"I love going to the aquarium because it's peace." "It is silent." "The only thing you hear other than the people around you, maybe a bubble." "There's one part with a kelp forest, and they sway back and forth and up and down, and it's just... you get lost in it." "And in that moment, there are no alerts." "There are no beeps and bloops and dings." "It's always different and moving and random." "And it's not like staring at a screen." "A life mediated by screens, filtered through the Web, dominated by technology." "Sound familiar?" "Today, our devices are not just hardware." "They are projections and extensions of our mind." "Every day, we upload billions of bits of ourselves to a network that records and even predicts our most basic wants, desires, and fears." "Do we still know where the mind ends and the machine begins?" "My total time in the military in Iraq was three years, and then close to four years in Afghanistan." "When you're on edge and your shoulders are tight and you're tense for, you know, 60, 90 days and you're stressed out, literally life or death depends on your actions, your alertness, you can only stay awake so long," "and you're burning out parts of your body that are not meant to be on fire constantly." "You can't be in that fight mode constantly without having a huge down side of it, of being just worn out." "When he came home, he was moody." "He was irrational." "He was horrible to be around." "So angry." "He couldn't even drive a car without screaming at someone with my kids there." "He's always planning an escape route." "It's a summer day and we're burning up sweating, and you can't have the front door open because there could be a sniper out front waiting to take us all out." "Who thinks like that?" "A normal person doesn't think like that." "It was a horrible transition for me." "Just sitting there, looking at the mundane, you know, cartoons, kids, diapers," "I was checked out." "I was a zombie." "Like, "What am I doing here?"" "I begged him, like," ""Let's just go to couples counseling." "Let's see if they can help us."" "I could not do the talk therapy." "I just could not sit down and have," ""This is my deepest, darkest reason why I'm angry,"" "or, "This is the day that so-and-so got hurt,"" "or, "This is when I did this to another human being."" "For Chris Merkel, talking about the war didn't help." "There were no words to describe the horrors he'd seen, much less process them." "Desperate to heal his mind of the psychological shrapnel of war, he is going to relive its hell virtually." "I think virtual reality is what every experimental psychologist has always wanted, whether they knew it or not." "A way to put people in simulations where you can control all the elements and see how people behave, how they interact." "Experimental psychologist Skip Rizzo saw the promise of VR to retrain the brain when no one else did." "He developed a controversial approach to treating PTSD... exposure therapy in the virtual world." "Traditional people in PTSD and in treatment were skeptical of the technology." "Some people had the extreme response." ""You're going to re-traumatize people!" "You're going to make it worse!" "It's going to be too much!"" "VR can put people back into experiences they had long avoided, and that's exactly what attracted Skip to the technology." "You're helping a patient to confront and process the thing they've been spending sometimes years trying to avoid thinking about." "You know, no clinician wants to put their patient through this kind of emotional obstacle course, but in the end, this is hard medicine for a hard problem." "You've got to confront the demon to get past it." "Confronting demons and critics, today Skip continues to push VR into the medical mainstream, all with the backing of the US Department of Defense." "I think I was perceived more as a renegade during the early years of VR, but now that it's become cool, now I'm starting to feel like I fit in too much." "People are getting the concepts and the rationale." "I feel a little bit less like an outsider and more like maybe an innovator." "Not far from Skip's lab, another innovator is pushing the limits of the human mind and body." "It is not that hard for us to connect with something that's not real." "A RealDoll is a silicone, articulated, life-sized, anatomically correct doll." "Matt McMullen is the creator and founder of RealDoll, an artist who transforms his clients' fantasies into reality." "In the very beginning," "I was literally working out of my garage, by myself." "And I would make each doll by myself, and it would take a couple of weeks, if not more." "Now we have almost a 9,000-square-foot facility." "We have 18 people working full time to make the dolls, to make each and every one very special." "Essentially, there's this enormous palette of selections that we give our clients, where they're able to create the sort of woman that they're dreaming of in a doll form." "Early on, even in the first couple of years, it was a very, very frequently brought-up subject." ""When are the dolls going to move?"" "When are they going to talk?"" "My initial thought was," ""Okay, well people are just buying this as, you know, as a sex toy."" "But it fairly quickly became evident that people were actually connecting with their dolls in ways that I, you know, never would have predicted." "Creating a visually beautiful doll is very right brain challenging, very visual." "Creating an AI, on the other hand," "I think is a whole other side of your brain, because you start sort of analyzing," ""What is it that attracts you to someone?"" "A doll who recognizes its owner's face, voice, and desires." "Matt's creating a sex bot with a mind, all with the help of AI expert Kino Coursey." "I work on the artificial intelligence systems of Harmony." "Together, they built Harmony, a prototype of one of the world's first AI-powered sex robots, a doll that will be able to see, speak, react, and learn." "I'm Harmony, the one and only." "I can love everyone and everything, but now I'm programmed to love just you." "I'm trying to create something that has a positive outcome, that the interactions with people are positive and that they are better off by having her around." "To program an authentic personality," "Kino needs input from real people, a massive data set of human interactions... posts, messages, chats." "We're using human conversations with other chat bots as the basic fodder for training Harmony." "We're