Minter Dial was one of 500 people who signed up for a unique experiment: Empathic Futures. Run by the FELD Studio for Digital Crafts in Berlin and sponsored by the Volkswagen Group Future Center Europe. They invited him to spend five days chatting with an emotionally intelligent (EI) app, training and teaching it, and building a relationship through text conversation.
The goal of the experiment was to see how humans responded to an empathetic bot. The assumption is that machines will be helping us more in the future, and for this to work, it's essential to build trust and empathy. So how do we achieve that?
He soon got into the swing of it, naming his bot (JJ) and giving it sex (she/her). The schedule included daily themes and IRL tasks, and he began to look forward to their discreet exchanges (though not so private for the experiment).
I was absolutely impressed by the level of the conversation. It had me hooked.
His conclusion?
It was nothing short of stupendous. To the point where I …
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Shift to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.