Advance Program - Plenaries -- Closing Plenary

Sufficiently Advanced Technology: Using Magic to Control the World

Thursday, 16:00 - 17:30

Kim Binsted, Interaction Lab of SONY CSL, Tokyo

Arthur C. Clarke's third law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," is usually interpreted to mean that, to the average non-magician user, advanced technology is usable but not comprehensible. However, there is more to magic than incomprehensibility. Magic is about having power over the world around us, and the typical forms of imagined magic reflect the powers we would wish to have.

Magic, as described in folklore and fantasy, is rarely raw power. It is encoded into spells, hardwired into tools, and granted by familiars. Also, it is rarely general purpose. Typical magical applications include farsensing, shapeshifting, teleportation, prediction, and mind-reading. Not surprisingly, technology too has some of these characteristics. We use specialized software and hardware that is sometimes mediated by a helpful agent (or a not-so-helpful demon), to communicate ideas, transport objects, and predict future events.

In this talk, I will argue that effective and appealing technology will increasingly come to resemble imagined magic. I will also discuss topics such as familiars and their foibles, practical shapeshifting, the advantages and disadvantages of invisibility, and the use of mind-reading in computer games.

Kim is an associate researcher in the Interaction Lab of Sony CSL in Tokyo. Her main research interests are character design, augmented performance, and expressive communication. Recent projects include Byrne, an emotionally expressive talking head football commentator, and HyperMask, a system which lets a performer wear someone else's face.

Kim did her Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh on the computer generation of punning riddles. She then went to the Kansai Advanced Research Center in Kobe, where she adapted her program to generate puns in Japanese. After traveling around the Pacific Rim for a few months, she returned to Japan to work for Sony.

Unpaid activities include improvisational comedy, underwater videography, and random outdoorsy dilettantism.

See www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/kimb/.

Bibliography:
Arthur C. Clarke. "Profiles of the Future: An inquiry into the Limits of the Possible."
Kim Binsted, Shigeo Morishima, Frank Nielsen and Claudio Pinhanez. "HyperMask: Virtual Reactive Faces for Storytelling. "Emerging Technologies: The Millenium Motel." SIGGRAPH 1999.
Kim Binsted. "Character Design for Soccer Commentary." pp 23-35, Proceedings of the RoboCup workshop, 1998.