"She's So Much More Than Perky Pat..."

Want to see something weird? Take a look at this. I do not know what to think of it.

I mean, it's creepy, right? Really creepy. PC Gamer pungently labelled it "an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever".

It's also like some warped window into the future. Is this what's coming? Not this, exactly, but something like this, only much, much more sophisticated, with far-reaching implications for how we live and what we think of as real.

Obviously, it reminds me of Philip K Dick because everything in the future does. Specifically it reminds me of Perky Pat and The Gameplayers of Titan but all his stuff is shot through with this sort of thing. 

When I saw it, though, the very first thing that came into my mind was that character in one of Peter F. Hamilton's series who keeps a bunch of tiny AI people in some kind of virtual ecology on his spaceship and ends up falling in love with one of them and, if I remember correctly, having some kind of ethical epiphany about the reality of what he's been doing that leads to a sort of personal enlightenment. 

Obviously I forget the details, especially the important ones like the name of the character or the books they were in and, if I'm honest, whether any of them were actually written by Peter F. Hamilton at all. I also remember thinking at the time that it seemed like an ending drenched in particularly Hamiltonian techno-optimism. I'm not at all sure the scenario would have played out the way he suggested. He does like a happy ending.

 But let's not worry about that. Those are just specifics. We all know this trope is all over Sci-Fi and has been since forever.

 

I ought to clarify my position a little here. This specific iteration makes me itchy but I am very much on record as saying I want a robot pet with full "AI" capabilities, so clearly I'm not opposed to the principle so much as the application. 

I'd also prefer actual AI to the fake sort we have now but since that doesn't exist yet I'd settle for an always-on wifi link to one of the LLMs that would allow my pet to talk to me in real time. That's surely doable now, isn't it? Why don't we have those yet?

I did also say once that I'd like a similar function in a collar that Beryl could wear, so that when I talk to her, which I do all the time, as does Mrs Bhagpuss, she'd answer back. I'd be willing to put in the time to build up a personality for her the way Jeromai's been doing with his fiction. We already know Beryl's personality, of course. It'd just be a case of training the AI to reproduce it reliably on demand. Ideally in a funny dog voice.

These are ideas that could make someone a billionaire and I'm just giving them away for free here. Based on the uptake for the product I linked at the top, I wouldn't even have to make the damn thing to bring in hundred of thousands of dollars overnight.

Since I backed Stars Reach I've been getting regular emails from Kickstarter, telling me about other projects I might like to back. I don't want to back any Kickstarters if I can avoid it so mostly I haven't even been opening them but for some reason I opened this one and now I wish I hadn't. 

Or perhaps I'm glad I did. Both of those, I guess. It's better to know than not know, isn't it? Or is ignorance bliss?  Funny how homilies tend to cancel each other out. 

Anyway, the thing to know in this case is that the goal of this Kickstarter was $5,000 and by the time I got the email, which was two weeks into the six-week campaign, they had over $700k. They raised $450k in the first twenty-four hours. At time of writing the campaign is closing in on a million dollars and the Kicktraq estimate for the final total is over $2m.

Leaving aside the actual product and all its multifarious implications, there's something here I don't quite get. Why did the people behind the project ask for just five thousand dollars in the first place? Clearly that number bears absolutely no relation to the costs involved.

Even odder are the delivery dates: August 2025 for all pledges (Although the rotating base doesn't get to you until October.) This suggests the Kickstarter is a less a fund-raiser than some kind of pre-order system for a product already close to being commercially available. Is that what people use the platform for now?

Well, apparently, yes they do because in the same email I was directed towards this. It's a lot less interesting conceptually and certainly not controversial in any way. It's just yet another hand-held device you can play games on. But the Kickstarter goal for this one is even lower - less than £1,000 and the estimated delivery time is even shorter - June 2025.

The project's not doing quite as well, either. it's only managed to raise £167k so far. Still, Kicktraq reckons they'll pull in over £400k by the close, so not too shabby on a £1k ask.

I guess the big questions here are:

• If these are real products, almost ready to go into production and be shipped out in a matter of months, what do they need a Kickstarter for?
• If they do need raise funds through pledges, why are the targets so laughably low?
• Is Kickstarter now just a shop-window, providing relatively cheap advertising for commercial products about to hit market?

There could be other questions, I guess. I can think of a couple...

I won't ask them, though. I'm pretty sure we'll have the answers soon enough.

Now, will someone just get on with making my AI robot dog already?

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Lol! Where would I even start?

Okay, sticking to the AI used by me, there's only the header image. That's by FluxSchnell at NightCafe using default settings except runtime (Medium). The prompt was the PC Gamer quote "an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever".

She looks sad, doesn't she?  As well she should.

I wanted to use a picture of Perky Pat but NightCafe blocked it. Not sure why.  I assume it was because I gave it PKD's name and the full title of the short story and there might be copyright issues. If I hadn't, though, I can't imagine it would have known who or what Perky Pat was. So, Catch 22. 

Which, presumably, would also be blocked.