yup.
Arturo stood out right away. Something about him didn’t quite look right. My readings seemed to have a hard time calibrating, which gave me time to scrutinize him straight up and try to see what the problem was. Once you were looking for it, it was obvious, but hard to believe. Unless I was mistaken, he hardly seemed masked at all. The eyes were the most uncanny part, of course. Eyes always carry the most information, so the slightest bit of something unusual about them really stands out. But it wasn’t just the eyes. It was everything. The skin around his eyes. His mouth. His entire face, his entire body. No masks. His posture was his posture, his expression was his expression. After letting this sink in for a moment, I realized just how devious this really was - so of course it couldn’t be effective for much longer, but for now, I was stumped. Who has the software to read actual, unmasked human expressions and signals anymore? I’d have to go digging around in some unbearably ancient archives, and anything I found was hardly likely to be reliable. Nobody knew anything about writing interpretative software back in the days when they were still writing it for real human faces and gestures. Today’s stuff is phenomenal, but of course it’s all geared toward figuring out what somebody’s mask is expressing, and subsequently what the mask is hiding, given what it’s trying to express. But if this Arturo guy is just showing me his own bare face, I’ll practically have to turn on my training mode and go from scratch. Well, it’ll take a while to catch up, but without any masks, he certainly can’t outpace it, and I’ll have him figured out soon enough.
It did take some kluging of old software with new training algorithms, but the next time I ran into Arturo I had a pretty good read on him. I did consider the possibility that he had a mask so sophisticated that it couldn’t even be detected, but that seemed a little more unlikely than that he anticipated the difficulty anyone would have trying to adapt to unmasked dilations and tics. It was fascinating, really, to watch him. Most interactions, you barely notice the person you’re talking to. Even though most of the signal reads your inner display gives you, indicating boredom, hesitation, nervousness, anger, dissembling, whatever your system is set up to recognize, these things you’re so used to you barely realize you’re being told - almost like it’s supposed to have been before interpretive software, but better, more detailed, more likely to be accurate. But you have to be reacting properly to that display, you have to be adapting your own mask to what you can guess about the other person’s software, you have to keep a fine interwoven dance with your own software, trusting its interpretations and suggestions but also strategizing based on that information. Recognizing boredom is one thing, but deciding how properly to deal with it takes quite a bit of concentration. Your software can only go so far: if it detects boredom, is that because you succeeded at recognizing it, or because they wanted you to think they were bored? And whichever one it is, you have to decide whether to retaliate with your own boredom, to try to force interest out of them, or any of a hundred other conversational strategies. Keeping all this in mind while continuously updating the reactions of the other person is absorbing.
But this Arturo. Assuming his pupils really were dilating when it looked like they were, assuming his eyes really were wandering when they appeared to, assuming that slouch in his shoulders was actually there, with my old-time software kluge I felt reasonably confident that I knew when he was sincere, or insecure, or interested or bored. Even though, in some respects, all the little gestures and facial tics he was displaying were generally the same as those that masks portrayed, either it was just different enough that I could tell, or just knowing that it was unmediated was enough to make it look a little different. I found myself actually watching his face, staring into his eyes, paying attention to his behavior more than to my software’s interpretation of it. Of course the software read it better than I could, but it was so strange to see.
The fascination began to run thin, though, as the conversation wore on. I had assumed that even though he wasn’t wearing masks, he at least had his own inner display and interpretive software. But without masks reciprocally adapting to my own, it was hard to interact with him. His expressive style and gestures seemed so static; he just acted the way he did, without changing the pattern to prevent me catching on to his habits and tells. The easier it seemed to read him, the less I had any hold on his intentions at all. It began to seem very creepy. Oh he had the usual occasional dodge, some exaggerations here and there, but my software was telling me that he was genuinely interested in what I was saying, was enjoying himself. I couldn’t seem to find any recognizable pattern of moving toward a particular goal, of shaping or guiding the conversation, I could hardly even detect what image he was trying to project. It all seemed very inconsistent, as if he were just following the ideas as they came up without any deliberate plan or outline of what to say or how to say it. He was either so astonishingly skilled that all his moves were utterly disguised, or a complete madman.
