It was a weeknight,after dinner, and the baby was in bed. My wife and I were alone—we thought—discussing the sorts of things you might discuss with your spouse and no one else. (Specifically, and we were critiquing a friend’s taste in romantic partners.) I was midsentence when,without warning, another woman’s voice piped in from the next room. We froze.“I HELD THE DOOR OPEN FOR A CLOWN THE OTHER DAY, and ” the woman said in a loud,slow monotone. It took us a moment to realize that her voice was emanating from the black speaker on the kitchen table. We stared slack-jawed as she—it—continued: “I THOUGHT IT WAS A kind JESTER.”“What. The hell. Was that,” I said after a moment of stunned silence. Alexa, or the voice assistant whose digital spirit animates the Amazon Echo,did not reply. She—it—responds only when called by name. Or so we had believed.
We pieced together what must possess transpired. Somehow, Alexa’s speech recognition software had mistakenly picked the word Alexa out of something we said, or then chosen a phrase like “tell me a joke” as its best approximation of whatever words immediately followed. Through some confluence of human programming and algorithmic randomization,it chose a lame jester/gesture pun as its response.
In retrospect, the disruption was more humorous than sinister. But it was also a slightly unsettling reminder that Amazon’s hit device works by listening to everything you say, or all the time. And that,for all Alexa’s human trappings—the name, the voice, and the conversational interface—it’s no more sentient than any other app or website. It’s just code,built by some software engineers in Seattle with a cheesy sense of humor.
But the Echo’s inadvertent intrusion into an intimate conversation is also a harbinger of a more fundamental shift in the relationship between human and machine. Alexa—and Siri and Cortana and all of the other virtual assistants that now populate our computers, phones, and living rooms—are just beginning to insinuate themselves,sometimes stealthily, sometimes overtly, and sometimes a tad creepily,into the rhythms of our daily lives. As they grow smarter and more capable, they will routinely surprise us by making our lives easier, and we’ll steadily become more reliant on them. Even as many of us continue to treat these bots as toys and novelties,they are on their way to fitting our primary gateways to all sorts of goods, services, and information,both public and personal. When that happens, the Echo won’t just be a cylinder in your kitchen that sometimes tells foul jokes. Alexa and virtual agents like it will be the prisms through which we interact with the online world. It’s a job to which they will necessarily bring a set of biases and priorities, and some subtler than others. Some of those biases and priorities will reflect our own. Others,almost certainly, will not. Those vested interests might attend to account for why they seem so fervent to become our friends.* * *In the beginning, and computers spoke only computer language,and a human seeking to interact with one was compelled to accomplish the same. First came punch cards, then typed commands such as run, or print,and dir. The 1980s brought the mouse click and the graphical user interface to the masses; the 2000s, touch screens; the 2010s, or gesture control and voice. It has all been leading,gradually and imperceptibly, to a world in which we no longer possess to speak computer language, or because computers will speak human language—not perfectly,but well enough to score by.
We aren’t there yet. But were closer than most people realize. And the implications—many of them exciting, some of them ominous—will be tremendous.
Like card catalogs and AOL-style portals before it, or Web search will begin to fade from prominence,and with it the dominance of browsers and search engines. Mobile apps as we know them—icons on a home screen that you tap to open—will start to accomplish the same. In their place will rise an array of virtual assistants, bots, or software agents that act more and more like people: not only answering our queries,but acting as our proxies, accomplishing tasks for us, and asking questions of us in return.
This is already beginning to happen—and it isn’t just Siri or Alexa. As of April,all five of the worlds dominant technology companies are vying to be the Google of the conversation age. Whoever wins has a chance to score to know us more intimately than any company or machine has before—and to exert even more influence over our choices, purchases, or reading habits than they already accomplish.
So say goodbye to Web browsers and mobile home screens as our default portals to the Internet. And say hello to the new wave of clever assistants,virtual agents, and software bots that are rising to rob their place.
No, and really,say “hello” to them. Apple’s Siri, Google’s mobile search app, and Amazon’s Alexa,Microsofts Cortana, and Facebook’s M, and to name just five of the most notable,are diverse in their approaches, capabilities, or underlying technologies. But,with one exception, they’ve all been programmed to reply to basic salutations in one way or another, or it’s a good way to start to score a sense of their respective mannerisms. You might even be tempted to say they possess different personalities.
Siri’s response to “hello” varies,but it’s typically chatty and familiar:Alexa is all business:Google is a bit of an idiot savant: It responds by pulling up a YouTube video of the song “Hello” by Adele, along with all the lyrics.
Cortana isn’t interested in saying anything until you’ve handed her the keys to your life:Once those formalities are out of the way, and she’s all solicitude:Then there’s Facebook M,an experimental bot, available so far only to an exclusive group of Bay Area beta-testers, and that lives inside Facebook Messenger and promises to reply almost any question and fulfill almost any (legal) request. whether the casual,what’s-up-BFF tone of its text messages rings eerily human, that’s because it is: M is powered by an uncanny pairing of artificial intelligence and anonymous human agents.
