{"id":1691,"date":"2009-01-13T07:42:04","date_gmt":"2009-01-13T11:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=1691"},"modified":"2009-01-08T10:08:30","modified_gmt":"2009-01-08T14:08:30","slug":"the-creepiest-idea-ive-heard-in-a-while","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=1691","title":{"rendered":"The Creepiest Idea I&#8217;ve Heard in a While"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The U.S. Department of Defense has published a <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.dodsbir.net\/Sitis\/display_topic.asp?Bookmark=34653\">research proposal<\/A> &#8220;To develop a highly interactive PC or web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with &#8216;virtual&#8217; renditions of deployed Service Members.&#8221;  The purpose is to let small children interact with &#8220;Mommy&#8221; or &#8220;Daddy&#8221; over a webcam, even when the real parent is deployed and unavailable.  The software is supposed to have enough AI capability to have simple conversations with the child.<\/p>\n<p>On the one hand, this might be comforting to children missing a deployed parent, similar in intent to the <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.hugahero.com\/\">Daddy Dolls<\/A> that are custom-printed with a soldier&#8217;s photograph.  On the other hand, the fact that the software is intended to fool children into thinking that they&#8217;re speaking to the real parent puts this on a whole &#8216;nother plane of wrongness.  I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;d be comfortable knowing that Shadowboy was chatting with an AI and thinking it was me.<\/p>\n<p><I>(via <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/\">BoingBoing<\/A>)<\/I><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The U.S. Department of Defense has published a research proposal &#8220;To develop a highly interactive PC or web-based application to allow family members to verbally interact with &#8216;virtual&#8217; renditions of deployed Service Members.&#8221; The purpose is to let small children interact with &#8220;Mommy&#8221; or &#8220;Daddy&#8221; over a webcam, even when the real parent is deployed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1691"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1692,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691\/revisions\/1692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}