people take these AI-controlled
avatars and let them free in ‘Second Life,’” Lester said, ” ... let
them randomly walk the grid.”
With AI characters within a grid of tens of thousands of active
users the social experimentation is nearly limitless. Social
scientists can examine certain behaviors and even provoke them
through the AI interface. Most interesting is if the AI can
recognize and then smoothly translate languages the program could
create cultural bridges and even examine cultural behavior
proclivities.
Futurist Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute has posted a thought-provoking avatar roadmap detailing an increasingly critical and symbiotic relationship between man and this progeny of ours. Frey argues that this increasing reliance on avatar extensions will change our fundamental values, eventually leading to a great blur of humans and avatars.
Frey: With each generation of avatar, they will become more life-like, growing in realism, pressing the limits of autonomy as we become more and more reliant on them for experiencing the world. The avatar will become an extension of ourselves. The pain that we feel is the same pain that they feel, and vice versa. Like symbiotic twins separated only by a dimension or two, we are destined to become one with our avatars.
Is that a fair frame and likely prediction, or are we already indistinguishable from our technology and environment? Are we destined to merge with our avatars? Are we already avatars generated by Gaiia or the Great Simulator(s)?
