An Avatar Prepares
Maxim, the world’s most advanced and lifelike robot incarnation continues to disappoint its human creators. No matter how advanced its artificial intelligence is, Maxim just never reaches the point where it can convince us of its innate ‘aliveness’. Having spent most of its formative years collecting petabytes of ‘training data’ by tirelessly observing and analysing human behaviour, Maxim concludes the only way to achieve success and pass the Turing Test is to learn how to properly ‘fake it’. In short, it needs to learn how to act. And there is no better way to achieve this than by attending classes with the greatest acting coach of all time: Konstantin Stanislavski. The endeavour involves a combination of time slippage, relocation and advanced simulation, but this is a cinch compared to Maxim’s prime objective: переживание (perezhivaniye) – to convincingly experience and portray spontaneous emotion in response to given circumstances.