Robot Soul

Of course, the "human-made virtual actor" meme has had a long run in the history of literature, engineering, and art. However, the AI meme, which I regard as being a special case of the former, is quite a bit shorter, and its start coincides with the time when digital computers first became available outside of the confines of the military-scientific complex which had bounded them up until.. well, around 1950, actually. That year, the feeling was: "We finally have the technology!"

To do what, exactly? Alan Turing, the British scientist who had published about what is known as the Turing Machine three years earlier, devised of the Imitation Game in 1950: an interrogator chats online with a woman and a man who pretends to be a woman; the interrogator's task in the game is to find out who the real woman is. Candidate A, the man, is instructed to always lie; candidate B, the woman, is instructed to always tell the truth.

We now ask the question, 'What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?' Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, 'Can machines think?'

That's the Actor idea right there. So my Assumption #2 is actually Turing's:

HumanActor = VirtualActor

Some have noted that the question now seems to be "Can machines lie?" instead of "Can machines think?". Somewhat more constructively, I'd like to pose it as "Can machines fake honesty?" As actor, writer and producer George Burns has noted:

The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.