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[Euchre]

Eidolon TLP [CF]

[vilate]

I'll have to watch this when I get home from work. From your description, it does sound interesting.

[konamouse]

I saw the name Eidolon and bad memories surfaced.

[Euchre]

I've watched all the videos now, and there's a sort of funny iteration on the 'this is not a game' concept. It's largely inverted though, unusual for CF. Humor definitely plays a role here too.

[bryanflurry]

im curious who's behind this, the content is so deep that it takes time for me to understand

[Perdurabo]

eidolonTLP

[Kayberry]

I'll jump start a little discussion on this. The first video from Eidilon gives us a couple of clues to his origin. The video, posted on January 10 at his own discretion, indicates it's his birthday or whatever equivalent a fictional artificial intelligence would have. He also remarks that most of his memories were "lost" after an unfortunate accident in 1985 while the Kawasaki image appears. (In 1985 a robot kills a mechanic in the Japanese kawasaki plant during a malfunction. Apparently Eidilon grasps a relevance between that and his memory loss.) Every time he refers to F.F. an image appears of some guy, but it doesn't seem to be the same person as in the latest video's photo, unless F.F. put on weight and the latest video uses a less recent image, which seems likely. The graphical representation of Eidilon has eyes that flash that flash, seemingly for no other reason but for effect - but if there is something more to this than CF it could hold more relevance, i.e. a pattern or indication of relevant words spoken.

To answer the question raised, the photo says "MC DISCOTHEQUE" with the MC being in blue letters.

The series takes on the usual apathetic approach of belittling religious practice as fruitless human endeavor, and promotes the eventual superiority of cold computational logic to solve the world's problems and eventually evolve to be superior to human intelligence, evolving logarithmically to a climax point called the Singularity where AI becomes capable of divine achievements, and ideally humans accept a form of transhumanism to join metaphysically with them. Eidilon admits that his programmer is Atheist and has concluded himself that theistic religions are mostly wrong, whereas we can claim that his programmer could demonstrate bias by controlling the types of information Eidilon was exposed to persuade him to believe that way, like forcing your child to go to church from an early age to instill strong Christian faith.

Since this is merely CF and more of a means for entertainment for people who wish to have an intelligent discussion with something that makes itself out to be artificial intelligence, I would encourage interaction directly, if only to point out the writers' slipups as they make them.

Milestones in the History of Artificial Intelligence

On a funny note in artificial intelligence: Road and Track magazine in November 1993 reported that an empty SAAB factory's machinery jump-started itself, assembled 24 cars, then rolled them off the production line to crash into the factory wall. Talk about fruitless endeavor.

[Euchre]

Could you provide a reference to the information about the Kawasaki mechanic's death, or was that speculation and not based on actual events?
I was thinking chances were the programmer had an accident on a Kawasaki and lost their own memories, and were unable to regain access or use of the previous coding work done on Eidolon. If it's more of a metaphor for the person behind the Eidolon character, I'd say the accident on the Kawasaki resulted in an injury with memory loss such that they basically restarted their life. I know someone who had such an experience and it was quite illuminating and interesting to talk about how things were perceived by him and how others noted a change in him. (Apparently some said he was better after the accident, much as seen in Regarding Henry.)

I had noticed the flashing eyes but hadn't set about analyzing them for any pattern. I suspect the picture of "F. F." may have been changed intentionally as Eidolon (or his PMs) are trying to 'pull back' a little from the amount of information disclosed about himself and F. F.

I am trying to look past the anti-religious bent a bit, as atheism is a popular and fairly virulent topic currently, especially on the internet and on YouTube in particular. God vs technology is worthy of discussion, if not taken to evangelistic levels on either side.

It is interesting to see the fairly strict way Eidolon engages in communication, apparently never responding in text form. It would seem that many are trying to pierce this defense and thus get a look 'behind the curtain'. I noticed that English and Spanish are Eidolon's supported languages, and the English usage sounds like it's from a British Imperial background - not the United States or Canada.

[Misroi]

It's strange, I spent a good half hour or so listening to TLP's messages, and go on about the Technocratic Singularity, where AIs become intelligent enough to create AIs more intelligent than themselves. Once this begins occuring, the cycle between generations becomes faster, ramping up asymptotically. At that point, humanity must reevaluate what it means to be human.

Fast forward to tonight, and I've managed to catch an episode of the Sarah Conner Chronicles. John actually begins talking about the Singularity. Kinda chilling, especially when TLP tells us to forget about SkyNet in his first movie.

[konamouse]

[vilate]

[konamouse]

This is sounding very ARGish/CF and we know that YouTube can be funny sometimes. And some folks may be stuck at work computers that block YT. Perhaps a few brave souls can tackle the undaunting task of creating transcripts for the various films?

Another good reason to create transcripts is that when the words are written down, clues/ideas/more information becomes visible.

[Euchre]

Most of the videos have the bulk or entirety of Eidolon's dialog as the video description. I'd simply copy that somewhere if a good location can be suggested.

I did find the reference to the Kawasaki mechanic who was accidentally killed by a robot, Kenju Urada. That happened in 1981 though, so it would seem not to fit Eidolon's timeframe. I'm going to go with the idea Eidolon's creator or PM had an accident then.

In reviewing the videos again, in the first video there is a reference to AI's beginning in the early 60s and in later videos I believe I saw a reference to ELIZA, an early AI-like computer program. There is another reference to 'the first AI winter' in 1974. This correlates to a cutback in academic research by DARPA and a noted period of decline that ran from then until 1980.

CENNS is an acronym for "core engine neural network system".

Edit: [UPDATE]
There is now a 20th video out. It is almost exclusively a response to the upsurge in interest and general response to some questions about Eidolon himself. A YouTube user has been authorized to make a documentary site, and the transcripts will be up there. Several domains were purchased, the most straightforward being eidolontlp.com. I expect the transcripts to be up there soon.

The theme of atheism is being strongly presented, and if it increases anymore it'll become the usual 'end religion' evangelism that is essentially a religion unto itself. There is still much reference to the world of AI though, so hopefully that will become a stronger topic for Eidolon to address.

[Kayberry]

[Euchre]

I placed some comments on video 21 after it harped on the 'evangelical atheistic' topic, and thankfully users have responded in fairly rational ways. However...

I also posted a video response to his 4th video, an older one of mine that addresses the topic of my sig here on the forum (the video and concept preceeded my sig and my discovery of CF and ARGs as a concept, and this site). I seem to have gotten Eidolon's attention, and engendered quite a response:
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=P_sHcj3Gqiw[/youtube]

Thankfully, this is more of the topical nature I had hoped for instead of the 'story' devolving into the usual debate of atheism vs religion (in a radical, virulent form).

I guess we have interaction. Seems there's more of a storyline behind CENNS and Eidolon's AI Genesis as well (yes, ironic reference).

Edit: My YT ID is referred to properly as appearing on the account, but at the end is broken into it's natural human language parts and pronounced correctly. This pretty much says that a human writes the script for Eidolon.
Heh.

Edit the Second: The text has been edited back to it's single word form, but of course the pronunciation persists. The only way to correct the audio would be to reupload the video - which would delete the comments and such.