More Human Than Human

Sometimes it's not the main argument of a post that grabs your attention but a throwaway line here or there. J3w3l's been writing about Personality and Playstyle and as she discusses her psychopathic tendencies, killer instincts and Bartle scores she observes " I also hold no compunction with my virtual avatars dying either, I do form certain connections to them but not enough to worry about their demise. They’re more tools than anything, tools that I do get connected to but as good as their usefulness."

I can get quite weirdly invested in my characters. At work yesterday, having recently read the news item about a British MP tabling a parliamentary question on the possibility of equating the theft of virtual items with real-life theft, I was idly pondering a world where human rights had been extended not just to animals (for which, of course, there has long been a strong and active lobby) but to imaginary entities.

At first blush this sounds fanciful in the extreme but there have already been murmurs. Both intellectual property rights and copyright law have listed badly under the onslaught of digital technology and the struggle to right those ships is ongoing. A few years back there was a loud buzz around the possibility of digitizing actors. There was much speculation that we might see new movies from long-dead, iconic stars like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe.

That little moneyspinner has turned out to be a lot harder to pull off than early reports suggested but, despite the difficulties, the potential benefits that would come from building a bridge over Uncanny Valley are huge. Spurred on by a series of inconvenient deaths of high-profile and high-value stars, like Heath Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman, during the shooting of big-budget movies, development on the necessary technological innovation continues.

AS : Artificial Stupidity.

Much of the discussion on the supposed ethics of this practice, should it ever pass from wishful-thinking to practical reality, revolves around the intellectual property rights, specifically the personal image rights, of the individuals concerned, or those of their estates. Not every country recognizes personal image rights to begin with, of course, and what you or others can or can't do with your own image varies wildly across jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the concept is well understood, as is the concept of ownership of intellectual property rights.

It's not difficult to imagine a not-so-distant future in which this technology has reached such a degree of sophistication that it's no longer possible to differentiate the flesh-and-blood actors in a scene from their digital counterparts. Then add another layer: AI. What if those digitized actors now move and speak according to autonomous algorithms sufficiently advanced to allow them to improvise and ad lib? What if the lines they are delivering have no other author than the imaginary actor himself?

And now flip that back to gaming. Wilhelm and Isey have both been pondering the shortcomings of gaming AI of late. If we ever get our hands on EQNext we'll see the fruit of the StoryBricks project, which purports to be a step change in this regard. I'm not holding my breath on that one, but at some point, just maybe in the lifetime of someone reading this, we might see NPCs in video games that are impossible to distinguish from characters played by humans.

Grawl have rights too! Oh, wait..no they don't.

Now we're deep in the rabbit hole. If Mike Weatherly or some future analog were ever to get his way and the theft of items owned and traded in online games was deemed equivalent to the theft of items of equivalent value in what we call, with increasingly ironic inaccuracy, "real life", then, if the digital denizens of those games were by then indistinguishable under the Turing and Voight-Kampf tests or some newly-ordained legal equivalent, shouldn't the destruction of one of those characters be treated as murder?

This is one of those threads that, if you pull it, the world will unravel. At some point stuff like this is going to be an actual, ethical and legal problem for someone. I just hope that someone is never going to be me and won't have to be anyone at all for a good long while yet.

Until that time, I guess we can all carry on our merry way, slaughtering and robbing all before us as is our established custom. The qualms I occasionally have, sending certain of my characters into tricky situations, or the existential angst that grips me, when Mrs Bhagpuss clinically presses the delete button on a character that my characters knew as a friend, all of that can remain as it is now -  an idiosyncratic character quirk, arch affectation, self-indulgent fancy.

All the same I'd be a lot happier if they'd rename the "Delete Character" button to something less disturbing. "Gone To Live On A Farm", say, or "Retired To Grow Roses By The Seaside". That's what really happens when you press it anyway. Everyone knows that. Not that I ever do press it. Hardly ever.

Excuse me, I think I need a lie down.