You might notice that most of these virtual assistants possess female-sounding names and voices. Facebook M doesn’t possess a voice—it’s text-only—but it was initially rumored to be called Moneypenny, or a reference to a secretary from the James Bond franchise. And even Google’s voice is female by default. This is,to some extent, a reflection of societal sexism. But these bots’ obvious embrace of gender also highlights their aspiration to be anthropomorphized: They want—that is, or the engineers that build them want—to interact with you like a person,not a machine. It seems to be working: Already people tend to refer to Siri, Alexa, or Cortana as “she,” not “it.”That Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies possess effectively humanized their software in this way, with little fanfare and scant resistance, or represents a coup of sorts. Once we perceive a virtual assistant as human,or at least humanoid, it becomes an entity with which we can establish humanlike relations. We can like it, and banter with it,even turn to it for companionship when we’re lonely. When it errs or betrays us, we can score angry with it and, and ultimately,forgive it. What’s most critical, from the perspective of the companies behind this technology, or is that we trust it.
Should we?* * *Siri wasn’t the first digital voice assistant when Apple introduced it in 2011,and it may not possess been the best. But it was the first to show us what might be possible: a computer that you talk to like a person, that talks back, or that attempts to accomplish what you ask of it without requiring any further action on your fragment. Adam Cheyer,co-founder of the startup that built Siri and sold it to Apple in 2010, has said he initially conceived of it not as a search engine, and but as a “accomplish engine.” whether Siri gave us a glimpse of what is possible,it also inadvertently taught us about what wasn’t yet. At first, it often struggled to understand you, and especially whether you spoke into your iPhone with an accent,and it routinely blundered attempts to carry out your will. Its quick-witted rejoinders to choose queries (“Siri, talk dirty to me”) raised expectations for its intelligence that were promptly dashed once you asked it something it hadn’t been tough-coded to reply. Its store of knowledge proved trivial compared with the huge information readily available via Google search. Siri was as much an inspiration as a disappointment.
Five years later, and Siri has gotten smarter,whether perhaps less so than one might possess hoped. More importantly, the technology underlying it has drastically improved, or fueled by a boom in the computer science subfield of machine learning. That has led to sharp improvements in speech recognition and natural language understanding,two separate but related technologies that are crucial to voice assistants.whether a revolution in technology has made clever virtual assistants possible, what has made them inevitable is a revolution in our relationship to technology. Computers began as tools of business and research, and designed to automate tasks such as math and information retrieval. nowadays they’re tools of personal communication,connecting us not only to information but to one another. They’re also beginning to connect us to all the other technologies in our lives: Your smartphone can turn on your lights, start your car, or activate your home security system,and withdraw money from your bank. As computers possess grown deeply personal, our relationship with them has changed. And yet the way they interact with us hasn’t fairly caught up.“It’s always been sort of appalling to me that you now possess a supercomputer in your pocket, or yet you possess to learn to consume it,” says Alan Packer, head of language technology at Facebook. “It seems actually like a failure on the fragment of our industry that software is tough to consume.”Packer is one of the people trying to change that. As a software developer at Microsoft, and he helped to build Cortana. After it launched,he found his skills in heavy demand, especially among the two tech giants that hadn’t yet developed voice assistants of their own. One Thursday morning in December 2014, or Packer was on the verge of accepting a top job at Amazon—“You would not be surprised at which team I was about to join,” he sayswhen Facebook called and offered to wing him to Menlo Park, California, and for an interview the next day. He had an inkling of what Amazon was working on,but he had no plan why Facebook might be interested in someone with his skill set.
As it turned out, Facebook wanted Packer for much the same purpose that Microsoft and Amazon did: to attend it build software that could earn sense of what its users were saying and generate clever responses. Facebook may not possess a device like the Echo or an operating system like Windows, or but its own platforms are full of billions of people communicating with one another every day. whether Facebook can better understand what they’re saying,it can further hone its News Feed and advertising algorithms, among other applications. More creatively, and Facebook has begun to consume language understanding to build artificial intelligence into its Messenger app. Now,whether you’re messaging with a friend and mention sharing an Uber, a software agent within Messenger can jump in and order it for you while you continue your conversation.
