I have been reading The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid and had a few thoughts about the second chapter on Agents and Angels. The authors give an excellent analysis of the use of software bots that are increasingly influencing our lives as we spend more and more time online.
There are bots that track our online behavior and then customize search results according to various algorithms. The purpose of bots is 1. to help the user by quickly finding what it "thinks" the user really wants to find, and 2. to push products of certain customers who pay the bot owner for each customer who clicks through to their website. There are alert bots that we can program to continuously search the Internet for us to find news on particular people, companies, or phrases. There are shopbots that we can program to continuously search for a particular product that we want to purchase and it will find us the best price.
One of the oldest forms of bots are called "chatterbots" that act as conversational partners with a level of "awareness" so to seem truly human. The most famous chatterbot is Eliza, an online therapist chatterbot that has been around for more than 40 years as nothing more than computer code. These bots have long been predicted to develop into personalized assistants that will keep our calendars, handle our communications, wake us in the morning, and lull us to sleep in the evening with just the right music based on its "knowledge" of our personal preferences and practices.
Chatterbots have replaced customer service representatives as the first line of response when we call a business and get the automated answering system with the human sounding voice that gives us a list of options and directs us through several layers of problem solving before finally, hopefully, handing us off to a human. Some companies have gone even further by having chatterbots search a vast database of recorded incidents of customer problems and solutions while keeping you on the phone and then delivering the most logical answer according to the algorithm. It has also been suggested that reference librarians and any other number of information professionals might be replaced in the same way.
So what I am thinking is this. Given the vast number of sermons posted to the Internet by a wide variety of different preachers, why doesn't someone write a bot program that can draw from this online resource and create a customized sermon? I am thinking of a bot that operates from a web page where I can fill out a profile of my religious orientation - denominational affiliation, doctrinal leaning, etc., as well as information about how I am feeling or what I feel like I am needing on a particular day - I am feeling depressed, I am feeling fearful, I am full of joy, etc., and within moments the bot will deliver me a sermon, in stereo if I prefer, that I can listen to whenever and wherever. The bot might take into consideration the time of the year and customize the sermon for religious holidays or maybe it has been tracking my online history and decides that I need a sermon on the dangers of greed, lust, or idleness. I almost forgot the most important part! After delivering the sermon, the bot asks for an offering.
Let me know what you think.
On the border between France and Spain in the Pyrenees
According to legend, the Brèche was cut by Roland, supposedly a nephew of Charlemagne, with his sword Durendal, while attempting to escape the Saracens during the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. This geological gap, if you will, seems like an appropriate metaphor for my personal attempts at Sense-Making.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
The Preacher Bot?
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2 comments:
Very interesting idea! I can see how an online sermon might be of interest to a churchgoer midway through the week or something. I'd be curious to know whether some religious folk might replace their church attendance with online sermons, rather than simply supplementing during the week... I would imagine this would be most likely if one had religious beliefs that were out of line with one's local churches.
In other words, the easy availability of more agreeable sermons online might increase the "cost" of going to a physical church enough that it would lower the churchgoers threshold for disagreeable messages in the sermon... ultimately leading church goers to stop attending a particular church if the congregation's beliefs deviate from their own.
This would be particularly interesting because it might be a way for other churches to gain membership from religious folk that would otherwise decide to stop attending church.
Very interesting idea! I can see how an online sermon might be of interest to a churchgoer midway through the week or something. I'd be curious to know whether some religious folk might replace their church attendance with online sermons, rather than simply supplementing during the week... I would imagine this would be most likely if one had religious beliefs that were out of line with one's local churches.
In other words, the easy availability of more agreeable sermons online might increase the "cost" of going to a physical church enough that it would lower the churchgoers threshold for disagreeable messages in the sermon... ultimately leading church goers to stop attending a particular church if the congregation's beliefs deviate from their own.
This would be particularly interesting because it might be a way for other churches to gain membership from religious folk that would otherwise decide to stop attending church.
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