About four years ago, Kevin Dunn and Peter Stevenson,co-founders of Trustnode, approached me with a novel idea forselling insurance and financial products. They wanted to talk withme because of my background in user experience design and humancognition and perception.

Their idea was bold. They wanted to replace human sales agentswith interactive 3D avatars who could sell insurance and financialproducts. These avatars would be programmed with deep knowledgeabout these complex domains and be able to answer questions clearlyand patiently. Their interactive agent would never sleep, haveinexhaustible patience, be available to anyone with a computer24/7, and, most importantly, be trustworthy. Plus, they wouldn’tcharge huge commissions on each sale (a bonus no consumer wouldargue with).

I was showed a couple of demos. One was a 3D realistic avatar, aquasi-human looking guy in a suit and tie who was looking at me andtelling me about insurance. The look of the 3D realistic avatar waswell executed, but there was something creepy about him. While heappeared human and, on the surface, “intelligent,” I knew he wasn’thuman, only pretending to be. Also, as I know enough about naturallanguage processing; I knew I could trip him up simply by asking aquestion that wasn’t scripted. I simply didn’t trust the artificialguy.