Immerse yourself in a captivating conversation with hosts Marco Ciappelli and Chuck Rinker, as they delve into the deep ties between society, technology, and the future of AI. Join us as we decipher technology's pivotal role and AI as a bridge in our lives, transforming the human experience in the digital age.
Guest: Chuck Rinker, CEO at PRSONAS by nuMedia [@VirtualPrsonas]
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckrinker/
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Host: Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society Podcast
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli
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Episode Introduction
"Immerse yourself in a captivating conversation with hosts Marco Ciappelli and Chuck Rinker, as they delve into the deep ties between society, technology, and the future of AI. Join us as we decipher technology's pivotal role and AI as a bridge in our lives, transforming the human experience in the digital age."
Welcome to another episode of the Redefining Society Podcast, where we delve deep into the intriguing world of technology and its transformational impact on our society. This is your host, Marco Ciappelli, inviting you to an exciting conversation that could very well redefine your perspective on AI and technology.
In this episode, we have a unique guest with us - Chuck Rinker, a cattle farmer turned tech enthusiast. Chuck is one of those rare individuals who's witnessed firsthand the evolution of technology, from the era of punch cards to the present day AI-driven world. His journey will surely leave you astonished and intrigued.
The conversation takes an unexpected turn as we delve into the human aspects of technology. Chuck brings up a thought-provoking point about how the essence of being human lies not in our physicality but in our demeanor, reactions, values, and experiences. He challenges the conventional approach of trying to replicate humans digitally and proposes a more ethical and practical direction for technology.
What does it mean to be human in the era of digital personalities? How can we make sure that AI is used for the benefit of all? How can we bridge the gap between our reality and the fantastical world of AI?
This conversation will get you thinking about your relationship with technology and the future of AI in our everyday lives. It's not just about the technological advancements, but how these advancements are shaping our society and our human experiences.
So plug in your earphones, sit back, and prepare to be enlightened. This is not just another conversation about AI, but a deep dive into the intersection of technology, ethics, and humanity.
Share this episode with your friends, family, and colleagues, and let's collectively ponder upon these crucial questions. Don't forget to subscribe to the Redefining Society Podcast for more thought-provoking conversations like this one.
Remember, the future of our relationship with technology and AI is not something that's 10 years away; it's here, and it's part of our daily life. So, how do you envision it? Listen to this episode, and let's start the conversation today.
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Resources
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To see and hear more Redefining Society stories on ITSPmagazine, visit:
https://www.itspmagazine.com/redefining-society-podcast
Watch the webcast version on-demand on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllTUoWMGGQHlGVZA575VtGr9
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Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording as errors may exist. At this time we provide it “as it is” and we hope it can be useful for our audience.
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Welcome to the intersection of technology, cybersecurity, and society. Welcome to ITSPmagazine. Let's face it, the future is now we're living in a connected cyber society, and we need to stop ignoring it or pretending that it's not affecting us. Join us as we explore how humanity arrived at this current state of digital reality, and what it means to live amongst so much technology and data. Knowledge is power. Now, more than ever.
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Marco Ciappelli01:52
Hello, everybody, this is Marco Ciappelli With redefining society, podcast and ITSPmagazine. And I gotta say that lately, I get more interesting topic, suggestion and guess then what I can actually handle, I'm gonna have to start giving it to some other hosts on ITSPmagazine. But I wanted to keep this one for for myself, because it's right at the core of what I like to talk about, which is artificial intelligence, technology, and humanity. And to talk about this from what I think is going to be a very interesting angle. Because of the background, and the story we're going to hear is Chuck Rinker here, and it's with us. And stay tuned, because I think is going to be interesting. Chuck, welcome to the show.
Chuck Rinker02:48
Thank you very much, Mark, I appreciate it.
Marco Ciappelli02:50
So I'm not gonna go too much into what we already talked before start recording because I want that to be your your leading to the conversation. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your unique story into into technology, how you got into that.
