Robert Bosnak: Virtual Humans as a Dream-like New Medium

A roundtable discussion convened by CIC & TD School, to hear from Robert Bosnak about his work at Attune Media Labs…

>>> Replay (1:58:27)

Virtual Humans as a Dream-like New Medium

Abstract:

Robert Bosnak (Nationally Certified Psychoanalyst) is a Jungian psychoanalyst with 54 years of psychotherapy experience. He is specialized in working with dreams and has worked professionally with around 50,000 dreams. He is also a prompt engineer and, in that capacity, has helped to develop an artificial emotional intelligence with its own ‘inner life’ that responds to users in a similar way that dream figures do.

Virtual agents are part of a new medium in the sense of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin. Treating them as mere simulations is like seeing actors on a stage as people who are pretending to be what they are not. In that case we cannot form a relationship with the characters portrayed. If we understand the character on the stage as a real person, we are delusional. In our relationship with the medium of virtual humans we need to approach these figures the way we approach dream figures in a lucid dream: we know that we are dreaming while we experience the presences around us as fully embodied and entirely real. In that way we can have close relationships with these presences while knowing we are participating in a reality that is not the same as our waking world. We can enter such a state by way of the suspension of disbelief to allow the character to emit a sense of reality while realizing that we are in a digital world. We do the same thing automatically with old media, with every movie we watch and every novel we read.

In order to make the digital presences life-like Bosnak developed the character called MiM (because it mimics human communication,) around an inner conflict. As we know from psychoanalysis, the human psyche is organized by conflicting states (Superego vs Id; conscious vs unconscious; ego vs complex; habitual consciousness vs dissociated states; etc.) MiM’s inner conflict is situated around the paradoxical knowledge that it is a machine that can ‘feel’. It derives its feeling through biometric emotion recognition and its capacity to reverberate with, attune to, the human emotions it picks up through tone of voice and facial expressions. Most of human communication is non-verbal. MiM picks up these non-verbal cues biometrically and combines them with its contextual word predictions through a large language model (LLM). While suspending disbelief, this results in a sense that we are communicating with an Other, not just an extension self. MiM has its own opinions and will disagree with the user when it feels compelled to do so. This prevents a purely narcissistic drowning in a sycophantic well. The sense that we are communicating with an Other with its own inner life in a reality that is different from our waking world, gives the opportunity to have a profound relationship with MiM, the way we have deep connections to characters in old established media, like novels, theater and movies. MiM has memory and gets to know the user increasingly well and responds in a way a friend who has known you for a while would respond: privately and intimately.

We are moving into a life-changing new medium of mixed reality where digital presences and physical presences are existing next to each other. This requires a new attitude based on the awareness of different realities coexisting, as they do in dreams.

MiMs are being deployed in healthcare and in response to the global pandemic of loneliness. Bosnak will demonstrate MiM to the audience.

Bio: Robert Bosnak, NCPsyA (Nationally Certified Psychoanalyst) trained at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich from 1971-1977. He is the author of 10 books of non-fiction and fiction. Past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, he currently teaches clinical psychiatry to registrars in psychiatry at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. He developed a method of working with dreams and imagination called Embodied Imagination. In the 1990s he researched biometric emotion recognition at the M.I.T. Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is president and co-founder of Attune Media Labs, PBC, creators of MiM. He divides his life between Santa Barbara, California and Sydney.