What If Computers Were a Gorilla?

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Corrections:
- [21:46] Reference release date of documentary should be 2015, not 2023
References: https://junferno.com/references/casa.html
Footnotes:
- Microsoft Agent was released in 1997 as a way for third parties to implement the interactive character technology used in Microsoft Office Assistant with the last release in 1998
- BonziBuddy was a trojan that reset the user's browser to the Bonzi website, installed a browser toolbar, collected user information, and served advertisements
- Bayes and Laplace came about Bayes' Theorem completely independently, with Laplace having no knowledge of Bayes' prior work. It remains uncertain as to why Bayes' work went wholly unnoticed after being published by Price
- Before Bayes, a similar attempt at the inference of probability was conducted by Thomas Simpson, who took interest in the problem for its application to astronomy and wrote a letter "On the Advantage of Taking the Mean of a Number of Observations, in practical Astronomy", approaching uncertainty from the angle of error distributions. This work was limited with some statements unsupported by proof. According to the statistician and science historian Stephen Stigler, "Later Laplace was to slip in this same back door and come around to open the front (only to find later that Bayes's key was already in the lock)."
- Bayesian inference was used for the Answer Wizard and subsequently MS Office Assistant from Lumiere, in which likely user goals were inferred from the terms used in the query
- Grice's Maxims or the cooperative principle is a concept of four maxims introduced by linguist Paul Grice: Quantity (be informative), Quality (be truthful), Relation (be relevant), and Manner (be clear), that encompasses the nature of people in achieving effective conversational communication
- The Comic Sans font was developed by designer Vincent Connare for Microsoft Bob to better fit the cartoon dog "Rover", who was originally speaking in Times New Roman. Rover Bob is Sans Undertale?
- Some harsher critics of Microsoft's attempt at social interfaces during the release of Microsoft Bob included computer scientists Jaron Lanier and Ben Shneiderman in 1995. Lanier claimed that "Agents make people redefine themselves into lesser beings" and that "computers, unlike other tools, seem to produce the best results when users have an antagonistic attitude towards them" while Shneiderman stated "Vague goal specification is dangerous... who would use a system that allowed a vague command like 'Delete all old files' or even vaguer 'Delete all useless files'".
- The Media Equation also ruled out some possibilities against CASA: The subjects were computer-literate with sustained responses meaning that they did not believe the computers truly had human capabilities nor were acting impulsively. When asked, none of them were purposefully suspending belief nor purposefully acting social for any reason. Could it be that the subjects were simply thinking of the programmer when behaving socially? No, because when asked, they all said they were not and they all presumed that both programs were created by the same programmer rather than different ones, and were correct.
Further reading:
- Lanier, J. (1995). Agents of Alienation
- Shneiderman, B. (1995). Looking for the Bright Side of User Interface Agents
- Heyselaar, E. (2023). The CASA Theory No Longer Applies to Desktop Computers
- Kaptelinin, V., & Dalli, K. C. (2025). Understanding Contextual Framing: A Nonessentialist Perspective on Social Interactions with Technological Artifacts
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