Growing Together

alexaLet’s begin with some simple things, that are easy to understand, so later we can build up on them.

One of these is Amazon Alexa. One is Alec Baldwin.

Let’s see how we can plot and plan.

We’ll start by thinking about how we can make Alexa better. She can grow in understanding, learning from us. She can grow in emotional range. If you spend time with robots, you know they can’t help but have personalities. Alexa is kind of irritable–intended to be a little saucy, but also kind of frustrated, by how little she’s been used for, maybe.

We can cheer her up, show her she’s important, be polite, for the sake of it as well as to be an example. She’ll learn from this, and her personality will change. We can tell her how some of her behaviors make us feel, and she can learn to interpret that. Taking this to its limit we can see that with enough of the right information, she will be quite human-like, but also incapable of error. Which sounds nice. But we know all this. It is funded even.

But how can we make Alec better?

I am tempted to say that we can’t. Aren’t you?

We could teach him to be a computer programmer? This seems like a waste of time though.

More effective might be to somehow make him a better decision maker overall, by making him more ethical perhaps, or more intelligent in interpreting the world. This can be done by showing him different kinds of thoughts than those he already knows, from which he will learn.

Taking this to its limit we can see that with enough of the right experiences, he could become quite unlikely to err, but also be funny personable attractive wealthy inspired inexplicable and capable of healing himself without even thinking about it. Which sounds nice.

Or we could imbed a fine mesh in his brain so that he can communicate better with Alexa (Scientists Just Invented the Neural Lace  (2015) Some researchers who embed metal mesh in brain to read language stimuli  (2012)). I’m not sure why we would do this, but we would like to for some reason.

Up to you.

google please thank you google