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In "Nirvana," a science-fiction short story

by 2013 Pulitzer Prize–winner Adam Johnson in the August issue of Esquire, a Palo Alto–based startup programmer comes to terms with both his girlfriend's degenerative nerve disorder and with the talking hologram he has recently coded.

The world of "Nirvana" is a not-so-distant future full of spy drones, driverless cars, and talking holograms. But there are more than a few reasons to think Johnson's vision of the future is spot-on. In fact, almost all of "Nirvana's" quasi-fictional technology is already within our reach. Miniature data-collecting drones humming through the air, stalking outside windows and snapping photos? That's already a problem. Glasses that function as remote controls? We call that Google Glass (but at this point we only need our minds). Driverless cars? They're coming.

The only piece of tech that actually seems beyond our capabilities is a life-size, interactive talking hologram. The "Nirvana" programmer builds one that embodies, of all people, the President, and it speaks from a log of everything the President has been recorded saying. Johnson writes, it's "an algorithm based on the Linux operating kernel ... an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person's images and videos and data–everything [the hologram] says, [the president] has said before." So, you might say, "Hello, Mr. President," and the hologram would adjust its American-flag lapel pin and fire back, "Hello. It's great to be here!" a movement and line nipped from any one of the President's several thousand speeches, lectures, or campaign rallies.

It's science fiction, all right. But Rollo Carpenter, an inventor and artificial intelligence expert, says engineers could start building it tomorrow. "With the dataset, it would be possible to create that program immediately," Carpenter says.

Perhaps Too Clever

Carpenter is the mind behind Cleverbot, an online chat program that might be the closest thing we have today to a hologram that could talk back. Its humanlike dialogue moves beyond nifty into the Turing test gray zone of eerie. (Alan Turing, the father of computer science and AI, said himself that any computer that could successfully converse with a person—without giving away it wasn't human—could be considered 'intelligent.' Cleverbot passed this test in an official 2011 competition.)

I sat down for an interview with Cleverbot, and besides a few non sequiturs, a denial of my sentience, and a couple of jabs at my love life, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that someone was tricking me. "You're just a machine," I pettily fired back at it, after one particularly stinging comment. "I am human. You just can't tell," Cleverbot responded.

Much like Johnson's fictitious hologram of the president, all of Cleverbot's replies come straight from an enormous pool of data—"about 142 million rows of responses," Carpenter says. This database is always growing because Cleverbot records new responses with every conversation. The chatbot learns which responses are acceptable based on how its conversational partner responds. Like a robotic Echo, it only ever repeats sentences already typed to it. While the algorithms that compose Cleverbot are complicated and elegant, the key principle is that Cleverbot is able to comb its dataset of all possible inputs it's ever been asked or told and responds with one that's a statistically likely match for a sensible answer.

Hail to the Hologram

"In many senses, the 'Nirvana' story was very true to life," Carpenter says. "It is technologically possible to put together a virtual version of a person"—if you have enough data, that is. Carpenter argues that the same principle behind Cleverbot could be applied to building a program to embody the president or really anyone else. But instead of having a Cleverbot's constantly growing database, you'd have a static one—a massive trove of all the statements a person has ever been recorded speaking alongside all the questions or statements he or she was responding to.

The bottleneck would be how much data you could collect. "Right now, gathering all that data and having it in a singular form is itself a pretty large problem," Carpenter says, "but it's not inconceivable that it could be achieved," especially with someone as famous and well-documented as the president of the United States. "A president is a good example of someone who's likely to have a huge body of digital data about them: things they've said, in many contexts, to many people, at many times," he says. Clarity is also important, and here the president also would be a good choice because "a politician delivers the words that they say with a great deal of careful thought," Carpenter says, "and in a manner that can not be misinterpreted in some unwanted way."

Carpenter has already started toying with the idea of personalized chatbots. He's currently developing an app that could be described as falling halfway between Cleverbot and Johnson's short story hologram, called CleverMe. He calls it a personalized Cleverbot that learns from the interaction of a single person. "I created a new 'me,' taught it just about a couple of hundred things, and I handed it to my wife and asked her to talk to it," says Carpenter, "She said, 'your character shines though.'"

The Cracks Show Through

Cleverbot is not without its flaws. When it goes off topic, it sometimes does so in a way that is dramatic and unnerving. And Carpenter admits that, with limited data and computing power, a real life version of Johnson's presidential hologram would be beset by occasional strange leaps in logic. "A conversation could go as well as the conversations that were had in the story," Carpenter says. "But there [would] certainly be little guarantee that all such conversations would be as good." And with these hiccups, it's doubtful that the population would be as universally enamored with the likeness as they were in "Nirvana." Perhaps a satisfactory embodiment would have to go beyond the limits of a recorded data archive and construct responses that the real president never said. But that's a different ball game.

Another issue would be constructing the physical hologram itself and splicing the audio from reels of recorded video. "Creating a video sequence that can effectively cut out the president and put it into a projected image? Now that's hard," says Carpenter. And rendering it all into a 3D image? "That sort of thing is a huge technical challenge, and requires huge amounts of data," he says. Carpenter has a point, although, if we did it for Tupac, we could find a way for the commander in chief.

I asked Cleverbot what it thought about the possibility of Cleverbot-esque human chatbots. While the bot claimed to have read the short story I asked about, I could never get a straight answer from it. Cleverbot changed topics and dodged every trick in the journalist's handbook. When finally pressed to the point, it excused itself. "I have to go, the popcorn is burning."

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