I wasn’t even sure if it would be harder or easier to manipulate him toward my own goals, if he didn’t even have software to respond to my tactics. Either way, I began to doubt I could get much out of him. I became convinced he was at the very least eccentric, if not worse, and that there wasn’t any good way I could work on someone like that. He probably wouldn’t respond to my pressures, wouldn’t even recognize them. My carefully crafted image was all but invisible to him. How can you use a person like that? I began to maneuver a way out of conversation with him, drawing on some of my favorite methods of getting out of future obligations. Hopefully he could catch on to at least that much. I think he probably got the idea: as we parted, my inner display reported that he appeared sad, and disappointed.
It did take some kluging of old software with new training algorithms, but the next time I ran into Arturo I had a pretty good read on him. I did consider the possibility that he had a mask so sophisticated that it couldn’t even be detected, but that seemed a little more unlikely than that he anticipated the difficulty anyone would have trying to adapt to unmasked dilations and tics. It was fascinating, really, to watch him. Most interactions, you barely notice the person you’re talking to. Even though most of the signal reads your inner display gives you, indicating boredom, hesitation, nervousness, anger, dissembling, whatever your system is set up to recognize, these things you’re so used to you barely realize you’re being told - almost like it’s supposed to have been before interpretive software, but better, more detailed, more likely to be accurate. But you have to be reacting properly to that display, you have to be adapting your own mask to what you can guess about the other person’s software, you have to keep a fine interwoven dance with your own software, trusting its interpretations and suggestions but also strategizing based on that information. Recognizing boredom is one thing, but deciding how properly to deal with it takes quite a bit of concentration. Your software can only go so far: if it detects boredom, is that because you succeeded at recognizing it, or because they wanted you to think they were bored? And whichever one it is, you have to decide whether to retaliate with your own boredom, to try to force interest out of them, or any of a hundred other conversational strategies. Keeping all this in mind while continuously updating the reactions of the other person is absorbing.
But this Arturo. Assuming his pupils really were dilating when it looked like they were, assuming his eyes really were wandering when they appeared to, assuming that slouch in his shoulders was actually there, with my old-time software kluge I felt reasonably confident that I knew when he was sincere, or insecure, or interested or bored. Even though, in some respects, all the little gestures and facial tics he was displaying were generally the same as those that masks portrayed, either it was just different enough that I could tell, or just knowing that it was unmediated was enough to make it look a little different. I found myself actually watching his face, staring into his eyes, paying attention to his behavior more than to my software’s interpretation of it. Of course the software read it better than I could, but it was so strange to see.
The fascination began to run thin, though, as the conversation wore on. I had assumed that even though he wasn’t wearing masks, he at least had his own inner display and interpretive software. But without masks reciprocally adapting to my own, it was hard to interact with him. His expressive style and gestures seemed so static; he just acted the way he did, without changing the pattern to prevent me catching on to his habits and tells. The easier it seemed to read him, the less I had any hold on his intentions at all. It began to seem very creepy. Oh he had the usual occasional dodge, some exaggerations here and there, but my software was telling me that he was genuinely interested in what I was saying, was enjoying himself. I couldn’t seem to find any recognizable pattern of moving toward a particular goal, of shaping or guiding the conversation, I could hardly even detect what image he was trying to project. It all seemed very inconsistent, as if he were just following the ideas as they came up without any deliberate plan or outline of what to say or how to say it. He was either so astonishingly skilled that all his moves were utterly disguised, or a complete madman.
I wasn’t even sure if it would be harder or easier to manipulate him toward my own goals, if he didn’t even have software to respond to my tactics. Either way, I began to doubt I could get much out of him. I became convinced he was at the very least eccentric, if not worse, and that there wasn’t any good way I could work on someone like that. He probably wouldn’t respond to my pressures, wouldn’t even recognize them. My carefully crafted image was all but invisible to him. How can you use a person like that? I began to maneuver a way out of conversation with him, drawing on some of my favorite methods of getting out of future obligations. Hopefully he could catch on to at least that much. I think he probably got the idea: as we parted, my inner display reported that he appeared sad, and disappointed.