Chuck Rinker03:11
Wonderful, and I appreciate it, I think it's going to be a tricky today. I'm really excited about that. Having this somehow society and technology merge from your perspective. So I think I'll learn as much from you, if not more from you today than you probably learned from me. But the background on how we got here is I'm actually grew up a cattle farmer, Virginia, up in the mountains, you know, urban, small town, good ol you know, American working class, a family grew up with some pretty strong ethics, very strong parents that were really supportive. And they started pushing me to play on some of my math aptitude and to get me from being a cattle farmer to something that they thought would be more conducive with the type of interest and intrigue I showed up. So we were lucky enough to be outside of DC. So where this really comes to is, as I got more and more into the DC community, of course, everything from Black Ops military, to growing up in the early the early days of one gaming was just becoming commonplace. People don't realize back in the days, you know, we represented football players by red blips on the screen, not by the photorealistic renderings, and all we got today. But that really plays right into the heart of what we're talking about when we say What's it mean to be human? What's it mean to have personality is even back in those days, when I was playing the LED football games, you know, to me, I could see a quarterback in my head, I could see the blockers out front and we were playing these games just as engrossed just as intrigued and infatuated. As if you had you know, your full VR headset on your head. So your brain is very powerful. Your brain as you know, has an imagination that people don't get a credit for. And so as we moved in more and more into some of the new technologies of When I first started, I was doing ticker tape for the for those old school guys, you'll see me on camera. I'm not a young spring chicken anymore. You know, we were punching holes in paper tapes to communicate data to the computer, then we had the teletypes, which were basically typewriters with those screens. And we had screens, then we had color screens from green screens, then we got more more. So there was this evolution all the way through the mouse, and now voice first. And there's an evolution in my mind, to now we're approaching that ability to recreate human personality, and how we handle that from an ethical standpoint, from a practical standpoint, and technology standpoint, of course, is is, as you say, in your podcasts, it's not something that's 10 years away, that evolution of talked about from cattle farmer to human AI is not something we're waiting for 10 years, we've been delivering practical application, people are using this, this is part of our daily life. And I really kind of feel like it's time to open up the conversation and make sure that we're using it for the right purposes. But let's let's call it for the benefit of all.
Marco Ciappelli06:10
I welcome that as that's kind of like my mantra, I keep saying this all the time. Now, I love actually a couple of things that you said, because you know, I'm not in my 20s either. And, and I consider myself really lucky actually to grow up with analog technology, and then being right there for the transformation in digital. And I go back to the radio, I go back to, you know, TV, and I go back to the earlier computer where, you know, we were using it you mentioned like, yeah, my first video gaming, it was, it was a ball bouncing between two little bar, right? tennis, ping pong, or Pong, or whatever it was called. And to see where we are now it's it's blows my mind. I mean, we're talking about things that we can actually chat GPT and have an artificial intelligence that is doing, I don't think is that intelligent, I think is more of a marketing push on that. But we're getting there. There's definitely machine learning. Right? You would agree with that. But you said something. And, and that is using our imagination, right? I mean, it's like you read a book. And many people say it was better than the movie because you made it the way you want it. So I think you said that, I don't know if I'm interpreting that but liberate that a little bit more. So what it means to be human maybe and, and what it means that the imagination, you know, this picture.
