From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: 18bf085e0922bb4ea8a4f81716755f67e682f61240ce65c5dff16103518b496a
Message ID: <199511162229.RAA29474@pipe8.nyc.pipeline.com>
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UTC Datetime: 1995-11-17 01:39:25 UTC
Raw Date: Fri, 17 Nov 1995 09:39:25 +0800
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 1995 09:39:25 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: GHO_mac
Message-ID: <199511162229.RAA29474@pipe8.nyc.pipeline.com>
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The Sciences, November/December, 1995
Another realm of explosive population increase is in
cyberspace, a phenomenon taken up in this issue with Sherry
Turkle's "Ghosts in the Machine." Here the growth comes
about not only in the traditional way but also in wildly
non-traditional ways. People multiply themselves on the
Internet, grafting various aspects of their personalities
onto distinct characters. Even more unsettling, as Turkle
wittily documents the matter, is that the Net is populated
with "bots": robot sentence-parsing engines that can do
fair impersonations of real people, often well enough to
(provisionally) pass Alan M. Turing's test for machine
consciousness. Do you really know who -- or what -- you're
talking to?
The future of all this is murky and mind-boggling:
Information-seeking bots even now can tie up sites on the
World-Wide Web. Bots impersonating people share chat groups
with other bots, much the way telephone answering machines
now "talk" to each other. Internet chatter gets so dense
that bandwidth and other Net resources become strained: the
site at the Los Alamos National Laboratory now
(automatically) warns robots away with a chilling threat to
"initiate automated 'seek and destroy' " action against the
machine from which the robot seems to be launched. A
conservative reaction may already be setting in, determined
to have users identify, encrypt and authenticate every
packet of information they send across the Net.
Net fatigue becomes a recognized medical syndrome; Net
detox centers spring up; Net warfare breaks out; Net
starvation becomes a recognized social problem; Net
demagogues undermine local democracies....
How many people can the Net support? -- Peter Brown, Editor
-----
For "Ghost in the Machine" by Sherry Turkle, a professor of
the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The article is adapted from her forthcoming
book, *Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the
Internet*, which is being published in November by Simon &
Schuster:
GHO_mac (16 kb)
... later this evening, that is.
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1995-11-17 (Fri, 17 Nov 1995 09:39:25 +0800) - GHO_mac - John Young <jya@pipeline.com>