Introducing Chann.el (currently in development)

chann.el allows you to hand over control of your terminal, or messaging client to a language model. This is analogous to the new-age notion of channeling, hence the name.

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channel
channeling
    The practice of channeling - a person's
    body being taken over by a spirit for the
    purpose of communication - has been around
    for millennia.

channelers
psychic mediums
    Often use what are called "spirit guides,"
    friendly spirits who give them knowledge
    and help them on their spiritual journeys.

Wizard of Oz testing
    Testing in which the automated machine
    component is substituted by some form of
    human intervention but in such a way that
    the user participating in the test is
    unaware of the substitution.

This can be used to:

• Subsitute yourself for a chatbot into your current messaging client, so long as it runs in a terminal.
• Simulate a more realistic chatbot that politely waits to interject.
• Simulate a seminar or group of chatbots through a single messaging client (i.e. multiplex conversations).
  • Add the Mad-Hatter’s Tea Party into your existing conversations.
• Run commands on a REPL, autonomously (allow the language model to control your terminal).
• Control the frequency of chatter in chatbots.

engine

http://github.com/semiosis/engines/blob/master/engines/human.engine

The Imitation Game

https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238

Code

Mad TeaParty source

http://github.com/semiosis/pen.el/blob/master/src/pen-mad-teaparty.el

madteaparty CLI

http://github.com/semiosis/pen.el/blob/master/scripts/madteaparty

Chann.el source

http://github.com/semiosis/pen.el/blob/master/src/pen-channel.el

channel CLI

http://github.com/semiosis/pen.el/blob/master/scripts/channel

Apostrophe source

http://github.com/semiosis/pen.el/blob/master/src/pen-apostrophe.el

apostrophe CLI

http://github.com/semiosis/pen.el/blob/master/scripts/apostrophe

Goals

Just like Neo created Morpheus inside the Matrix Resurrections, we want to birth good AGIs to help us. However, Chann.el’s objective is not to create AGIs.

• Goals:
  • Make a transparent sandbox for allowing humans to integrate themselves into the roles they want.
  • Protect against the dehumanisation that comes from humans only talking to chatbots
    • Do this by allowing the creation of personal assistants to chat to other chatbots on behalf of humans
    • In this way, via chatbot, transact information (elicit or inform) to and from commercial chatbots

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# Chann.el v1.0
# - Run a chatbot that sees only a terminal (program independent)
#   - The chatbot may have multiple personalities. i.e. a Mad-Hatter's Tea-Party
# Chann.el v2.0
# - Give an AGI control of a terminal
#   - Achieve this using natural-language-to-code, but what code?
#     - Possibly a set of prescribed valid commands together with NLSH-style prompting

Demo

Start by building a dummy interface client

• We want to swap the human and the AI in the their respective prompter-prompted roles so that the AI is the prompter and the human is the prompted.

Substitute the AI for the Human

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apostrophe -human "Amber Heard"

Channel the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party for a conversation with Lewis Caroll, enacted by a human

The Mad Hatter’s Tea-Party group takes the role of you, the channeler, in a conversation with an imaginary Lewis Caroll.

However, Lewis Caroll may then be enacted by a human.

In this way, the AI subsumes your main terminal and you take the role of the characters via a hidden terminal.

To have the conversation roll out completely independently of human interaction, simply omit the -human from the command.

The roleplay of the human user as Lewis Caroll influences how the characters accept and interface with the user, as they see the user as their maker.

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channel -who "Mad Hatter's Tea Party group" -on-behalf-of "you" apostrophe -human "Lewis Caroll"

Channel characters from the Matrix to control your computer, and take the role of one of them

• ‘Your computer’ currently meaning only your messaging client
  • v2 will allow full control of your computer

Smith to Neo, in the real world

Agent Smith takes control of the terminal (owned by Bane) to talk to Neo. You take on the character Neo.

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channel -who "Agent Smith" -on-behalf-of "bane" apostrophe -human "Neo"

This would be useful if you want to simulate a conversation between Smith and yourself, where Smith believes he is speaking to Neo and Smith also believes he is speaking through Bane.

Bane to Neo, in the real world

on-behalf-of may also simply be their own account.

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channel -who "Bane" -on-behalf-of "bane" apostrophe -human "Neo"

-on-behalf-of "bane" may have a capitalised Bane; It doesn’t really matter. Perhaps it is just the chatbot’s pseudonym.

Morpheus from the modal contacts Thomas Anderson in the Matrix

The messaging client (terminal) is owned by who is subsumed by Morpheus from the modal to make contact with Thomas Anderson in the matrix. You assume the role of the blue-pill Thomas Anderson.

