Digital Homunculus
Doppelganger Edition
Major video game publishers are parasitizing your "data body" to grow and feed digital clones of you.
The project to create Artificial Intelligence has failed, you are the man in the mechanical Turk, it is your soul in the "black box".
From the very beginning, Norbert Wiener hypothesized the evolution of man-machine hybrids in his seminal 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings. Wiener described corporations as "machines of flesh and blood".
Around 2005 the discussion of "the limitations of artificial intelligence", began to be swiftly overtaken by "hybrid intelligence" and more recently "collective intelligence" and "human-in-the-loop intelligence."
They have failed to summon their djinn and now it is *you* who are in the lamp they rub. The "lamp" is video games, social networks and the emergent superorganism of data devouring devices.
Their wish is to merge the bio and the technosphere, to give birth to "hybrid entities".
One of the ways this hybridization occurs is in video games and gamified social networks. Games are increasingly understood as systems that easily allow the reduction of human action into knowable and predictable formats. Games, and virtual environments, are ordering devices.
Electronic Arts holds a patent "Distributed training for machine learning of AI controlled virtual entities on video game clients" which farms player data to build neural nets which may animate NPCs.
How many NPCs have been inseminated with your data genetics?
Sony Interactive Entertainment has applied for or holds a multitude of patents which sponge up player’s emotions, vocal cues, gait, facial expressions and body language and applies machine learning to create neural nets for artificial intelligences.
As in the patent, "Mobile and autonomous personal companion based on an artificial intelligence (ai) model for a user", the player model is saved on backend servers and is wholly the property of Sony.
It isn't a little robot friend, it's a digital homunculus mirroring your face.
Sony holds another patent "Artificial intelligence (AI) model training using cloud gaming network" which discloses a method for training AI using a vast "plurality" of players and information streams
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Coincidentally, it's quite possible that Google's LaMDA, the "sentient" chatbot, utilizes the same approach. Google holds a patent titled "Forming chatbot output based on user state" which feeds on the "digital exhaust" of your IRL activity to train the bot's neural network
You are merely speaking to a cyber shadow of your self, a puppet animated by your own psychographic profile and intimate details of your behavior (which is owned by Google, Inc and may be “stored for later use”)—
Forza Motorsport 5 (Turn 10 Studios 2013) incorporate partially machine-learned models of individual players called Drivatars. The player model very directly represents its "human substrate" in the game.
Recently, a Forza player found the Drivatar of their late girlfriend—
This was reported as "touching" and "heart rending" with barely a mention of the ethics of contacting "digital ghosts". The doppelganger of his dead girlfriend is corporate property and he has no options for safe-guarding nor removing this model.
What will she be driving next?
The artificial intelligence developed in games has real world applications. For example, DARPA's Gamebreaker seeks to validate AI methodologies that “can be extended beyond a single video game and could potentially be applied to advanced DoD wargaming scenarios,”
In December 2013, the limited hangout operator Edward Snowden released NSA documents from 2007 and 2008 that detailed the role of games and virtual environments not only in state intelligence gathering operations, but also their utility as an “interactive influence medium.”
In the leaked SAIC proposal we learn “Why Games are an effective influence platform,” it seems they are capable of “passive messaging and conditioning,” The NSA was also interested in creating new games and partnering with commercial developers of popular titles.
For the NSA, games are seized upon as “an opportunity! We can use games for: CNE exploits, social network analysis, HUMINT targeting, ID tracking (photos, doc IDs), shaping activities, geo-location of target [sic] and collection of comms” (National Security Agency 2007: 2)