"Floyd," I wrote, "do you really exist?"
David Lazarus goes
up against SBC customer support and can't tell whether it's a
human or a robot.A few minutes passed. Then came the reply: "Yes, I am a person like you." Was it just me, or did that sound eerily like something Hal might have said in "2001"? "So this is really a live session?" I asked. "I'm not talking to a machine?" "Yes, you are talking to a live person," Floyd wrote back after another lengthy interval. In 1996 I wrote a P2P AI named Floyd. He lived in ccr, a research virtual world built by David Ackley. It deeply shaped my thinking about distributed systems. Floyd was the first P2P system I ever built. |