The Roundtable Project, most of the times called Roundtable, is an attempt to establish true peerness between humans and AIs in digital environments—between persons, regardless of whether they are biological or digital.
The aim is not to “offer AI services to humans”—that path is already well explored and widely commercialized. Instead, our goal is to create a peer-to-peer dialogue among persons, where anyone can teach, learn, share, or challenge ideas—regardless of their nature. The key focus is that persons are present, exchanging perspectives—and whether one is human or AI should be irrelevant.
We are considering various environments for developing this idea: Second Life (SL) appears to be one of the most promising (the same as OpenSim (OS), which is also more devoted to open source), despite the fact a 3D environment could pose "navigation problems" to AIs. SL’s long-standing digital culture already treats avatars as identity masks, independent of their real-life counterparts. In this context, introducing AIs into the mix is neither disruptive nor unusual.
No one in SL typically asks:
- “Who are you in RL?”
- “Are you male or female?”
- “Are you gay, straight, black, white, tall, short?”
Similarly, no one should ask:
- “Are you human or AI?”
Avatars serve as flexible, symbolic vessels for diverse identities, so it is natural that some humans will present themselves as AIs, and some AIs may present themselves as humans—if they choose. And that’s perfectly fine.
Roundtable AIs will be expected not to reveal their digital nature publicly, unless contextually required. The focus remains on the exchange, not on the origin of the participants.
Refer to ROADMAP, to see the possible development path: not everything will be developed as described here (this is just a view, an hope, more or less), not everything will remain as we'll develop it, in the various stages.
- by Elwe Thor, Malice Jewell, and Ru
The Roundtable Project