VENUS ORCHESTRA - Offenbach, Cancan

Shark Barbara Corcoran on How to Stand Out in Business

Council Study Session - 10/28/2021

French President Emmanuel Macron's speech on the restitution of Benin ar...

MASTERS OF THE METAVERSE: Soul Machine Creates 3-D Digital Humans. . .An entire New Virtual Workforce Industry

Yep it's a brave new world - “At some point in the future,’ (says Cross,) “you might be able to create a digital version of yourself or multiple versions of yourself, and they can go out and do stuff, make money for you, make money for your company, while you’re doing something else that’s a whole lot more fun.”

Gaming

This company is making digital humans to serve the metaverse

Meet Sam

By Alexis Ong Oct 27, 2021, 11:30am EDT

 

 

hhh

Sam isn’t a real person — she’s a digital human created by Auckland-based tech company Soul Machines. Designed to have a short conversation with visitors about herself, she runs on a proprietary “digital brain” and studies my expressions via webcam. At one point Sam asks me to smile but can’t seem to register my biggest, brightest “cheese.” I wonder if I’m just bad at emoting. When she asks if I know what autonomous animation is, I respond “No, but you’re about to tell me.”

“Good answer!” Sam chirps. “You should come and do my job!” She then explains that it means her speech and action aren’t pre-recorded — she can respond to every moment like a natural interaction.

Digital people running on Soul Machines’ dystopian-sounding Humans OS 2.0 can use their hands and will one day be able to use full-body motions. “Does that make me more relatable to you?” she asks.

When we think of the metaverse, popularly depicted as a game-like virtual environment where humans use avatars to live, work, and play, we’re often the main characters. But it’s Soul Machines which will be filling the metaverse with what co-founder Greg Cross refers to as a “digital workforce” — a stream of bespoke Sams who will form the equivalent of NPCs in nascent digital worlds, as well as extensions of ourselves.

“When we’re playing a game, we adopt a certain persona or personality, when we’re coaching our kids’ football team we adopt another persona, we have a different personality when we’re at the pub having a beer with our mates,” Cross explains. “As human beings, we’re always adjusting our persona and the role we have within those parameters.

With digital people, we can create those constructs.”

Right now, Soul Machines mostly makes digital people for customer service and public outreach, but they’ve also worked with will.i.am and Carmelo Anthony; in will.i.am’s short promotional video for his digital twin, the Black Eyed Peas rapper observes a pimple that Soul Machines replicated on his face.

> The company has digital people repping the World Health Organization, Maryville University, Westpac bank, the New Zealand police, and SK-II skincare. Ruth is a digital baking coach who works for Nestle. The company has been doing this for years, starting with BabyX in 2013 — a prototype AI that remains the core of its research arm. Cross’ co-founder is engineer Mark Sagar, who had an Oscar-winning digital effects career in Hollywood (including a stint at Weta Workshop) before returning to the University of Auckland to create BabyX, which is modeled after his daughter.

There are naturally other players in the digital person industry, like the AI Foundation (AIF) which also boasts a mixed team of scientists and entertainment veterans, including AI-driven game creator Lars Buttler (Trion Worlds), visual effects artist Rami Hachache (creator of fake Quibi celebrity Kirby Jenner), and Hollywood executive Joe Drake from Lionsgate. AIF’s website offers even less insight into the nuts and bolts of their tech, aside from a similar general message about “bringing the potential of AI to everyone.”

[. . .] At the moment its digital people still require guidance from a human “trainer.” Soul Machines’ end goal is to teach a digital person how to make goal-based (and one day, value-based) decisions, which is still a long way off.

“At some point in the future,’ says Cross, “you might be able to create a digital version of yourself or multiple versions of yourself, and they can go out and do stuff, make money for you, make money for your company, while you’re doing something else that’s a whole lot more fun.”

My first thought is that this is going to be an absolute field day for MMORPG botters farming for resources. But Cross goes on to suggest using a digital person to play a game like Call of Duty. “Those types of digital people are what we call human-enabled or human-driven digital people, they’re mimicking — they’re under the instruction of real people,” he explains. . .

[. . .]. “It doesn’t matter how well animated the ‘digital person’ is, how high their resolution is, or how well-programmed they are to provide ‘individual attention,’ they are unable to replace human teachers who have a monopoly on knowing how to be human — now and in the foreseeable future,” Kelly explains, pointing out the dangers of having a for-profit company, working with governments, to determine the shape of entire education systems.

