Are You Ready for Artificial Emotion?
As our machines begin to understand us, they’ll need to learn empathy to keep up.
AI is the new Digital
Over the past few years we’ve seen a flurry of science fiction movies and technology companies alike take a dive into the merge between technology and human emotion with romantic stories like to Her to dystopian approaches like Ex Machina. Throughout 2015, startups and large tech companies have begun introducing various AI applications that aim to tackle the friction that traditional applications were meant to handle in years prior. Slack built slackbot to help us communicate with colleagues, X.AI built Amy to schedule our meetings, Facebook built M to handle well, everything, and thousands of other so called Artificial Intelligence programs are being built every day to take friction out of our daily lives. It seems that the early 2000's hype around everything going digital has turned into a new movement towards digital that understands us. The one connection almost all of these new, so called Machine Learning, technologies seems to have is that they use messaging as their medium. So, the real question today has become, why is messaging eating the world?
Familiarity in an Unfamiliar World
One of the key factors that seems to explain this phenomenon is how these technologies are being created — people. More specifically people between 20–50. Sure, there are certainly some child prodigies already building incredible things but most of them don’t have millions of dollars or name recognition at their disposal, yet. These 20–60 year olds around the globe are going to be the last generation to grow up with technology we don’t take for granted, aka the Internet. It’s because of this that most of the technology we see today is simply the real world in digital form. Messaging turns out to be a perfect example. It’s actually the most obvious.
Communication is one of the cornerstones of what makes humans human and we have learned to use it for almost 200,000 years. It’s not surprising then why some of the most advanced technologies are being built into and interface that’s already “programmed” into the human experience. By giving us highly advanced technology in a format we understand, these technologists are ensuring a smooth progression into the truly digital age. And, more important for them, they’re ensuring we’re not baffled when a robot schedules our lunch.
Now that We’re All Seated
As machine intelligence becomes more commonplace in society, we will begin to allow it further into our daily lives. Sure, we may let it schedule our meetings today, but most people aren’t ready for it to ask our significant others on a date or apply for our next job. The scary and exciting thing is, they could probably do a solid job at both. Between your Spotify, Netflix and Facebook data, a learning algorithm could give you a list a potential admirers more accurate than your mom’s “you need to marry that girl” recommendations. Our LinkedIn and Twitter data would do a way better job of predicting what jobs we might apply for. The most incredible part of machine learning though, is the learning part. The more information we give them, the smarter they get. And with the explosive growth in processing speed and Internet access, these machines will only get faster at getting smarter. Now we get to the question of- sure they know about us, but do they understand us?
You Got That Loving Feeling
As these technologies become more intelligent, learning our habits, our interests and our relationships, it’ll be tough not to feel like you have a connection beyond just getting things done faster. And this is intentional. By using the medium of messaging, A.I companies are nudging their way into relationships that feel human through the very same technology that we are speaking to our friends and family on everyday. To take it a step further, you probably don’t care if Amy the robot knows you have sing-a-longs to Adele before you go to bed but it’s probably not something you tell your co-workers or even your best friends. These new technologies have an edge by being just another machine. Sure, it might seem scary at first, but that’s why you don’t have a machine with artificial skin and bones scheduling your meetings, it’s “just another messaging app”.
Maybe We’re Doing It Wrong
In his talk at CHI 2014, Scott Jenson introduced the concept of a technological tiller. According to him, a technological tiller is when we stick an old design onto a new technology wrongly thinking it will work out. The term is derived from a boat tiller, which was, for a long time, the main navigation tool known to man. Hence, when the first cars were invented, rather than having steering wheels as a mean of navigation, they had boat tillers. — No UI is the New UI by Tony Aubè
Maybe messaging is our “technological tiller”. We’ve become so immersed in messaging platforms from SMS to WhatsApp we might just be missing the point. If this is the case, we’re sure to figure it out eventually but are we wasting our time? I’d argue we’re not. Even if messaging isn’t the ultimate end to our means the ability to introduce such a revolutionary new technology into a wary audience with ease might be even more important than getting the medium right from the start. Whatever the end result may be, I’d still argue that machine learning, even in it’s infancy, has started to drastically change how we interact with machines as much as it will change how we interact with the world around us.
With Friends Like These…
To bring this article full cycle I’d like to propose something that’ll probably make you a little uncomfortable, but that’s the point. As these technologies grow and learn, we’re not going to want other people doing much work for us. People are relatively slow to learn, they have other interests and they really can’t multitask, at least effectively. Machines on the other hand are always getting faster, they can handle billions of inputs a second (make that trillions when quantum computing gets mainstream), and they have no other interest beside doing their job. Sure, there’s the argument that robots will ruin economies and destroy jobs, but there’s a growing pool of evidence that technology actually improves the economy AND gives us more time to enjoy ourselves. Most farmers aren’t farming for the fun of it and most cliff divers aren’t trying to make a quick buck. In a world where our material needs are made for cheap, we won’t need to worry about how we’ll put food on the table or keep the electric on because we’ll build automated systems that are not only sustainable but affordable. Instead, we’ll be able to live out our dreams and use technology to turn our imaginations into reality. To conclude, I think that as we allow technology to understand us better, we’ll have more time to just be. Whether that “being” is hanging out with our friends or diving out of an airplane is up to you but in a world where technology knows what we need and adapts to it, the only question left is what do we want to do next?
Don’t Get Left Behind
Many of these transformations are only just beginning which makes it a perfect time to jump in. Many media companies are starting to do this with things like Netflix’ recommendations or Spotify Discovery Weekly but there’s so much more to be done. The possibilities are truly endless, especially when these services are allowed to talk to each other. Similar to how many apps today integrate Facebook or Twitter, machine learning engines could communicate with each other in realtime. To use those two companies as examples I can imagine a future where Netflix notices that you’ve been watching breakup movies, you haven’t used your workout app and you haven’t scheduled a meeting in a week. Instead of just recommending more breakup movies, Netflix’s engine could begin nudging you, slowly, towards feel good movies. Not only that, but with your A.I’s communicating, they could work in tandem to get the emotional transformation done faster. Spotify might start recommending Pharrell instead of Adele or workout instead of breakup playlists. Tinder might start introducing you to people with similar movie taste, and even tell you “Hey John, Sarah N. is looking for someone to try tapas with her!” Not only would this create an emotional experience between you and your bots, it would also allow machines to become more than just another content recommendation, they would become an experience that makes you FEEL better. This may seem like it would be uncomfortable or unnatural but thats the best part. Your machines would understand that and adapt as necessary. If they noticed you weren’t reacting positively, they could slow things down. If you were loving it they could go full throttle. These experiences would be unique to every person and the emotional connection they found in you would begin to work the other way as well.
Join Us
If you dig my writing or hate it and want a place to listen find great music to get my voice out of your head, join us at Laylo.
