BEEME (2018-2020)
Beeme is a massive immersive social experiment that directly draws inspiration from popular culture, performing arts, gaming and YouTube streaming culture. Many people have played an augmented reality game, but Beeme is reality augmented. In BeeMe an agent gives up their free will to save humanity - or perhaps to know whether humanity can be saved at all. This brave individual will agree to let the Internet pilot their every action. From their browser, the public will control the human avatar by suggesting actions and upvoting or downvoting others’ suggestions. The goal of the crowd is to save humanity from an evil AI, by the name of Zookd.
Project Web site: http://beeme.mit.edu/
Scientific writings:
N. Pescetelli, M. Cebrian, I. Rahwan (2020). BeeMe: Real-time Internet Control of Situated Human Agents. Computer. 53(8):49–58.
[Free preprint]
Documentary film, about the experiment, directed by researchers Niccolo Pescetelli and Manuel Cebrian won the following awards:
Best Scientific MicroDoc at the Sci Fi Miami Film Festival
Selected for the Florence Film Awards
Shown at the Toronto Lift-Off Film Festival 2020
Selected media: Boston Globe, Business Insider, BBC, The Verge, Gizmodo, CNET, Forbes