Stanford Dummy Experiment

[andygates]

We have a new medical training tool, an interactive dummy in an entire false operating theatre.  The thing's like Tickle Me Elmo on steroids: you can set it up with a medical history, send it episodes, and the damn thing will choke and gurgle and its vital-signs monitor will beep and fibrillate like a good 'un.  It's a team trainer: the team do their thing, the whole session is videoed and then reviewed afterwards in a seminar with other teams.

I had to set it up on the network today, and damn if I didn't go all evil towards the rubbery thing.  It's not realistic -- it's the right size, but it has the same appearance as those first-aid resus dummies you might have seen.  Damn thing breathes on the table, though, and I had to repeatedly roll vs. Willpower not to go into the room and poke and abuse it.  Couldn't resist sending it a couple of episodes, though.  Twitch, fucker.  Flatline! 

It was very unsettling and not made any better by knowing that everyone else who sees it does that too.  Not the most glowing reflection on human nature.  It might be because it's in the uncanny valley, but it might just be that people are shits when they can get away with it.

In lighter news, we're getting the dummy baby soon.  I fully plan to swap its "gurgle choke" MP3s for soundbites from the Exorcist.  Because the video of a team of medics being told as they intubate their sprog that their mother sucks cocks in Hell, that's too rich to pass up.

Comments

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Not the most glowing reflection on human nature.

I remember reading, some years ago, that there were a bunch of people who entertained themselves abusing some variety of virtual pets (might have been Tamagotchi -- there are pages about it, but I seem to recall it having been a virtual pet I hadn't heard of), and then uploading the busted "mental profiles" of the pets so other people could be likewise entertained.

Other folks took it upon themselves to download and "help" these abused virtual pets, and in some cases sent death threats to the folks who had abused them.

Now, I can't help feeling that everyone in this scenario is in some way just a wee bit insane. The latter, obviously, because you do not murder people for doing something -- be it ever so "nasty" a something -- to a very simple, non-sentient computer program (please note that I have no doubt that a more serious version of this topic will resurface in a few years when programs actually have a sophistication that is roughly equivalent to a gerbil's brain, and charges of "animal cruelty" not quite so far-fetched). However, I also think that there's something wrong with the first group, and it took me awhile to figure out why. I think it's a certain lack of empathy: if something gives similar feedback to an animal in pain, and you seek out that feedback -- even if you know it's not a real animal you're dealing with -- I confess that I worry about you a little bit.

Not *you* you -- the "sucks cocks in Hell" thing would be hilarious.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Tamagotchi-torture was nicely parodied with Tamagothi: you *had* to be mean to it or it wouldn't grow up properly moody. The first group were ordinarily mean; the second group were just bizarre.

There's an interesting take on subjective relationships here. Your Tamagotchi-rescuers sit at one end of a craziness curve that goes through tormenting Pleo through Second Life nonhuman relationships to regular distance-relationships with regular humans; you or I might be that gerbil-brained AI, we've never met to verify our meatspace existences and - to use a geeky analogy - to synchronise them.

I guess the insane, dysfunctional end of that spread might be defined as where you know there's no chance of it being what you think it is, but you persist anyway, but people are very good at self-delusion and doublethink. After all, people think that cats care about them.

The idea of a future-tech "torture me Elmo" with sufficient sophistication to remember its abuser and 'wish' to avoid more pain -- that's a creepy one. It goes into a whole weird moral place that has shadows of Gitmo and BDSM and Dahmer (and Douglas Adams).