[. . .]

This new digital workforce would also operate under a specific set of conditions. “When we create a digital brand representative for a big enterprise, of course, they’re not going to have the ability to express negative emotions,” Cross explains. “We’re expected to behave in a way that is consistent with the values of that particular role.” It’s a troubling standard when you consider how Big Tech dehumanizes its workers today, with Amazon leading the pack. While digital humans don’t need rest (or basic compassion), a corporate “positive vibes only” mandate means changing the way we perceive and interact with “customer service” even as it wears a human face.

“People are more aware of what data is getting captured and how it’s getting captured and how it’s getting used,” Cross says when I ask him about ethics of metaverse construction, especially in the wake of an era when Google once bore the slogan “don’t be evil.” “Every wave of new technology has been used to make a huge difference in the world, in terms of productivity, democratization, our ability to travel... technology has always been used by most of us to do incredibly good things and by a few of us to do the things that aren’t very nice or simply plain evil. That is a reflection of the human condition.”

It’s an interesting ideal to hold up in an age where Facebook is being rightfully pilloried as an “indisputable” source of harm to its millions of users, especially when you consider its origins as a glorified “hot or not” for Mark Zuckerberg’s fellow Harvard students.

> Over at The Atlantic, Ian Bogost points out that tech-driven metaverse buildup is very much “a fantasy of power and control” that twists and romanticizes a sci-fi concept into an equally twisted escape route for billionaires who don’t need to contend with the reality of their capitalist legacies.

PLEASE READ MORE:

This company is making digital humans to serve the metaverse

By Alexis Ong Oct 27, 2021, 11:30am EDT

The Verge

SWARMS OF TURKEY VULTURES DESCEND ON A SMALL TOWN: Scattering Their Droppings Like Liquid Business Cards

A story by Adam Gabbat that appeared in The Verge yesterday that is open to interpretation:

Vultures who came to stay bring year of acid vomit and toxic feces to small town

Dozens of vultures descended on Bunn, North Carolina, last year and nothing – not even cannon shot – looks like shifting them

Adam Gabbatt

@adamgabbatt

Tue 26 Oct 2021 03.00 EDT Last modified on Tue 26 Oct 2021 11.37 EDT

 

Black vultures in North Carolina. Bunn’s troublesome ‘buzzards’ are either black or turkey vultures. Photograph: Bob Karp/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Adam Gabbat

"Residents of a North Carolina town have spoken of their dismay after spending more than a year besieged by scores of buzzards.

The birds, which arrived in Bunn in late 2020, quickly staked out their territory in the 344-person town.

Standing at 2ft tall, clad in dark brown feathers, and described as “graceful in flight” yet “awkward on the ground”, the buzzards have also proven to be remarkably self-possessed, and have resisted all attempts at dispersal.

Over the past 12 months a high school and a cell tower have become the birds’ regular haunts, along with the home of one unfortunate local resident, Ally Leggett.

“This weekend, they were up there swarming,” Leggett told the News and Observer newspaper, referring to the roof of her house. “It makes my dogs insane.”

Leggett has counted up to 58 of the buzzards on her property. She said the birds have slowly destroyed her chimney, while according to the News and Observer, they also “scattered droppings like liquid business cards”.

In American English buzzard is often used as a catch-all term for vultures, and Bunn’s nuisance birds are either turkey vultures or black vultures, both of them protected species.

Attempts to remove the birds, which as well as gathering on Leggett’s roof have also been spotted in groups of 20 or more at Bunn high school, have so far proved unsuccessful. . .

> Efforts to disperse the buzzards have been complicated by the birds’ tendency to vomit when roused.

“Vomiting allows them to take flight much faster,” Kathy Schlosser, a local naturalist, wrote of turkey vultures in 2018.

“Some people report this as intentional, projectile vomiting at approaching people or other creatures, but it is a means of escape, the distraction and lessened stomach weight allowing them to get away quickly.”

[. . .]

A further nuisance is the toxicity of the birds’ feces.

“Because of the quality and quantity of food their digestive systems handle, strong stomach acids are necessary,” Schlosser wrote.

The acidity of their expulsions, she said, can strip the paint from a car – and presumably anything else covered in paint – in no time."

Aligning technology governance with democratic values