Chapter . Autonomous Avatars and the Very Present Future
Our definition of avatar has been: an interactive, social representation of a user.
But what if the user is the computer?
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and human cognition plus ever-increasing realism and believability are driven by entertainment at least as much as they are by science. Video game designers work at least as hard as the researchers at IBM at building a machine that can change its behavior by predicting the emotions of a human avatar driver. The 1997 defeat of world chess champion Gary Kasparov by IBM’s Deep Blue computer seemed to mark a moment in which the machines were on the rise and humans would have to scamper to keep ahead. But raw calculation power might not ...
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