New program lets users control humans through internet

With Halloween just around the corner, researchers have created a new online program that will let users control a living person through the internet.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a creepy online social experiment called ‘BeeMe’ for Halloween night through which users who take part will be able to control a person, a trained actor, via internet.

With a tagline of ‘See what I see. Hear what I hear. Control my actions. Take my will. Be me,’ BeeMee is a ‘massive immersive social game’ aimed to ‘shed a new light on human potential in the new digital era’.

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“Halloween night (October 31) at 11pm ET (3am GMT), an actor will give up their free will and let internet users control their every action,” one of the researchers Niccolò Pescetelli told Business Insider.

“The event will follow the story of an evil AI by the name of Zookd, who has accidentally been released online. Internet users will have to coordinate at scale and collectively help the actor (also a character in the story) to defeat Zookd. If they fail, the consequences could be disastrous.”

The person controlled by the participants will be a trained actor whose name and location won’t be revealed. The game is expected to last for about two hours but, Pescetelli said that it will be the audience who ultimately decides how long the game would go on.

However, there will be limits as to what the crowd-generated commands can made the actor do. Pescetelli explained, “Anything that violates the law or puts the actor, their privacy, or their image in danger is strictly forbidden. Anything else is allowed. We are very curious about what [is] going to happen."

Moreover, the actor could be controlled through a web browser either by writing and submitting custom commands like ‘run away’, or users can vote up or down commands; once the command is voted up, the actor will perform the particular task.

About the outcome of the project, Pescetelli informed New Atlas, “I personally can see three outcomes, all equally likely. First, the crowd completes the goal that it has been given, namely the game mission. Yay. Second, the crowd establishes for itself and maintains a different set of goals (e.g. trolling the actor) and successfully executes them. Third, the crowd cannot achieve its goals (whatever they are) and acts as a headless chicken, jumping from non-sense to non-sense.”

The event will be live broadcasted on BeeMe’s website where the users can see what the actor sees via the live video stream.