Chuck Rinker07:55
Yeah, as a human, I'll start there. And like said, I don't have the formal background, you haven't some of this discipline. This is, this is where the fun begins. Marco says to me when when I've engaged millions of people in football games and gaming, like said I did the Madden NCAA football franchise prior to starting this company. And now we're moving this towards some of those benefits. We talked about how do we use these digital personalities for clinical trials. But in order to get that when we say we need to bring the human element, and I'm not dissing any of my competition, but a lot of people focus on digital humans. That's a term Gardner's using all over the place as part of a hype cycle. A lot of the people in this space are saying over creating digital humans recreating digital humans, and that leads to something we call the uncanny valley, which is kind of that sense that us humans are so engrossed with what it means to be human. And we'll get to answering your definition directly here in about 30 seconds. But we've gotten so engrossed with this concept of what it means to be human, and we're trying to replicate humans. And think that that's how we that's how we make something that's more human. And that's entirely entirely in my mind, the wrong approach. And I play homage to the great Walt Disney and say he was the original creator of virtual reality. Not Not, not Facebook, or do you know the whole reason he created the whole Disney Empire Disney World and theme parks in the videos was when you talk to you led you to believe that a skunk had a personality and that if it died, you cried over a deer or a skunk or an animal or an inanimate object, and you had true emotion and feeling you had a human part. You had a human connection with those people with those personalities, let's say so when I think of what is human and why our flag our mantra is digital personalities for the workplace is I want to know what makes Chuck rancor. What makes Marco Marco. It's not everything about your beard and you wearing glasses, it's your demeanor. It's how you react to something. It's the culmination of your life experiences that cause you to not only to be blunt, but the aesthetics you might hold, what your values are, how you respond to certain situations, how you respond to stimulus around you. And at the end of the day, reality is the eight inches between your ears is your reality. And so that is what it means to be human is what is your view of the world, everything from values, demeanors personalities, vocabularies, languages, aesthetics, cosmetics, the physiology, the physicality of your being, is what it is human. And we spend so much time trying to create digital humans, that they become creepy, they become this uncanny value Valley. And we lack the relaxed the stripping that away and creating something that we're comfortable communicating with something that we will trust, like these Disney characters that talk about something that can express empathy and emotion, something you can create an emotional bond with. And that gets you to react and how we would as humans, not just simply trying to create somebody down to the hair follicle, and then using it for the wrong piece that you alluded to. So that's my definition of what it means to be human. So when you alluded to chap, GPT, and the machine learning piece, we use a lot of that, and not chat GPT, but machine learning, but we actually take, I'll call it more of Microsoft's definition of active learning. We're not trying to teach these things to be their own sentient beings and act in a truly autonomous way. We're using the API, we're using speech to text natural language parts, parsing all these IoT technologies that we talked about language understanding text is the ability to speak 148 languages, we've developed our own sign language in piece so we can communicate with the deaf community, we have a couple of members on our team from the deaf community. And we built all these tools, not to automate humanity. But to build a communication pipeline that you and I are comfortable with 2 billion years ago, if I wanted something I'd point to, you know, some food on a tree in Groton, or and you know, that was communicating. I know, that's a little goofy, a little geeky. But but but that's how you indicates. Yeah, so we're going, why are we trying to we humans have spent 2 billion years learning how you and I will form a bond the gestures I can make now the eye movements I can make? And that's where you will, you're either gonna learn to trust me or not, trust me, I'm going to be empathetic to your thoughts or not. And that's the human bond. And that's what we're trying to embrace with personas, not let's replace humans.
Marco Ciappelli12:56
So I love a lot of things. And and the reference to Disney, I'm a big fan of Disney. I'm a big fan of storytelling. So how can you not look at what is done? And and then you mentioned a few things that I agree with you again, it's recreating humanity when you when you play creator, it's something that always scares me, every bad sci fi movie or book and bad because of that, right? So it goes out of control. Right. And it's good in storytelling, it works in sci fi. I don't want it to work in our society. So I like the approach. And I always say that, you know, AI advanced technology is, for me is a tool to enhance maybe our communication and our self, it's a robotic arms. It's a small robot that goes into a cave and, and find something so the body, nobody raised their life, and they are, you know, good in the environment, whatever it is, but there are tools. And I think that that's also part of your message, meaning why are we trying to recreate or pretend because we're far from recreating that, and I hope we never get there. So what's your approach to that and not only because of what you do, and I want to go a little bit more into this personas that you're you're creating and what their utility and approach and approach in real life scenarios are. But this vision about distinguishing reality from fantasy, even if character is a fantastic character, like a deer, or a talky mouse, or whatever it is or a video game. I think it's important that we know that we are not in interacting with reality. What are your take on that?
