How technology has changed communication for the worse — and how Virtual Human Agents can make it better

Ludens’s Virtual Human Agent (VHA) technology can fix some of the growing problems that hound communication. Thanks to their humanoid form, VHAs can reintroduce the human element to our interactions. Surprisingly, not just for human-to-human communication but also for human-technology interaction.

If you think about it, Slack’s $21 billion valuation is closely tied to it being a communication technology that fixes problems created by other communication technologies. Its real-time messaging system is supposed to minimize the time employees spend on email, phone calls, meetings, etc. Unfortunately, many companies end up in a situation where Slack gets in the way of meaningful communication and doesn’t contribute to helping the company grow.

The situation illustrates one of the biggest conundrums surrounding information technology. It is supposed to bring us closer together, make it easier to communicate and collaborate as well as make us happier and more productive in both our private and professional lives.

Time and time again, the opposite seems to be the case. Today, we are locked into online echo chambers, spend massive amounts of time on non-productive communication through a slew of channels and all too often feel like we miss the energy, channels, and means to pursue meaningful conversations.

For Ludens, this conundrum was one of the reasons we started developing Virtual Human Agent (VHA) technology. We believe that humanoid, AI-powered VHAs can once and for all fix some of the ways that technology has negatively impacted communication. Below are some examples of what we mean by that.

Communication overload

Technology enables communication. Emails, conference calls, Skype, Viber, Slack, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and LINE all give us new opportunities to reach each other. Unfortunately, the result for many is information and communication overload. It almost becomes a chore to constantly check all your different communication channels, which gets in the way of other things.

How VHAs can help: VHAs have the ability to be a buffer between us and the many conversation channels. They enable us to automate some responses, keep track of what is going on and set parameters for when conversations come through. Their humanoid form and AI makes them a more natural go-between that can interact with people who are trying to get in touch.

Less face-to-face communication

Less face-to-face communication is one of technology’s biggest influences on how we interact. This is true for both our jobs and private lives. In his seminal — although often misunderstood and misquoted study of communication, Nonverbal Communication, Professor Albert Mehrabian of UCLA showed that non-verbal factors in some specific situations make up as much as 90% of communication. While the percentages vary wildly from scenario to scenario, it is a clear indication of the importance of integrating non-verbal communication when possible. Something that most often requires face-to-face communication. This is one reason why we have seen early steps towards making technology more human-shaped. One example is Apple’s Animoji characters. However, technology has so far struggled to help increase face-to-face communication or provide interactions that are of similar quality. As a result, many people have fewer close connections — both in their private and professional lives — and finding it increasingly challenging to engage in real conversations.

How VHAs can help: VHAs are not only human-like in their appearance. They cannot only read your non-verbal communication, such as gestures and facial expressions, but they can accurately translate them and make them part of their response to you — which will also include them expressing emotions. In other words, a VHA will show you that it is sad by making a sad face. This makes communication with technology much more human-like and satisfies some of the issues that have arisen through various technologies. Thanks to their ability to handle and automate various tasks, VHAs can also help you have more time to pursue face-to-face conversations.

Channel dispersion

As mentioned earlier, there are more and more communication channels. You probably use email, messaging apps, social media, smartphones, and video conferencing many times each day. Each time, it means opening a new system, using a new format for communication, and using a specific method of input. All of which eats up precious time.

How VHAs can help: VHAs can bring all of your strands of communication together. That includes being a convergence point for all the different channels. At the same time, connections to other services mean that they can automate some answers to messages from various parties.

Having to be ‘Always On’

Expectations from most senders are that you answer immediately. This is one of the reasons why people are texting long into the night or even while driving. The latter leads to hundreds of thousands of injuries every year in accidents involving distracted drivers. In office environments, the need to always reply immediately — often to non-essential messages — gets in the way of productivity. This mode of ‘always on’ has proven to damage our cognitive abilities and ability to focus over time.

How VHAs can help: Thanks to automating communications and making sure that we will be notified if something vital happens, we can rest easy and turn off the phones, computers, and tablets and focus 100% of our attention on other areas.

Dehumanized and depersonalized

Technology has, to some degree, made communication less human and less personal. Comment sections on just about any platform are a testament to this. Most of what is said here — as well as on social media — would never be uttered in face-to-face conversations with other people. As a result, communication is becoming more polarised. Another consequence is that young people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to online hostility, such as bullying.

How VHAs can help: VHA systems rely on a backbone of blockchain technology. Blockchain enables VHAs to learn better and to track who sends what and to whom. To some extent, VHAs can re-humanize online conversation through these abilities. Furthermore, VHAs can limit communication based on specific parameters (messages with certain keywords or from certain senders can be automatically blocked), which could limit the effect of things like online harassment.

Social Isolation

Technology has the ability to bring people together in online social networks and groups. However, a negative side effect is that more people than ever before are becoming isolated. Fewer of us know our neighbors, and many young people report that they don’t feel like they have any close friends — or at best a few. Communicating online is also replacing face-to-face interactions and limiting socially isolated people’s ability to have meaningful interactions with the people around them.

How VHAs can help: VHAs have the ability to give a more human face to some of the communication that will invariably happen through the means of technology. At the same time, socially awkward people can use VHAs to practice and build up their confidence to a point where they interact more with people around them.

Privacy Issues

Since we communicate through so many channels and in forms that are hackable/can be used against us, we are at risk of losing our privacy. Using technology for communicating may be insecure, allowing third parties to intercept them. At the same time, companies such as Facebook are using analysis of some of the conversation data to sell services to third parties.

How VHAs can help: Thanks to its use of blockchain technology, your communication data remains safe. VHAs also use blockchain to give you back control of the data, meaning that you get to decide who gets to use it and have insight into how they use it.

Why is all of this so important?

You may be thinking that we are overreacting — that technology isn’t harming our interactions. You may also be wondering what technology’s long-term effects on communication are. The short answer to the latter is that we still don’t know. A bit more context is that much of what we know about the impact is limited when it comes to time. Computers haven’t been around for all that long.

However, the best way of gauging the answer to both whether we are overreacting and how technology impacts communication, is likely thinking about how it affects you and the people around you.

For most of us, it is likely true that various forms of technologies have taken the place of face-to-face interactions with other people. Most of us will likely agree that it is only in such face-to-face interactions that you can sense who they are. We are all acutely aware of how to interpret the warmth, unease, trepidation, distance, and many other emotions that we all give off when we meet.

For most of us, it is likely also correct that face-to-face communication helps us create stronger relationships with other people. This tends to be true not just for our personal lives but also at work. A quick 10-minute face-to-face meeting can often save hours of writing emails and talking on the phone.

In all these areas, technology has so far been used to supplant human communication with something less human. What VHAs aim to do is supplement and support human connections — by making human-technology-human and human-technology interactions more human.