The Future: Bots Fighting Bots
8 year old me celebrates. But it may look different that we expect.
The complete sensory overload of interacting with our environments — where flashier and flashier content competes for our attention — is beginning to saturate our elegantly evolved perception filtering.
We take for granted our own extraordinary ability to filter as a first step in processing our perception.
Marketing doesn’t. It depends on getting through this filter. More and more campaigns with increasingly sophisticated techniques compete for your attention. With automation, this bombardment will get worse before it gets better.
Before we consider where the battle for attention is going, let’s take a quick reality check.
It’s not people who will have the most conversations with AIs. For every stammering, sputtering sentence in human language we give to a chatbot, that chatbot will have billions of transactions with other AIs in it immediate ecosystem.
We already see this with Twitter. When we first started @paperhq we used a bot to quickly upscale our subscriptions and follows. A few seconds after execution, we had a few thousand followers and followed.
Seconds.
That was our bot getting reciprocating follows from other Twitter-bots (FYI: now bot-free we have fewer, but higher quality, connections).
Bots talking to bots for humans — all at a speed we can’t match.
Putting these trends together and looking in the crystal ball, we can make a guess where technology will take us.
We will rely more and more heavily on AIs to filter content for us. This will begin as more and more advanced, dedicated tools (think Youtube “recommended for you” for everything).
Eventually, specialized AI gatekeepers will aggregate our attention to a single, intelligent tool.
I imagine these specialists as the ultimate personal assistant. Rather than logging in to every subscription we have, we’ll rely on an AI to prioritize data, deal with the things that can automated, and present the tasks that matter the most to you.
For example, rather than asking Siri questions, Siri will proactively tell you a LinkedIn contact is currently displaying features receptive to a follow-up call that will advance your priority Salesforce deal.
Your personal AI become the singular point of contact to integrate with everything. That single point is already a battleground between all big tech companies, and will only escalate as technology makes more actions possible without effort.
The new reality of AI as gatekeepers will change the plays, but the marketing game will remain the same. Strategies will be formed around getting through AI filters to reach humans (and their wallet).
And the best weapon to fight through AI filters? Other AIs. We are reaching the dream of every 8 year old — robots fighting robots.
It just won’t look like we expected. It will be with data-streams and algorithms instead of lasers and lightsabres. May the best intelligence win.
Are humans then destined to wander clueless in an encrypted digital reality dominated by AIs speaking binary?
Not necessarily.
Good user experience will still drive purchase decisions. Natural Language Processing is an obvious choice to comfortably mediate interactions — becoming a sort of console log for humans needing insight into AI interactions. NLP is becoming so commodified that implementation will likely become an expected feature-set.
And it allows humans to access (or troubleshoot) systems when required.
We have the chance to implement tools and standards now that will keep us involved as AI use grows.
The increased prevalence of AIs will reset the way humans conduct business. Arm yourself appropriately.