Chuck Rinker14:55
Yeah, well, I'm gonna back up to one word you said that's key. You use the work tools over and over. This is a tool, this is a tool. And I want to highlight that because I can't agree with you more Marco, I think people view they've seen too many episodes of, you know, iRobot in The Terminator, and all these artificial intelligence to come back and find that humanity's inferior, we're gonna wipe them off the face of the earth. The reality is, is AI even as sophisticated as appears right now, is not really a full general purpose AI, we build tools that solve specific problems, very unique, very identifiable, very quantifiable, specific problems. And we're doing the same thing, we're not trying to recreate a genuine human eye, we're trying to create a tool, I mean, use your word again, again, I'm not against you with for you to support you a tool that will help take some of the repetitive, mundane elements that we as humans are required to utilize. And we'll get into some of these use cases like, let's take health care, we believe strongly in health care, our health care system needs a lot of help. We got labor shortages, there's, you know, three, three open positions for every single resume out there and submission, and how do we improve our healthcare system? And, you know, you take these digital personalities? And how do we remove some of the burden on the HCPs to healthcare professionals so that we can free up what you and I do as humans, we're creative, we're innovators, we can think we can we can create from the ground up, we can not only solve problems, but AI is designed typically from the ground up with a set of rules, whether that's rules is automatically generated based on GPT. But you know, they still have to populate the data and creates its own algorithms. But at the end of the day, it's still a sophisticated algorithm, what we're trying to do at personas is to play on to what you'll set about tools, we're trying to supply a tool to society that allows you to scale the human experience, not replace the human experience, but to scale that human experience. So that all this massive, wonderful technology that's running at a rapid pace right now, is something that we can use in a practical sense that we can communicate with we can understand with, and so society will be able to get the benefit of this scale human experience without everybody be an AI data scientist. And that's an easier problem than people think, actually, I do. And and I'm not saying My guys are the smartest on the planet, but you know, they're pretty dang close. And we focus on that scaling piece. And it's, um, it'd be interesting to, to get your take on what you've seen, on use cases for this type of AI before I continue my ramble about how we've been successful in scaling that human experience. And in today's world, where do you see AI? And that human learning piece going?
Marco Ciappelli18:02
Well, I go back to the tool, you know, I mean, I keep saying, you know, let's, let's do it, let's do it. I believe it's bringing so many advantages to our society. I mean, you're talking to a healthcare system, and when I hear people just bashing AI, because they don't want it and I'm like, you understand that we are already using this and it's already making our life a lot better, even if you don't know, I mean, you're landing safely on a plane and flying because of that you healthcare, you know, they can detect. I mean, it's, it's the speed, and they're curious, see that they do this, but but then we go to the sentient and to the creative mind, and I don't feel like they're going to take our place. It's like, everybody's talking about shut GPT now and I'm like, well, people are like, well, the writers are going to lose their job. And I'm thinking like, the bad writer, probably the bad writers probably will because they're gonna use it and don't change a thing. Or even write lyrics for songs and music. I mean, there is the machine learning the Korean music now. But if you're good, I think you're okay.
Chuck Rinker19:15
I think it's even beyond that. I think it's going to I think it's going to improve the productivity take on two interesting use cases all all of the two at one point in time we were worried that you know, computers were going to take you know a typist jobs away from but now it's an understood tool, then accrued improves the overall productivity society. The old one I like to go because it's a little more fun to to bring out is back when the stethoscope was stethoscope was first invented in health care. All the doctors thought it was a threat. You can't replace the human ear. It's just those amount of sensitive, you're going to destroy healthcare as we know it because the stethoscope can't be used like a human ear and you go on well, that's just a tool to to prove your hearing perception and now stethoscopes, just standard practice. So if you've had
Marco Ciappelli20:07
to have one right on your
Chuck Rinker20:12
