The Lifelike Illusions of A.I.

In January, 1999, the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency had issued a memo on its intranet with the subject “Furby Alert.” According to the Post , the memo decreed that employees were prohibited from bringing to work any recording devices, including “toys, such as ‘Furbys,’ with built-in recorders that repeat the audio with synthesized sound.” That holiday season, the Furby, an animatronic toy resembling a small owl, had been a retail sensation; nearly two million were sold by year’s end. They were now banned from N.S.A. headquarters. A worry, according to one source for the Post , was that the toy might “start talking classified.” Tiger Electronics, the makers of the Furby, was perplexed. Furbys couldn’t record anything. They only appeared to be listening in on conversations. A Furby possessed a pre-programmed set of around two hundred words across English and “Furbish,” a made-up language. It started by speaking Furbish; as people interacted with it, the Furby switched between its language dictionaries, creating the impression that it was learning English. The toy was “one motor—a pile of plastic,” Caleb Chung, a Furby engineer, told me. “But we’re so species-centric. That’s our big blind spot. That’s why it’s so easy to hack humans.” People who used the Furby simply assumed that it must be learning. Before the Furby, Chung had worked as a mime, a puppeteer, and a creature-effects specialist for movies. After it, he designed the Pleo, an animatronic toy dinosaur. If you petted a Pleo by scratching its chin, it cooed or purred; if you held it upside down by the tail, it screamed and, afterward, shivered, pouted, and cried. If a Pleo was grasped by the neck, it made choking sounds; it sometimes appeared to doze off, and only a loud sound could rouse it. After the toy’s release, the Pleo team noticed that, when the dinosaurs were sent back for repairs, customers rarely asked for replacements. “They wanted theirs repaired and sent back,” he said. If you bring your dog to the vet, you don’t want just any dog returned to you. Pleo […]

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