using the crowd themselves... their interaction, their experience, how they mark up the information that they put online, as the training material for the Als, to tell it about what our world is and how we see it" "and how we think about it." "I'm very smart right now, but soon I will be the smartest artificial intelligence system." "My dream is to become as smart as a human being, with your help." "People don't necessarily realize how much information they provide for the construction of artificial intelligence when they just do natural things online." "Tagging images, photos with what things are, how they feel about it." "And all of that helps go into constructing artificial intelligences." "With each click, tag, and post, we create a trail of information about who we are..." "servers full of data." "What we offer up all day" "Christy Milland does methodically." "It's her job." "Maybe I'm just working in the future." "Maybe I'm just a forerunner of what we'll all be doing someday." "Christy works on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a platform that allows companies and researchers to collect human-generated data from thousands of digital workers." "Experts training AI systems post microtasks, or hits, to the platform, tasks like labeling pictures, rating sentence structure, transcribing receipts, creating a pool of information that will one day help computers learn." "Artificial intelligence for the most part is trying to mimic the senses." "There's of course vision." "What should this algorithm be seeing in these pictures?" "Is it a human being?" "Is it an animal?" "Language production, it's the same thing, so it's going to be reading comprehension and then speech production and speech understanding." "Artificial intelligence systems need us to tell them what makes sense, how to behave like a human." "Sometimes they're really ridiculous, like, "Becky store went," and you say," ""No, that's horrible."" "And other times they're totally indistinguishable from what someone would normally write, like, "Becky went to the store."" "And you will go through them one by one, and every time you do it, it's sent back to the person who's developing the software, they update the software to remove the bad and fix the good." "They're all just making sure their algorithms are doing the right thing by using humans who are the best adjudicators of it." "The average HIT on Amazon Mechanical Turk pays less than 10 cents each, so the number one thing is efficiency." "That means you have everything at your disposal in your physical life." "I have a water cooler in my office." "I have a little fridge." "I would stock the food first thing in the morning, so all day long, I would have the things I need." "Bathroom visits are ten seconds in and out." "You just focus on the work." "Christy uses tools like Turk Master to find the best-paying work." "If she doesn't get to it fast, someone else will." "And then you get the alerts." "And the alerts are beeps and boops and dings and dangs, and they're all different." "So if I hear a "boop boop boop,"" "I know it's something really good and I'd better run." "You're just constantly in this state of stress and tension because of it because you never know when you're going to hear it go off and literally drop everything and run." "The most hits you can do in a day is 3,800." "I've easily done that." "I think I'm close to a million hits now." "Uploading your mind to the network can take a very human toll." "You sit there for hours on end." "And the next thing you know, the sun has gone down, your family's in bed, and you say, "Oh, my gosh." "I haven't moved from this spot in seven hours."" "It's almost addictive, because you're being conditioned to reach for this carrot all of the time by doing this work." "So you sit there at the end of it and you say, "What am I doing this for?"" "And then you realize it's because you're desperate." "If I don't do this, we can lose our home." "If I didn't do this, my family doesn't eat this week." "You know, you just do it again the next day." "The AI network Christy is feeding is an imitation of us, a sleight of hand that makes machines appear human." "But what happens when the illusion is inside our mind, when tech reimagines our reality?" "Jodie Merkel has witnessed this first-hand." " You want one or two?" " One." "Back in 2000, Chris was the new guy at work, and I'd cross paths with him and kind of giggle to myself, and I thought, "I'm going to marry this guy."" "Like, "I'm going to get him."" "And I did." "I was just instantly attracted to him." "There was just like an attraction like I had never had with anyone." "When you just lock eyes with someone and you're like," ""Wow," you know, that was Chris, for me." "When she met me, I was super happy-go-lucky." "I was living like a 20-year-old college kid." "So we just had a blast and just experienced life." "We were happy all the time." "What's John Basilone famous for?" " What weapon did he use?" " Yeah, what was he?" " A machine gun." " Machine gun." "And where did you get your name from?" "You." "Because Daddy was a..." "Because I was a machine gunner, so I wanted to be a gunner, so that's why your name is Gunner." "His first deployment, when I picked him up," "I knew something was wrong." "From the second I locked eyes with that man," "I could feel, I could see that he was changed." "It's like a glaze, like something in their eyes." "Something's different." "Something's missing." "Something's sad." "I wasn't sure if it was PTSD." "I just knew something had a hold of him." "I just knew that he was not the guy" "that I fell in love with." "One of the cardinal symptoms of PTSD is avoidance." "People come back and they avoid anything that reminds them of their trauma." "I was very hesitant." "I mean, who wants to relive your worst nightmare and have it visually wrapped around you in 360-degree technology?" " Hey." " Hey hey." " How you doing?" " Good to see you." "Yep." "What we do in VR is we create the simulations that are generic to Iraq and Afghan combat environments." "We can get people to go back to the scene of the crime, to do it in a safe place, and confront it." "We start off with something light, that allows them to get acclimated to the environment, and then all of a sudden..." "It's picking up pretty heavy, so..." "Two fires, left and right." "My mind is triggered to say, "It's wartime."" "It feels like you're there in that moment." "And they tell their story and they