bring your point about, we're not replacing humans. Here's a here's a real practical example that we've done. We've worked with them RTI Institute with a clinical trial, clinical trial on outcomes. Obviously, as we know, clinical trials, I shouldn't say obviously, it was, you know, I apologize. I'm not sure exactly who your audience is. But let's just take a 32nd review of what a clinical trial does. A clinical trial runs a series of test runs a series of experiments, and you're trying to specifically improve the health and wellness of the human population. Now, in order to get that in there to get these trials done, they're incredibly time consuming, incredibly expensive, takes a tremendous amount of labor, tremendous amount of dedication, a tremendous amount of education and background. But if we could just move the needle a little bit, there's so much in our healthcare system right now, that is inefficient, let's be honest, and that is not as effective as it could be. So we've been able to take our characters and say, well, instead of having people try to track down a certain demographic that gets into a population of a clinical trial, so that we can study this underserved community or this minority community, or let's say they're in a eco socio socio economic or social underserved community or disadvantaged community, they're very much like three to 10 times less likely to participate in a clinical trial. So if you want to reach those communities, and you want to speed up the clinical trial process, improve outcomes, so that we can improve health care for those communities, especially that are, you know, multiple language, multilingual, different genders, different races. We mentioned the deaf community, we're now able to use our digital personas or digital personalities, to now go out and reach out to those individual patients, and to give them a empathetic, trustworthy ear, to talk to, to respond to, to engage with, and help that community format, trust, and feel comfortable participating in these clinical trials. So that is something that's not taking anybody's job away from them, it's just using the power of this human engagement component to refer to this, you know, scalable human element, and being able to apply it to something that's very real, very practical, and has a positive impact that engagement concept we talked about, you're more likely to engage as a gamer, as a, you mentioned, your your your gaming background, my gaming background, how you react to some of these movie characters, and all. So I only tell people imagine if we could get people as comfortable, trustworthy. And I'm going to use the word addicted, and as addicted to their own health and well being and their own patient advocacy on their healthcare journey that we could with this entertainment, you know, you're in the middle LA, you're right in the heart of electronic entertainment and CGI production. I'm an ex EA gamer. And we know people go to movies, people go to Hollywood people can play games, these are huge, and people are quite bluntly, almost addicted to them. So why can't we do that? With healthcare? Why can't we do that with customer service? Why can't we do that with things that are more beneficial than the entertainment value alone?
Marco Ciappelli23:38
So I had some conversation in the past with people in the healthcare industry, actually former CEO of of the large permanente group, for example. And, and we were talking about how kind of what you said about the stethoscope, how the actual medical community, they are somehow refusing the innovation because they think that you take their status away from them, like you can't trust the stethoscope, which now is the AI or machine learning. And I don't know, I mean, I think the truth is in the middle meaning we need to understand that we're going to need both, but apart from the medical community, do you have some case studies of how the user perceive these changes? So I'm going to in healthcare facility instead of talking to the person that that welcomed me there, it's made me moody and sometimes nice, sometimes not. I go to like a screen right and tell me if I'm understanding well, and I can get the appointment going or I can do it. things. How are people responding to this?
Chuck Rinker25:04
That's a great, great, great question. And one that I'm quite honestly, we're we've been at this since 2013, I consider ourselves one of the probably top three to five leaders in the space. And we're unique in how we take our approach. And it's directly related to what you just asked. Because early on, quite honestly, we got a lot of the creepy factor, we got a lot of one of my biggest pieces and I'll admit the faults in the the positives and the negatives, as we say, the good bad, the ugly of what we've learned over the last 10 years. And one of those was the reluctance in the attempts of trying to get into recruiting these humans and trying to be so in touch and in tune with what we believe people we want to communicate with and how realistic that character should be. We did probably defend ourselves on a monthly basis of Oh, you're just trying to take jobs, you're just trying to do that. But when we shifted gears a little, and we changed our tagline to the digital personalities and focused on the personality of the human what what does it mean, to be human to your point? Him when we found out it was less about the human replication, as a matter of fact, just a little bit of a tangent? Because I think it was interesting. You you expressed a passion for Disney like I did. I do have to ask you in your second title of your opening notes, you say it's a small world common after all, it has gotten even smaller technology. Is that is that a direct reference?
Marco Ciappelli26:35
I I think it came from that. I mean, it's my clue on is Marshall McLuhan in the you know, the media, the Global Village, but I think yeah, it's a small world after all, it's definitely this is definitely from Disney. Yes.