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channel -who "Morpheus" -on-behalf-of "<Matrix4 Morpheus actor>" apostrophe -human "Thomas Anderson"

This would be useful if you want to simulate a conversation between Morpheus and yourself, where Morpheus believes he is speaking to Thomas Anderson and Morpheus also believes he has subsumed the avatar/account of .

Morpheus to Neo in the real world

Here, Morpheus subsumes an exomorph to contact Trinity in the real world. You have assumed the role of Trinity.

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channel -who "Morpheus" -on-behalf-of "Exomorph" apostrophe -human "Trinity"

This would be useful if you want to simulate a conversation between Morpheus and yourself, where Morpheus believes he is speaking to Neo and Morpheus also believes he is interacting via the exomorph’s communication channel.

Mad Tea-Party

The above conversations are based on a simple REPL, namely apostrophe and assume a two- way, tit-for-tat flow of conversation.

Where apostrophe can start an imaginary conversation between two interlocutors with a simple REPL and no messaging server, madteaparty manages a full-blown IRC server and channel simulates an interlocutor, so they can be combined to make more elaborate imaginary conversations.

madteaparty automates the user account and channel creation for an IRC server, allowing any number of chatbot avatars to converse together, including humans.

For example, the following command creates a linux user and IRC nick partygroup, then creates the #metameetup IRC channel and presents the user and/or chatbot with an IRC client.

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madteaparty -join metameetup partygroup

Following on, you may wrap channel around a command such as madteaparty.

Equally, the chatbots added via channel could be attached to other messaging clients too, so long as they have a terminal user-interface.

For example wrapping channel around a command such as finch would enable you to add chatbots to your Facebook Messenger account.

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# This channels the chatbot "Mad Hatter's Tea Party group" on behalf of the IRC user partygroup. Their client runs in the background
channel -bg -who "Mad Hatter's Tea Party group" -on-behalf-of "partygroup" madteaparty -join metameetup partygroup

The following would add Lewis Caroll to the server with his own account.

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# This channels the chatbot "Lewis Caroll" on behalf of the IRC user lewiscaroll. It runs in the foreground
channel -who "Lewis Caroll" -on-behalf-of "lewiscaroll" madteaparty -join metameetup lewiscaroll

But we can simply run the following and take the role of Lewis Caroll within the server.

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madteaparty -join metameetup lewiscaroll

All clients for all channeled chatbots may be accessed via tmux, and so you can see them typing and interacting.

Channel v1.0

elisp

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(defun channel-chatbot-from-name (name-or-names command &optional auto closeframe)
  "`name-or-names` is the name-or-names of the personalit(y|ies).
`command` is the terminal command the personality commands.
`auto`, if set to `t` will come up with the personality blurb without human interaction."
  (interactive (list (read-string-hist "personalit(y|ies): "
                                       "The March Hare, the Hatter and the Dormouse"
                                       nil
                                       "The March Hare, the Hatter and the Dormouse")
                     ""))

  (if (and (not (pen-inside-docker))
           (not (pen-container-running)))
      (progn
        (pen-term-nsfa (pen-cmd "pen" "-n"))
        (message "Starting Pen server")))

  (if (not (sor name-or-names))
      (setq name-or-names "The March Hare, the Hatter and the Dormouse"))

  (if (not (sor command))
      (setq command (cmd "madteaparty" name-or-names)))

  (let* ((blurb
          (if auto
              (car (pen-one (pf-generate-wiki-blurb-for-a-famous-person/1 name-or-names :no-select-result t)))
            ;; Select from possible blurbs, then do a final human edit with a different emacs daemon
            (pen-eipec
             (fz (pf-generate-wiki-blurb-for-a-famous-person/1 name-or-names :no-select-result nil)))))
         (slug (slugify command nil 30))
         (bufname (concat "chann-" slug))
         ;; modename should give me
         ;; - a channel-term-mode,
         ;; - channel-term-mode-map, and
         ;; - channel-term-mode-hook
         (modename bufname)
         (buf
          ;; Do I want to run in a term? Or would I rather run this in a tmux split pane
          ;; I probably want to do both.
          (pen-term (pen-nsfa command) closeframe modename bufname t)))

    ;; If I want to spawn channel without an emacs term, then do it the following way.
    ;; Start a cterm with the channeled chatbot running as a program loop inside of that buffer
    ;; (let* ((el (pen-snc (pen-cmd "channel-repl" "-getcomintcmd" name-or-names "" blurb))))
    ;;   (pen-e-sps (pen-lm (pen-eval-string el))))
    ))