Skip to main content

MIT Media Lab will let the internet control a human’s actions for one Halloween evening

By

The MIT Lab has an excitingly creepy way for you to celebrate Halloween, if parties or candy aren’t your speed. Next week, you’ll be able to work with other internet users to control one person’s actions for an evening, as spotted by Business Insider.

Researchers at the lab made a program that lets a group of users control a human being while hearing and seeing everything the person does as if they were inside the person’s mind. The human is an actor hired by MIT Media Lab. The project is called BeeMe, and it’s billed as a web-based social experiment.

Starting on Halloween at 11PM ET, people can log onto the BeeMe website and start suggesting and then voting on what action the actor should take next, like opening a door or entering a room. (Naturally, commands that would endanger the well-being, privacy, or dignity of the actor will not be allowed.)

As the outlandish narrative the MIT researchers have crafted goes, the human being has given up his free will and agency over to a group of humans in order to defeat an evil artificial intelligence called Zookd that has been accidentally released online.

The idea behind the social experiment seems to be partly inspired by “White Christmas,” an episode of Black Mirror where a dating guru played by Jon Hamm and several of his clients watch and give advice to a man through a chip embedded in his head as he approaches women at a Christmas party.

The implications of this are dystopian for a number of reasons. In the episode, the guru and his clients are able to see what the man sees and hear what he hears, part of what makes it such a violation of privacy when the man ends up going home with a woman from the party. Ultimately, the guru gets caught by law enforcement, and his voyeuristic activities get him labeled a sex offender.

The MIT Media Lab’s experiment is understandably more light-hearted and data-oriented. The researchers hope to garner more data on whether a group of people are capable of making one person execute a fluid series of tasks, or whether the results will be disjointed and random. Think “Twitch Plays Pokémon,” but with a real player.

MIT has a history of conducting creepy experiments around Halloween. In 2016, the Media Lab created an algorithm called Nightmare Machine that makes images spookier. Participants clicked on scary images to teach the AI what qualified as truly grotesque, in hopes that it would learn as time went on.



from The Verge - Teches https://ift.tt/2Rh0MaK
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Magic Leap is shipping across (most of) the US

By
As Magic Leap holds the first developer conference for its Magic Leap One mixed reality headset, that headset has started shipping across the contiguous United States, instead of in a set of select markets. The Magic Leap One Creator Edition costs $2,295, just like before, but there’s now an installment plan that starts at $96 per month. All orders are supposed to arrive within 60 days. The Magic Leap One Creator Edition went on sale in early August, and while Magic Leap has touted it as a fully functional device, it’s basically meant for people who want to design apps, games, or art for mixed reality. We were ambivalent toward the hardware, which we found limited, and we noted that Magic Leap hadn’t shown off a lot of material that showcased its potential. The company’s developer conference keynote has revealed several new projects. Among other things, Spider-Man studio Insomniac Games is building an experience that will let you grow a holographic creature on your tabletop, and...
Post a Comment
Read more

The company behind the adorably doomed robot Kuri is shutting down

By
Less than a month after Mayfield Robotics said it was stopping production on its Kuri home robot, the company announced today on its blog that the company will be shutting down. Mayfield Robotics launched in 2015 as part of Bosch’s Startup Platform, but struggled to integrate with and find a business fit within Bosch. Since the cancellation of its Kuri robot, Mayfield Robotics had been looking for external partners for long-term technology development, but was unable to find investment to support its future. The company will cease all operations by October 31st. We first met Kuri at CES 2017, and it wasn’t yet able to showcase all the features it was promised to have in the future. The robot was supposed to have smart assistant functionalities like an Amazon Echo, but with a much cuter face and movable body. Promo videos showed it working as a moving home security camera that was controllable through the Kuri app, but in the demonstration we saw, it only had as much functionality a...
Post a Comment
Read more

US carriers introduce Project Verify to replace individual app passwords

By
Four major US carriers — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon — are joining forces to launch a single sign-on service for smartphones. The service, called Project Verify , authenticates app logins so that users don’t need to memorize passwords for all their apps. The companies say their solution verifies users through their phone number, phone account type, SIM card details, IP address, and account tenure. Essentially, your phone serves as the verification method with details that are hard to spoof. Users have to manually grant apps permission to use Verify, and it works similarly to how you might log into some services through Gmail or Facebook instead of using a unique account password. Of course, these apps also have to choose to work with Verify, and the program hasn’t listed any partners or when it intends to launch. The service can serve as your two-factor authentication method, too, instead of an emailed or texted code that can be intercepted. Users might not be totally sa...
1 comment
Read more