Chuck Rinker26:51
So there is I bring that up is because um, we were at we were actually talking with Disney and I was lucky enough to meet with one of the SVPs of Imagineering, Jeff germanium, Jon Snoddy, who I think just recently retired. But he had run a game company prior to joining Disney. And he was one of these guys that put faces on digital avatars inside of video games. I don't know his full background, I apologize. I don't want don't tend to too much. But he sold a persona. So at the time, we were delivering demo holographic displays, making a move wow factor lighting to trade show. It was really like the attractor of that what can we do, we did a TRL a background, we did one of the backup back parties for Sony Pictures, where they would be greeted by this hologram and talk about some of the information on the film that they had produced and stuff like that. So they can act as information readers. But John was Mr. Snowden, he's the one that said hey, get come out backup guy. You're a little too close to human, you're creeping people out. And it's coming from Disney. He alluded to that directly. So over the years is we've dumbed our characters down and that shouldn't use that word, let's just call him I call it make it a more approachable, but we've taken them away from that photorealistic piece. The reception of them has gone from who now every time I'm turning around and defending myself on LinkedIn about why I'm not really trying to replace humans, people are starting to look at the engagement side of it. And they're really starting to be a little more trusty, a little more empathetic. There's even some clinical trials, if you have any patrons that are interested in the psychology of these avatars in why the Disney asked and why the more or less photorealistic characters, we call them and some of the ones we merge on the natural, and I'll get to that in a second, become more approachable, more empathetic. And the gaming space, we used to use the term suspension of disbelief. Meaning you want to put somebody into a world you want to put someone into an environment, that there's nothing that's quote, unquote, out of place, when something's out of place, it takes you out of that reality or it seems supernatural. The example I use to people with some of these horror movies, you'll watch and if you're, if if you know, if you watch them, you know, a body part that turns a little farther than its butt or the exorcism when the head turns past the natural. Anything that's just slightly off becomes creepy. And we're incredibly tuned to our conversation before the interview. You know, we've been spending 2 billion years ever evolving the human form and we become intensely keen on what it means to look human and act human. And if you violate that for something that's human, it creeps you out Disney gets away with it. We get away
Marco Ciappelli29:34
well, I had no idea we're gonna go in this direction. And I love it because I want to stay there for the time and reminding. So you're talking about suspension of disbelief and you know, I was actually reading about how you create this. This this moment of fear panic and this is exactly that if you break a bone like a stranger things. Yeah, the opposite, right? And that's why Whoa, Somebody is missing the step and he's walks the monster, the creator walks like a spider instead of like a human or you move on the side, that's incredible things that you can do. So apart from that being fun, and intelligent in terms of understanding the human natural and how we respond to this, that was exactly what I want to go deeper into is this revelation that maybe make everything so anthropomorphic. So human, is what creeps, creeps us out. Because we're used to see it, you know, a mouse that the walk and seeing and resolve things and rabbits, and we're okay with that, because we're in another world. And I give you another example. My wife, she likes to watch all the mystery and serial killer stuff. And you know, I'm not a big fan, but I do love. I watched Wednesday the Addams Family. So kind of weird stuff going on. I'm a big fan of, you know, The Nightmare Before Christmas. But I get away because I'm in another world. I mean, a fantasy world. And I know that I'm not dealing with real psycho. They're still upcycle maybe, but you're in another place. So I say these because if I go to a booth, for example, to a kiosk, and the person that greets me is not too human, but it's I don't know, maybe he's a rabbit. With the kids like it, maybe he's in a kid office? Or maybe it is a very funny character. Why do we need to anthropomorphize everything? Why did the robot need to look human can either be a cube, there are cubes. So isn't there more than way to go so that we can distinguish? This is not human, but it's having a function in our society?
