My $10 Billion Idea

They’re trying to get AI to the point where it’d pass a Turing Test, in part to service the incipient age of home robots, where the things will need to have a voice and a personality, and the problem is that humans are extremely sensitive to fake/canned responses - and, even more problematically, revolted by simulation that's merely close-to-human (uncanny valley).

What if we took 1% of that R&D and paid actors? Real live actors, who'd give your robot maid/butler/companion a completely convincing personality. You could, during set-up, flip between a number of candidates (i.e. an audition process for remote actors), finally locking on to the one with the personality you want.

We’d allow the actor to sleep - and to multitask as multiple robots in parallel - very easily. It's just a matter of ignoring conversation at certain times (while fulfilling all robotic functions). That actually makes the robot more like real people (“Fido gets very quiet after 9pm; I’ve learned not to bug him!”). The actor would also pre-prepare certain canned responses for everyday functioning ("Yup", "Ok", "Thanks", etc.).

It sounds expensive, but we could surely pay 30,000 out of work actors, cam performers, or college kids a decent living for the R&D it would otherwise take to convincingly simulate conversation (I don't think it'd ever happen, anyway, as consciousness is not an implantable, cultivatable thing).

If owners get gross or abusive or cross some sort of line, the robot could stand up to them, draw lines, say mean things back (again, this makes them more human!). If an actor no longer wants to work with a given owner, the robot would sulk silently, waking up the next day with a fresh outlook and voice (i.e. actor switch).

To handle inevitable actor churn, maybe there would be a few dozen standard personality types, with back stories and a repertoire of typical expressions, and actors would be trained to portray one of those types. This would ensure some continuity when actors shift (if the owner, per above, gets gross or crosses lines, they'd need to select a personality more in line with their new requirements).

Consider this