I had a conversation with a friend today about how people will feel about bots taking on human roles, once VR gets to the point where people are conducting transactions in a virtual world. The specific question was whether people, in general, would protest a bot impersonating a human.
In a more limited way, this is already becoming an issue. During our discussion we checked on-line to see whether anybody had used the phrase “bot or not”, and we got several hits: One to software that analyzes a poem to determine whether it was written by a human or a computer, and another to software that can determine whether a twitter account is being written by a human or a bot.
My sense is that yes, people definitely would object. I’m basing this opinion on that study in Zurich I wrote about back in 2008, which showed that our brains react differently, on a physiological level, depending solely on whether we believe we are interacting with a fellow human or a computer.
Which strongly suggests that the question “is this a real person or not” is one of those things hardwired into our brains. There are just some things about which we are not rational. After all, if somebody tells you that their child is more lovable than your child, your rational mind might understand and even process such an assertion. But deep down, you know that your child is the most lovable child in the world. 🙂