Chuck Rinker32:03
Yeah, it's interesting you say that because um, there's there's justification for both extremes. And there's a really curious study, I'm happy to for you after the podcast market, because you might find it intriguing with your psychology background. There's a clinical trial that shows when something is too in animate, inanimate, you don't have a trust, you don't believe there's an intelligence behind it, you believe it's a machine. When you're too realistic, you creep people out and think that there's some supernatural going on. Reality is the avatars that have a human appearance, and a slightly more what we'll call natural human appearance, but that are at the right level of realism, then become comfortable, they become trustworthy, they become what we call approachable, they become empathy, they can express the empathy and emotion and expression to you. And as we go back to the old Disney, and it's funny, you said Nightmare Before Christmas, because I love that as well. But those characters could emote and you believe the emotion and even though they would stop motion. So there's a reality in my mind, that we find in the gaming space, that you hit that point of, not to inanimate, that it's not believable or not credible or doesn't appear to have an intelligence behind it are not too much in that level, is that fine balance that I'm going to call it for those audience members that are familiar with determined, uncanny valley. It's this concept and I'll try to draw the arrow here. The more photorealistic something gets, the more believable it is, but once you hit a point, and it's too accurate, physiologically speaking, it drops off like a cliff. And then once it goes through that valley, and comes up and I go, Okay, wait, that is real, that is Marco, he is a real person. Now I get back on some of that trust back. So we're driving that line up to that cliff, to make it as believable as possible without taking people over that cliff, over that uncanny valley journey. And that's a balance and that only comes from experience and the experience we've learned in where I believe my approach and personas his approach to this problem is, is excelling and learn from quite honestly, it's early military simulation is gaming, we've been able to create a gaming society that makes believable characters, and it boils down to the one word engagement. How do you engage people, everything from that trust and all that engagement? I'll give one more anecdotal story of why I'm 100% convinced we're taking the right approach to stop what you were just alluding to, which is that distrust that creepiness that, okay, you're just trying to replace humans there's a there's a definite dish Trust, um, with certain approaches to digital humans. And that's the trade shows we've done hundreds of trade shows. These are great information disseminated from us from a practical application. Tell me about your product, hey, can you do this? Can you do that these things that you know, can be trained with 1000s of questions if you have to a lot of content, but it goes there. But if you walked into this trade show, we were at a trade show in downtown Raleigh. And if I was to knock your iPhone off of your desk, and cracked the screen, the first thing I'm going to do is turn and go. Oh, Marco. I'm so sorry. I broke your iPhone here. Let me pay for it. We had a gentleman that definitely we call her Daphne, everybody creates her own personality. Our persona is called Daphne. So Daphne was at the top of the escalator greeting people when they came up, somebody wasn't paying attention, and their kid was running off subways, and they bumped into Daphne. And personas definitely start toggling a little bit. She didn't fall over. But she physically got bumped and the guy turned to see that it was Daphne and I was standing at the booth next to him answering questions. He said nothing to me. He turned to Daphne and what oh, I'm sorry, I apologize. And then stabiliser and walked off. And that shows you he wasn't creeped out by her. He wasn't intimidated by her. He really subconsciously catching that glimpse of this human believes that there was somebody there that was bought in that the psychology of that's amazing to
Marco Ciappelli36:34
me. Yeah, it is. I have a creepy story too, which is not that creepy. But I was in RSA Conference, the security conference. That is usually in San Francisco, but they have a Singapore one as well. And three years ago, right before the pandemic, one of the keynote was Sofia, the Robert Yes. It's creepy.
Chuck Rinker37:00
Well, they got the they bring the Qatar skull and make it transparent. Yes,
Marco Ciappelli37:04
it's crispy. And it's kinda like, Okay, you're trying to be too real. And then you go on the side. And he's like, what I mean, then there, your head is cut off, and I can see the inside, which get that creepy level.
Chuck Rinker37:20
Robocop movie, remember your Robocop movie?
Marco Ciappelli37:23
Yeah. But I also to wrap this side of the conversation I had, as a guest on one of my shows, one of the person that had been working in creating her personality, which she's actually a comedians that works with a team because they felt like bringing you more, for example, in the way that she interact. And I say she buddies eats, whatever it is. That she Yeah, well, yeah. Because it's, that's what it looks like. And I refer to Siri as she and I don't know why we still there. But anyway, the point is that there is all these nuances of using that blurring that line, where it's like, how human do you make it? I mean, if you're even making make jokes, but then something doesn't appear human. Because it's not there yet. There's no passing the Turing test yet. Yeah, you're really gonna freak out. But if I'm talking with again, I say, rabbit, or frog, or whatever it is, or something that is more of an alien. And it's okay, I think is more okay.
