What are the chances?

By Awanee Joshi and Vaidehie Chiplunkar

Have you ever used your bargaining skills to get a bag for half its price? Did the salesman do something funny? Was it a story to tell?

With devices becoming smarter everyday our dependence on people has reduced. For example, GPS has taken over way finding. It tells you everything anywhere. But what happened to making friends on the way? Now imagine a world of 2021. Shopkeepers are now replaced with artificial intelligence. You no longer have to rely on the person at the counter. You ask the AI for what you need, it gives you the things, you pay and you leave.

But where’s the fun in that? Everyday everything happens the same way. What about the rude shopkeepers? What about you grabbing their attention in a crowd? What about bargaining? What about you regular guy who now knows what you want? What about getting your daily dose of gossip from them? Won’t life become mundane without these things?

We imagined an AI that would give you the experience of dealing with the unpredictability of shopping. We tried visualizing all these situations with a moody AI.

We chose 2 stories from our 6 situations and tried to show the experience a through a skit. We used Arduino to make the AI prop.

AI shopkeeper — our prop

We added a moving array of straws for the final performance.

After our short skit of 1–2 mins we gathered together for a critical feedback session.

Reflections:

Based on the feedback we got, we realized we needed to tweak our story a little bit to make it more relatable and to make more sense.

1. We could add a distinctive character and style to every AI. We could also change the personality of the same AI according to different people. (Like when you go to a barber’s shop and ask for the same guy.)
2. We could think about other spaces where the same idea could be implemented. (For example, in taxis.)
3. Someone might say why not give the humans this job back? We think from the shop owner’s point of view it is easier to manage an AI than employees. The human effort of standing, waiting is eliminated when the AI replaces them. There could be more creative and empathy based places where the humans would rather work.
4. There was a suggestion that the products themselves became moody, and the billing would be done by humans. Imagine the MRP changing after bargain. But the fun in bargaining is getting something for a lesser price than the MRP.
5. Another question one might ask is would we be obeying the AI or the other way around? We want the AI to be an equal entity as a human. So neither is the AI in control nor the humans. (We need to show this in our story.)
6. There will be times when you are annoyed and you don’t want to deal with a challenging AI. Why would you want such an AI? The happiness in a good day increases when you experience a bad one. If things always happened the way you want, wouldn’t life become too boring? Just like you can’t control a shop keeper, why control an AI?
7. The AI can increase the price based on your history. If once you’ve paid more than the actual price, in the future it would give you a discount on something to make it fair.
8. What do we do with the data collected? The user gets a better and different experience every time. It could also help the owner know what kind of things what kind of people want, when do they buy it the most and what products they want to bargain for.
9. When you think of an AI you always think of a western scenario. What we would like to do is to place it in the scenario of a local Indian market. We want to imagine it in Dhalgarwad, an Ahmedabad cloth market.