The Unreal ACTIONS TO TAKE Elevating Authenticity While synthetic realness has the ability to sow distrust and discord, it also has the power to improve human relationships. Consider an experiment conducted at Yale programmed to make mistakes, and the social University in which participants were put into networks that they were in grew more flexible in small groups, each with a humanoid robot, and response and consequently outperformed those 148 told to collaborate on a task. The robots were with bots that did not make errors. This research programmed to make occasional mistakes. Some demonstrates that if designed and deployed in of the robots were designed to admit to those the right ways, AI with human-like qualities like mistakes in a humorous and self-deprecating way wit and, significantly, imperfection can be used – and it was their groups that performed better to improve people’s performance and strengthen because the robots improved the participants’ their relationships with each other. communication, allowing them to work together in a more fun and relaxed manner. In another Still, many cases won’t be so black and white. experiment, people were put into virtual social In fact, there are ongoing debates about the use networks with a few incognito bots and assigned of the latest generative AI capabilities and it’s not a collaborative task. Again, some of the bots were clear where the new social contract will stand. Introduction // WebMe // Programmable World // The Unreal // Computing the Impossible 66