Yorick Wilks

Those working in the theory and practice of artificial companions (www.companions-project.org) at the OII and elsewhere are, naturally enough, always on the lookout for new social implications of our future friends, the Companions. One future function might be as a backstop guarantor of identity, for the Companion’s user, when all biometrics have failed. It is a well-known problem of biometric definitions of identity, exploited in many movies, that they can be corrupted, stolen, removed etc. in a range of ingenious ways, after which the “owner” can be left helpless in a world in which the biometric had effectively defined their identity. Even without the science fiction, one can foresee an ongoing need for some non-scientific non-objective determiner of identity, stronger than the current fall-back to “Mother’s maiden name” and “Name of first pet” that the banks still use.

One can see the role here of a long-term computer companion, designed to spend years in conversation with its owner, building up a structured life of memories, gleaned from conversation, photographs, texts, ideally to be put in some semi-autobiographical form that surviving relatives will inherit, either as a full, frank intimate account of a whole life, probably with details and memories not known to the surviving spouses and children or, in the more extreme case, as a companion on a screen, say, looking and sounding like the former “owner” and able to discuss life from beyond the grave. Those who find this far fetched should look at Emily fromManchester:http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article4557935.ece and imagine her as a long-lost daughter.

One could also think of the Companion of a living user as some kind of informal guarantor of identity: a Companion would know very soon if it was talking to its owner or not—not in the sense of voice recognition, which is just one more biometric open to faking—–but in the sense of how you normally talk, what things you know about “yourself” and so on, much like a vast structured form of “What was your first pet called?”, except these need not be questions that had been pre-planned but more along the lines of “when were you last in Venice and what did you go to see?”, “Where were you in 1986?”. The potentially nasty slip here would be that this function of the Companion might be ostensibly in the interest of the authority demanding the identity verification, rather than of the owner, given that most people would find a Companion-world acceptable only if the Companion was the servant only of its owner, and not its manufacturer or the State. There need be no dilemma here if anyone can say “Let my Companion identify me as YW” and a central registry can always know (as with a car) that Companion xyz is registered to YW and can identify him and only him. All this is another argument for treating Companions nicely of course, just in case…….