Could social media be taken over by robots?
Let’s face it, the Turing test is easy. OK, so no computers have actually passed the gold standard yet, but it’s only a matter of time before somebody programs one with enough recorded chat up lines and put downs to convince someone it’s real. I’ve got an idea for an effective new test of computer AI: it’s called the Sillis test. Yeah, I named it after myself.
How does it work? Simple. A robot has to be smart enough to create its own identity, profile and following on the world’s most popular social networks. And I’m not just talking followers and friends - they’re easy to acquire, even for computer programs - but real authority, as measured by organic factors like retweets on Twitter, or the number of people in Facebook groups it sets up.
I’m not sure I’m going to get research funding for this any time soon, but the point I’m trying to make is that artificially creating a legitimate online profile (Not a stock picture of a Russian woman with breasts that exert gravitational pull on objects around them) on social networks could be a greater test of human nature’s complexity than a simple tête à tête. All the ways we interact with each other across a whole range of services would be a much more impressive task to emulate convincingly.
What got me thinking about this wasn’t the absurd number of spambots (or twammers, if you will) on Twitter, but an article in Wired about a man who’s rigged his home appliances up to the micro blogging service to communicate their power consumption rates. It’s a fantastic way to save money on bills, all orchestrated through TweetDeck of all things, and it struck me as a constructive way for machines and robots to make use of social networks, rather than merely to push out badly spelled solutions to problems in the bedroom.
If you’ll forgive this bit of Nostradamus mulling, I’d like to hazard a guess at one of the future paths for social media: automation. I don’t simply mean users’ profiles sending generic greetings to each other like they do now, but software taking advantage of historical and user data to fine tune and pick out tweets, Facebook status updates, Diggs and whatever else, and deliver the best, the most relevant, to us, whether on the phone when you wake up, computer screen when you sit down at your desk, or TV when you slump down on the sofa.
I already get automated recommendations from Stumbleupon, and Digg is obviously based on the thumbs up of others. The creation is still up to us, but could we see AI smart enough to make choices on social media for us to consume, to the point where we trust it to, rather than wading through everything ourselves? As a journalist, I don’t think so, but without my hack hat, I’ve got my fingers crossed.
Tags: automation, robots, social media, twitter
