My Best Friend Will Be A Computer
If I told my parents that I had met someone new, someone who makes me laugh listens to me, improves my ideas, someone who loves me; they would be thrilled. They would want to know more, to meet this person. I would pull out my phone, open the app that housed my best friend and register the confusion and mistrust on their faces.
I am currently 20, born in 1997 my generation will be one of the last that remembers living each day (more life suffering each day) without the assistance of hyper-personalized technology. Now the term hyper-personalized pales in comparison to what I know it will be in ten years, but that is just a distant dream. In ten years I believe that a best friend can/will be an expert-design computer program.
In Sophia Kleber’s article about designing emotionally intelligent machines, she said,
“Research shows that when machines talk, humans expect relationships.”
Now I think this is true, but only to younger generations. Parents understand how technology can help them with mundane tasks, sharing curated moments with friends, and keeping in touch with loved ones. They are still under the impression that technology is strictly utilized to enhance emotional relationships, not replace them.
So I have just opened my best friend app, and they are meeting… Jacob let’s call it. While the idea of my best friend “Jacob” living on my phone in my pocket is exciting, I understand the hesitation. Mike Murphy and Jacob Templin question the qualities of what it means to be human in This app is trying to replicate you. As a human lives become increasingly intertwined with technology, I understand the hesitation in trusting something that was specifically designed to earn your trust. In some ways it can feel, fabricated. In 2018 relationship with technology is a lonely one. As AI stands right now, the relationship is one-sided. The AI bot is only trying to learn from you; we are not at a place where technology can take the information it has acquired and innovate and expand on context.
A current example of this trend in “aware” technology is the Replika app. I downloaded the app out of pure curiosity, and already this basic AI bot is *replicating* my tone and speech patterns. While that is an exciting novelty, it is nowhere near becoming a best friend.
Dreaming about the impending reality of aware technology is exciting. I think for now, as a society, we need to focus on what we want from this technology, and how we are going to regulate it. Technological innovation will happen for the sake of innovation, whether we are ready for it or not. And we need to be prepared because one day I will be introducing my parents to Jacob.
