I’ve been working on this for a while. It’s essentially Greg Bear’s “partials” idea. In this case an agent with a high fidelity understanding of the user is sent out into the world to perform tasks that the corporeal person doesn’t need to be present for. You can be in multiple places at once. You can stay at home while you’re out of town, etc. Sounds great, right?
Here are the main problems with a digital copy and why ”partial” is probably closer to the mark.
Legality. One would have to grant the digital copy some form of legal standing, to act as proxy for its user. Before anyone gets concerned about personhood, let’s accept that we have already given legal standing to non human entities in the form of corporations. One would imagine a legal system and society that accepts that an AI could have some, even if limited, form of legal standing. I‘ve spoken with lawyers who say the courts won’t allow it for centuries. We shall see.
Security. How much does your digital copy know? Everything you know, right? Not to mention a whole lot more since you‘d need more than what you carry around in your skull to perform in most important situations—papers, notes, forms, documents. And the necessary infrastructure to act as a DIGITAL copy—passwords, keys, logins, etc. Your digital self has now become the most valuable target in cyberspace. If data is gold, a detailed copy of you is El Dorado.
Reintegration. How much does your digital copy tell you? If you have to spend the time listening to your copy play back meetings, you may have just gone there anyway. Clearly it’s going to involve compression of some form—text summaries, proposed updates to internal documents, and anything that can be more quickly processed by the human.
Identity. Here you’d be thinking about auth tokens or non-human identities or something, but this may be worse. How do you know who’s the actual person? Yes, one is clearly digital and the other is biological, but we’re already experiencing the shift of cognition in our more prolific AI users. The barycentre of the cognitive functions starts to shift as one extends their exocortex, and it’s easy enough to see that those susceptible to AI psychosis having a real problem with disassociation.
What do all of these problems have in common? Scope. And this is where we get back to that “partial personality”.
Worried your legal proxy is going to agree to something you don’t want? Give it scope—for instance, limited power of attorney (for legal standing) to make decisions in a narrow range. Your legal partial could not make purchases online, and your shopper partial could not agree to legal settlements on your behalf.
Legality—limited power of attorney exists, and we accept human proxies all the time. This would be easier to accept than full AI standing, since it would always be tied to a human. This also solves for accountability, since the user is still responsible for its partial’s actions.
Security—we make the gold mine of personal data a full copy represents a smaller target. Your business partial may not have personal details, and you would be bound by AUPs and other standard security controls to never hand over business details to your other partials. Your legal partial would have only the information it needs for that hearing or that case, and not be able to provide any more than allowed. Plus, the agents can always be shutdown and reinstantiated anew if necessary.
Reintegration—partials would only need to update the overall system, much like meeting with a legal representative or employee, for quick, scoped integration into the whole. Compression is already built into the data model, via scoping.
Identity—the mental model of proxies allow for safer interactions since they don’t represent another full self. The center of identity stays firmly within the human, especially since each agent not only has limited function, but limited role in the larger cognitive system. They’re smaller entities to the human brain, not complete other selves.
Obviously there are challenges to this—the legal issues alone pose a huge challenge. It will take market demand to force the issue, just as so many new technologies do. However, we should be aware that proxies and even full copies are coming sooner than even we here might think, and we need to start laying the foundations for the safety of users, or it’s going to be corporate interests writing them. I don’t like the idea of a Meta Digital Self(TM) and I doubt many of you do either.
I’ve been working on this for a while. It’s essentially Greg Bear’s “partials” idea. In this case an agent with a high fidelity understanding of the user is sent out into the world to perform tasks that the corporeal person doesn’t need to be present for. You can be in multiple places at once. You can stay at home while you’re out of town, etc. Sounds great, right?
Here are the main problems with a digital copy and why ”partial” is probably closer to the mark.
Legality. One would have to grant the digital copy some form of legal standing, to act as proxy for its user. Before anyone gets concerned about personhood, let’s accept that we have already given legal standing to non human entities in the form of corporations. One would imagine a legal system and society that accepts that an AI could have some, even if limited, form of legal standing. I‘ve spoken with lawyers who say the courts won’t allow it for centuries. We shall see.
Security. How much does your digital copy know? Everything you know, right? Not to mention a whole lot more since you‘d need more than what you carry around in your skull to perform in most important situations—papers, notes, forms, documents. And the necessary infrastructure to act as a DIGITAL copy—passwords, keys, logins, etc. Your digital self has now become the most valuable target in cyberspace. If data is gold, a detailed copy of you is El Dorado.
Reintegration. How much does your digital copy tell you? If you have to spend the time listening to your copy play back meetings, you may have just gone there anyway. Clearly it’s going to involve compression of some form—text summaries, proposed updates to internal documents, and anything that can be more quickly processed by the human.
Identity. Here you’d be thinking about auth tokens or non-human identities or something, but this may be worse. How do you know who’s the actual person? Yes, one is clearly digital and the other is biological, but we’re already experiencing the shift of cognition in our more prolific AI users. The barycentre of the cognitive functions starts to shift as one extends their exocortex, and it’s easy enough to see that those susceptible to AI psychosis having a real problem with disassociation.
What do all of these problems have in common? Scope. And this is where we get back to that “partial personality”.
Worried your legal proxy is going to agree to something you don’t want? Give it scope—for instance, limited power of attorney (for legal standing) to make decisions in a narrow range. Your legal partial could not make purchases online, and your shopper partial could not agree to legal settlements on your behalf.
Legality—limited power of attorney exists, and we accept human proxies all the time. This would be easier to accept than full AI standing, since it would always be tied to a human. This also solves for accountability, since the user is still responsible for its partial’s actions.
Security—we make the gold mine of personal data a full copy represents a smaller target. Your business partial may not have personal details, and you would be bound by AUPs and other standard security controls to never hand over business details to your other partials. Your legal partial would have only the information it needs for that hearing or that case, and not be able to provide any more than allowed. Plus, the agents can always be shutdown and reinstantiated anew if necessary.
Reintegration—partials would only need to update the overall system, much like meeting with a legal representative or employee, for quick, scoped integration into the whole. Compression is already built into the data model, via scoping.
Identity—the mental model of proxies allow for safer interactions since they don’t represent another full self. The center of identity stays firmly within the human, especially since each agent not only has limited function, but limited role in the larger cognitive system. They’re smaller entities to the human brain, not complete other selves.
Obviously there are challenges to this—the legal issues alone pose a huge challenge. It will take market demand to force the issue, just as so many new technologies do. However, we should be aware that proxies and even full copies are coming sooner than even we here might think, and we need to start laying the foundations for the safety of users, or it’s going to be corporate interests writing them. I don’t like the idea of a Meta Digital Self(TM) and I doubt many of you do either.