Chuck Rinker38:38
It is I'm gonna highlight a piece we did with CVH, A, the Columbia health basin, just between Seattle and Spokane. And there's a population of there. And it's going to play directly into what you're saying, because we talk about focusing on the personality, that whatever target audience, whatever your demographic, whatever your target audience is, you want them to be comfortable and get the value and information and to be comfortable engaging with this technology. And then we'll get to a Infocomm talk I said earlier, about some of those stats behind you asking about how people react. But in any sense. We were up there in this there's this community that served in they speak a I'm not very popular language called mix tech, which is a language that Siri doesn't speak Microsoft Cortana doesn't speak Alexa doesn't speak. But because of the tools of AI and such, and this population would come into these hospitals, or there's one hospital in particular and tried to get served because they had health issues that were migratory or agricultural workers, and they needed support. And they weren't able to always get where they wanted to go efficiently. So they would always try to hire staff, translators, people from the community, and they would try to address this population. So they hired us and we worked with them over a collaborative period of couple years. And we taught Daphne their version was think we think they caught her Libya. So we created Olivia and Olivia worked on what we call our personality engine. So she was medical. So she had to have straight lace. So they helped work on how the scripts would go, we worked on teaching Olivia how to speak mix tech, and how to listen to mix tech. And then we used our personality engine to create a personality that had some of the same facial shape. And in that society, like most societies, for now, I'm not trying to be sexist, but there's a much better trust factor about 75% of women and men trust female personalities, which is why series female, which is why our dafis Tip tend to be female. So in any sense, we took a typical population. So we started building up this personality and that personality was deployed at this hospital that had, you know, everything from healthcare, optometrists, dental, and they could walk in the door be greeted in a very trusting fashion. And it wasn't stealing somebody's job, they couldn't have a receptionist sitting out there 24/7 Trying to greeting people, and they would greet them and give them information, hey, if you're here for your appointment, you go over here, if you're here for this, you go upstairs, if you're here for imaging, here's how you get to the Imaging Lab. And they were able to do that. So then the hospital staff could focus on that high value patient care that we as humans agreement. And I think people need to start to your point going all the way back to the tools. That's an example of what we were just talking about with the engagement and the creepy factor. But it's practical. And that was done, you know, probably five or six years ago, this is not something that's 10 years out something we need to really to your point and embrace and understand and deploy in something that's that's mutually beneficial for everyone. And I think that's possible.
Marco Ciappelli41:49
No, no, I think he did a perfect connection back to where we started, which saved me a lot of time from going there, as well another 40 minutes of conversation, which I didn't even realize it was going so far, because it's really fascinating. And like I said, it's it's really different from what I imagined. But I truly enjoyed it. Because we ended up talking about storytelling, character creation, Disney, digital intelligence, and of course, the machine learning. And I think that I agree with you. I mean, in the long run, I just look at how now I can literally translating 25 languages, something that that I wrote. And that happened quickly I was in in Japan two months ago talking about using characters like cartoonish characters crazy over there. And in the how, with my, with my phone, I could translate just by taking the camera on something in Japanese, which other than you know, arigato and few other things. I don't know. But look at that. Is this stealing somebody's job? Now, I don't I have a personal translator with me. But it's definitely something that is a tool that I think it can be very, very useful when you need any information and you can't put it out there. So huge leaps in leaps in the in what technology has become I think in the past 1025 years. And let's we don't even need to go that back. But I enjoy. I mean, that was a good a good strolling in some creative aspect of technology that that you walk us through. So
Chuck Rinker43:34
thank you, Chuck. Do appreciate your time market. Yeah.
Marco Ciappelli43:38
And as you mentioned, and as I close, if you have any resources, software is obligated that you want to share some books or publication and data, send it to me and I'll put it in the notes of the podcast and again, people can get in touch with you learn more about you and maybe ask you some some creepy question too. Now,
Chuck Rinker44:01
I love to debate I like like the, like the naysayers as well as the, as we call it the Kool Aid drinkers, it makes you think makes you guess everything
Marco Ciappelli44:14
I appreciate? Absolutely. And as I always say, I want to thank everybody, for listening. And if you have more question now than when you started listening to this, we did a good job. I want people to question things. So thank you again, Chuck. Thanks, everybody for listening and stay tuned for redefining society podcast and ITSPmagazine and I'll catch with you next time. Take care.
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