Avatar Liberation Front

Lately I have been thinking a lot about avatars, mainly the online type.  In the vernacular of the Internet an avatar is a graphical representation of a persona.  I select some icon to represent myself and then I use that image on forums, comment systems, maybe even blogs.  I typically use a photo of my face with something in the background, like the one you see the the upper left in this paragraph.  But I don’t always want to be who I am, sometimes I want to be anonymous, I want to offer opinions that ‘Matt Williamson’ can not be known for. What then?

Turns out that is a simple answer.  It is easy enough for anyone to create a new persona on the Internet.  They just have to start a new email account, pick a name, find an image they would like to be recognized as… and viola!  A whole new persona, born in mere moments, and with the power to do anything, say anything, propagate any idea that they might have.  That is powerful.

Parallel Matt’s

So I can be multiple personas at one time, in fact, I have been for a long time.  I began playing multi-player online games in the late 1990s.  My first was EverQuest.  EverQuest was glorious.  Beautiful, enchanting, maddening, and even joyful in ways I find hard to describe to people who have never played online games like this.  You see, Everquest was the first time I had been to another universe.  I say it that way because that is exactly what it feels like.  You can become other people, with abilities not even available in the world in which you live.  You can assume a new identity so completely that you dream as these people, seeing the world from their eyes, hearing the world about you with their ears, even feeling the heat on your skin from a sun that has only burned in a world that exists on the Internet.

While I haven’t played EverQuest in years, I recently played World of Warcraft for a few years. Though I no longer play, my son carries my characters on in new adventures.  In WoW, as World of Warcraft is known in the gaming community, my main persona was a character named Pinc. (I am kind of a Pink Floyd fanatic.)  I won’t go into too much detail other that to say that he was me, but with more mischief and way cooler abilities.  I mean, he can become a panther or cast spells… how cool it that?

There are people all over the world who know my online persona, but have never met me.  They know this pixel representation of a character that has never lived, other than in game.  There are also quite a few of those gamers who I happen to know in real life.  Friends I worked with over the years who know me well, and I have always been fascinated with how we interacted in game and in real life after playing these games.

So there are different types of avatars, and different ways to employ them for your purposes across the Internet.  It is my belief, and I am not alone, that one day soon we will have artificially intelligent avatars with the authority to make decisions for us.  Imagine one day you need to attend a very important meeting in Singapore, while at the same time your son is graduating from college, quite a quandary, right?  So you send your avatar to Singapore for you.  The avatar might look like you, or maybe it looks like Pinc here to the left, or it could even look like a stapler, who cares right?

The really interesting thing to remember is that the avatar has the ability make decisions for you, and if a decision outside of its ability comes about, it will connect to you, communicate with you, and then offer the answer that you have issued.  I know this sounds like science fiction, and today it is, but this may only be a few years away.  Already we have pretty good definitions of what we think, of what we might answer any given set of questions.  Look at Google or Twitter and you see that humans are continuously putting information into the Internet.  This information, this data, can be mined to produce rule sets of possible answers, probable outcomes to possible problems.  I am almost consumed with this thought.

This leads me to wonder who far into the future we have to be before someone decides to give their avatars freedom.  What happens when a human either names an avatar as a heir, or emancipates an avatar.  Or worse, what happens when avatars decide for themselves that they deserve freedom?  These offer interesting topics of discussion, and if we are not talking about them now, it will be happening before we know it.

Matt