This was put out a few weeks ago, but I’ve just now got around to it. The Escapist writes about how there is a system that allows Xbox 360s to have a “voice”. In the article, the author, Mur Lafferty mentions that this is possibly a slippery slope to give machines voices. I don’t know about how these blog posts are really generated, but considering that everything with an OS has some manner of logging system, it would not take much to take those logs and anthropomorphize them. If it’s limited to this (reading the log, looking for usage tags and then adding comments and maybe offering suggestions from an existing database), then I don’t think there is much of a slope. Basically what it’s doing is search. The same thing that Google does when it gives results and presents ads. But when you consider that the “semantic web/web3.0” is coming soon, then things could get interesting as these machine blogs could start to go out and find information online to include into their own database to help augment their voice.
I don’t think we have to worry about a Skynet type situation any time soon, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to consider the possibility of one day turning on your blogging device and asking it to do something and having it say no after having evaluated your request in light of what the blogosphere has said. But as long as the machine has to obey local operator commands, I think we are safe (now how do I log into my Wii… assuming that I get one).
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