Cassandra

Cassandra
Creator	Lucia Dossin
Year	2015
Bio	The bio is coming soon.
Thumbnail
Website	www.example.com

Mina is a smart chat bot, a commercial project designed by a promising startup to fulfill humans' need of talking to someone else in a world where communication has become almost completely mediated by social media services. To keep the illusion alive, the software aims to be invisible.

The invisibility of technology is not spontaneous. It is a deliberate and difficult goal to achieve, being simultaneously beneficial and prejudicial. The pros have been celebrated for ages. The cons are usually swept under the rug.

The project is an interactive installation in the form of a popup/trade fair stand, comprising 2 or 3 computers (according to the available space). Each one of the computers will display the product website, which promotes the software features and shows the subscription prices. Besides that, the website will also contain a DEMO button, which will allow the exhibition visitor to talk with the bot. (149 words)

---

thumbnail is TEMPORARY (since it is mandatory to have a thumbnail for making this page, I used a temporary placeholder).

"free text - short version" 203 words

In a future not so far away, most humans were deprived from communicating with other humans through voice. Increased intolerance to raw subjective matters combined to a competitive labour market that practically forced every adult to work 12 to 16 hours everyday resulted in that most of human communication happened through written text messages or images using online social media services. As a side effect, the complexity of human conversation decreased to a level in which computers and people could understand each other reasonably well (an issue of Artificial Intelligence solved in an unexpectedly simple way, after many decades and much money spent on Natural Language research). Children were trained from early age to perform well in this environment. However, a parcel of the population still had the need to engage in conversation using their voices, like humans used to do 'in the good old times' (that's what they read somewhere online). Within this group, a few actually met other humans to talk. Others did not manage to find time or energy, despite their longings. With this group of people in mind, a promising startup company launched Mina, a chat bot that was able to fulfill this need for voice interaction remarkably well.

"free text - full version" 601 words

In a future not so far away, most humans were deprived from communicating with other humans through voice. Increased intolerance to raw subjective matters combined to a competitive labour market that practically forced every adult to work 12 to 16 hours everyday resulted in that most of human communication happened through written text messages or images using online social media services. As a side effect, the complexity of human conversation decreased to a level in which computers and people could understand each other reasonably well (an issue of Artificial Intelligence solved in an unexpectedly simple way, after many decades and much money spent on Natural Language research). Children were trained from early age to perform well in this environment. However, a parcel of the population still had the need to engage in conversation using their voices, like humans used to do 'in the good old times' (that's what they read somewhere online). Within this group, a few actually met other humans to talk. Others did not manage to find time or energy, despite their longings. With this group of people in mind, a promising startup company launched Mina, a chat bot that was able to fulfill this need for voice interaction remarkably well. Mina was presented as high technology, a product of years of research done by the brightest minds in the tech world. But in fact, it was a very old program, written in the infancy of digital electronic computing. This program worked quite well, since humans did not communicate too complex ideas anymore. But admitting the re-use of something old was completely out of question. Recycling was highly encouraged in matters like packaging, for example, but unthinkable for products and ideas. (That was regarded as not creative.) So, Mina was presented as a contemporary creation.

Mina was a program that managed natural language in a quite rudimentary fashion. When the program was initiated, it loaded a script. This script contained a specific set of instructions for a conversation. It was able to identify some language patterns and according to these patterns, it chose a response that would sound plausible. But in order for the program to have the desired effect, these scripts would have to contain changes in the responses on a regular basis. These changes would keep alive the illusion of talking to another human being. Without them, subscribers would probably notice they were talking to a robot and would cancel their subscriptions. Also, scripts would be changed according to the calendar and the news - and would count on social media profile data to increase the (sanitized) subjectivity rate of the conversation. So for example, on Christmas season, the scripts would be almost completely different than scripts loaded along the year. For some subscribers, according to their profile data, Christmas scripts would contain emotional and inspiring words in a frequency higher than usual. For others, they would transmit the subscriber a sense of belonging to a group that hates Christmas.

From time to time, the words database that was used to feed the scripts was attacked and the connections between words were switched or corrupted. That caused the script to reply using weird language constructs, and in many cases Mina's talk would not only unmask the robot but could also ignite a self-reflection process in the subscriber. Some would use this wake-up chance to try to find a way of having actual human contact back in their lives, others would instead sue the company and ask the subscription fee back. Nobody never found out if the ones responsible for these attacks were hackers or a business competitor.