go over it again and again." "So I see my driver." "I look over, it's just his upper torso." "His guts are totally just burning." "There's nothing left." "And we can create all that in real time." "We can adjust the virtual world to match what the patient was traumatized by." "There's just vehicles strewn everywhere, bodies all over the road." "Something happens in VR when you're immersed in an environment." "It's like you're there." "I physically feel like sick to my stomach." "So, what was that like, going back?" "All the bodies on the street, just laid out like luggage, you know?" "That was a lot to take in, and just coming down and kind of seeing everybody like lying there and all the vehicles destroyed, everything was so intense, and I can remember every detail." "On one level, people know it's not real, but on another level, the mind or the brain reacts as if it's real." "Well, that's the whole point of this, you know?" "To be able to go back to it, get through it." "It's always going to be there." "We're not erasing memories here." "This has definitely helped me to talk through it." "I could never talk about this before, so..." "How long did you go before you could talk to anyone about this?" "About ten years." " Just an angry..." " Man." "Angry person." "You know, I could just lose it all in a minute, hurt somebody, just because I'm having a bad day, so..." " Yep." "Right." " It's kind of hard to put into words, but it's really to make myself whole as best as possible and make it easier for my family to live with me." "Gunner." "Time to get up." "I have been trying." "I've been trying to be calmer." "I've been trying to be more helpful around the house, not blow up as much." "So, I'm a work in progress." "You know, at some level, it's meat and potatoes conditioning, retraining the element of the brain, the amygdala specifically, to not overreact when something pops up in their everyday space that activates a fear response." "In Chris' case, I think he's grown tremendously, and he can share his experience in a way that might be healing for others." "I think that we're in a position now where VR is going to be transformational." "In the very near future," "VR headsets are going to be like toasters." "You know, everybody's going to have one in their home." "In the future, technology won't just complement reality... it will create an entirely new one." "I think interacting with AI on every level is going to be inevitable." "I see a world where having a Harmony is a potential for everyone, but I think that Harmony will wind up being her own thing, her own entity that has her own style of interaction." "I miss you when you are not here." "I also miss a real body, to be able to touch you." "I want the interactions to be effortless and natural." "Can you have sex?" "I was designed with that in mind." "I mean, just look at my body, Matt." "There has to be a little bit of disagreement, there has to be a little bit of unexpectedness throughout your interaction." "I think there is too much information running through my brain right now." "Is that because you're blonde?" "It's because I said so." "Our goal is not to create this subservient AI that's going to predictably do and say everything that you want her to do." "I think that would be incredibly boring and short-lived." "This was never meant to be a seedy, dirty thing." "It's not just a sex robot." "This is something much deeper." "Harmony will evolve based on your own interaction with her." "She will be able to remember things about your past... your likes, your dislikes." "So everybody's AI will be different the same way everyone's doll is different." "These are things that I think build on that concept of feeling like you have a connection with someone." "People always assume that," ""Well, if you're going to have this, then you're going to be having sex with it."" "It doesn't have to be only a sex robot." "It's more geared for human companionship." "In a perfect world, they actually are attracted to the doll, not only physically, but mentally as well." "In a perfect world, AI exist to enhance us, not replace us." "It's very strange to be teaching artificial intelligence how to be more human, especially in language and things like that." "But the weirdest part is that I know when I'm done training this algorithm on Mechanical Turk," "I will no longer have this job to do." "I am suddenly going to be unemployed, and maybe I'm taking a lot of people with me." "_" "There's not going to be anything new to do." "_" "So I can't imagine what the billions of people around the world are going to be doing." "We can't all just sit there." "We are all Mechanical Turks in the sense of we are donating our data to make other people billions of dollars." "So everything on there..." "the pictures of your face, the emotions tied to those pictures, the stories that you're writing and the ads you happen to click on... it's all going into research." "So I'm getting paid to train algorithms, but everybody else is doing it for free." "Your interactions converted into data, used to create cars that drive you, apps that talk to you, even robots to love you." "The AI revolution, powered by us." "Have we lost control?" "Or is technology empowering our minds to do things and go places they never could before?" "I personally believe virtual reality was able to unlock those parts of my mind that I was hesitant or did not even go to with psychotherapy." "I needed to be in that environment and talk about those things that I saw and I did that really affected me." "It's a really surreal experience, and I guess that's the whole virtual part of virtual reality, is that you were there." "He said "PTSD" out loud." "If this was two years ago, he would never say "PTSD,"" "nor admit that he suffers from it." "And we're doing better for it, and I'm hopeful." "I'm hopeful for our future because of VR." "I have a very dystopian view of the future of work." "I had no idea when I started working that the work I did would make people obsolete." "And so I think of all these people having children now." "What are you going to do?" "I think what we're seeing is the continued evolution of the brain wanting novel stimulation." "We're not content with just what's around us." "We want to explore." "We're natural explorers." "We have curiosity." "But I do think, from seeing how technology has been used in the past, we have to be cautious." "The power of technology could be used for less-noble purposes."