Y2ism.net

Robo-Personalities For Your Inbox?

So the human personality construct is a pretty multi-plicitous beasts, no doubt about that. Especially in this newly fractured world of social media and friends networks and avatars, the net-connected human has many opportunities to present different faces to the world as different situations and contexts present themselves. Despite this, the fact remains that contending with the many traits and habits that people bring to a situation requires a certain level of predictability and stability, or else we are left without the all important middle ground where conversation may reliably take seed and blossom.

Consider email and the habits of interaction in that well-trod, though still very new communication space. Some people rely on the caps lock key to indicate excitement or exasperation. Others rely on the aptly-named emoticon, an attempt to parse the emotion of facial expressions with the tools of text. Some emailers have a repeating set of anecdotes they employ to illuminate a variety of situations and events. If you run with the truly geeky side of the net, you may even encounter the world of 1337sp34k (leetspeak), gamely replacing normal letters with number and symbol stand-ins.

We all learn to identify and predict these styles of email communication and respond at the very least coherently, and at our best, even reflect these styles back to the sender in our responses. So while the human’s opportunities to mix up one’s personality to the nth degree has increased, i believe our personalities in context, the personalities we present in specific situations and modes of communication, are actually becoming easier to codify and predict. Email is again a good example of why. First of all, unlike many other mediums of communication, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that one’s entire history of email communication could be stored and accessed in one archive. As the medium matures and services like gmail and hotmail have the opportunity to become a kind of “life-partner tool” establishing relationships with customers that last a lifetime, the opportunity to process the whole of one’s communication styles and habits within a certain frame becomes possible. User A starts off a conversation about Subject A with communication construct style G 95% of the time on weekdays. User B responds to Question B with Communication Construct Style G6 86% of the time after a workout.

There will always be limitless opportunities for a question or answer to be constructed just so. At the same time, email’s very nature inserts a number of rules and reductions that considerably limit and fence in the possibilities of communication. In a face to face conversation, there are so many tools available, and the limits of the interaction are left only to the imagination. The opportunity for violence for example. In a face to face, this is always a real possibility. In email, that entire realm of possibility has been completely removed from the scope of the conversation. Constraints represent rules represent reductions of possibilities. Couple this with the copious amount of repetition out there - we all have our individual assortment of habits, but at the same time, each individual habit is shared by many others. Collect all these habits and situations and constructs into a sophisticated enough probability matrix that encompasses not just all your messages, but everyone else’s messages as well? Some seriously repeatable patterns are going to present themselves.

So where the hell does this lead? Robo-personality mirrors. That’s where. You heard it here first - Y2 droppin some prophecies on ya’ll. If one’s communication style can be processed and predicted, then why not let a robot go ahead and do that for the 90% of your email correspondence that ends up being drudgery, or 2% or 99%, whatever your comfort level may be. The fact is, many of us that heavily use email already employ the canned response tool to handle questions and situations that come up over and over. What if there was a robot in gmail that could do all that for you automatically, and still sound like you, all the while throwing in the proper amount of off-topic babble that some are wont to include in their correspondences.

But then its just a robot talking for you and not you! Well, that may be true, but its a robot mirror of YOU, custom tailored to your own style, and if necessary, only sending out messages you’ve already approved. With adoption for Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Orkut, imeem, and so many others continuing to rise at a rate much greater than actual population growth, the idea that our personalities are cracking, splintering, shattering all over the net like a broken mirror is beyond debate. Already the drudgery of manually setting up all those profiles and personalities is weighing on the early adopter. What happens when this condition reaches the masses. Automation. That this process may be sped up by the automation of robotic technologies is not just a likely possibility, its a technological inevitability. The Robots are Coming. And in way more spaces and places than you’ve ever imagined.