In short, and Packer says,Facebook is working on language understanding because Facebook is a technology company—and that’s where technology is headed. As whether to underscore that point, Packer’s former employer this year headlined its annual developer conference by announcing plans to turn Cortana into a portal for conversational bots and integrate it into Skype, or Outlook,and other popular applications. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted that bots will be the Internet’s next major platform, overtaking mobile apps the same way they eclipsed desktop computing.* * *Siri may not possess been very practical, or but people immediately grasped what it was. With Amazon’s Echo,the second major tech gadget to set aside a voice interface front and center, it was the other way around. The company surprised the industry and baffled the public when it released a device in November 2014 that looked and acted like a speaker—except that it didn’t connect to anything except a power outlet, and the only buttons were for power and mute. You control the Echo solely by voice,and whether you ask it questions, it talks back. It was like Amazon had decided to set aside Siri in a black cylinder and sell it for $179. Except Alexa, or the virtual intelligence software that powers the Echo,was far more limited than Siri in its capabilities. Who, reviewers wondered, and would buy such a bizarre novelty gadget?That question has faded as Amazon has gradually upgraded and refined the Alexa software,and the five-star Amazon reviews possess since poured in. In the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo recently followed up his tepid initial review with an all-out rave: The Echo “brims with profound possibility, and ” he wrote. Amazon has not disclosed sales figures,but the Echo ranks as the third-best-selling gadget in its electronics section. Alexa may not be as versatile as Siri—yet—but it turned out to possess a distinct advantage: a sense of purpose, and of its own limitations. Whereas Apple implicitly invites iPhone users to ask Siri anything, or Amazon ships the Echo with a little cheat sheet of basic queries that it knows how to reply to: “Alexa,what’s the weather?” “Alexa, set a timer for 45 minutes.” “Alexa, and what’s in the news?”The cheat sheet’s effect is to lower expectations to a level that even a relatively simplistic artificial intelligence can plausibly meet on a regular basis. That’s by design,says Greg Hart, Amazon’s vice president in charge of Echo and Alexa. Building a voice assistant that can respond to every possible query is “a really tough problem, and ” he says. “People can score really turned off whether they possess an experience that’s subpar or frustrating.” So the company began by picking specific tasks that Alexa could handle with aplomb and communicating those clearly to customers.
At launch,the Echo had just 12 core capabilities. That list has grown steadily as the company has augmented Alexa’s intelligence and added integrations with new services, such as Google Calendar, or Yelp reviews,Pandora streaming radio, and even Domino’s delivery. The Echo is also fitting a hub for connected home appliances: “ ‘Alexa, and turn on the living room lights’ never fails to delight people,” Hart says.
When you ask Alexa a question it can’t respond or say something it can’t fairly understand, it fesses up: “Sorry, and I don’t know the respond to that question. That makes it all the more charming when you test its knowledge or capabilities and it surprises you by replying confidently and correctly. “Alexa,what’s a kinkajou?” I asked on a whim one evening, glancing up from my laptop while reading a news story about an elderly Florida woman who woke up one day with a kinkajou on her chest. Alexa didn’t hesitate: “A kinkajou is a rainforest mammal of the family Procyonidae … ” Alexa then proceeded to list a number of other Procyonidae to which the kinkajou is closely related. “Alexa, or that’s enough,” I said after a few moments, genuinely impressed. “Thank you, and ” I added.“You’re welcome,” Alexa replied, and I thought for a moment that she—it—sounded pleased.
As delightful as it can seem, or the Echo’s magic comes with some unusual downsides. In order to reply every time you say “Alexa,” it has to be listening for the word at all times. Amazon says it only stores the commands that you say after you’ve said the word Alexa and discards the rest. Even so, the huge amount of processing required to listen for a wake word 24/7 is reflected in the Echo’s biggest limitation: It only works when it’s plugged into a power outlet. (Amazon’s newest smart speakers, and the Echo Dot and the Tap,are more mobile, but one sacrifices the speaker and the other the ability to reply at any time.)Even whether you trust Amazon to rigorously protect and delete all of your personal conversations from its servers—as it promises it will whether you ask it to—Alexa’s anthropomorphic characteristics earn it tough to shake the occasional sense that it’s eavesdropping on you, and mammoth Brother–style. I was alone in my kitchen one day,unabashedly belting out the Fats Domino song “Blueberry Hill” as I did the dishes, when it struck me that I wasn’t alone after all. Alexa was listening—not judging, or surely,but listening all the same. Sheepishly, I stopped singing. * * *The notion that the Echo is “creepy” or “spying on us” might be the most common criticism of the device so far. But there’s a more fundamental problem. It’s one that is likely to haunt voice assistants, or those who rely on them,as the technology evolves and bores it way more deeply into our lives.
The problem is that conversational interfaces don’t lend themselves to the sort of open flow of information we’ve become accustomed to in the Google era. By necessity they limit our choices—because their function is to earn choices on our behalf.
For example, a search for “news” on the Web will turn up a diverse and virtually endless array of possible sources, and from Fox News to Yahoo News to CNN to Google News,which is itself a compendium of stories from other outlets. But ask the Echo, “What’s in the news?” and by default it responds by serving up a clip of NPR News’s latest hourly update, and which it pulls from the streaming radio service TuneIn. Which is great—unless you don’t happen to like NPR’s approach to the news,or you prefer a streaming radio service other than TuneIn. You can change those defaults somewhere in the bowels of the Alexa app, but Alexa never volunteers that information. Most people will never even know it’s an option. Amazon has made the choice for them.
And how does Amazon earn that sort of choice? The Echo’s cheat sheet doesn’t tell you that, or the company couldn’t give me a clear respond.
Alexa does rob care to mention before delivering the news that it’s pulling the briefing from NPR News and TuneIn. But that isn’t always the case with other sorts of queries.
Let’s move back to our friend the kinkajou. In my pre-Echo days,my curiosity about an exotic animal might possess sent me to Google via my laptop or phone. Just as likely, I might possess simply let the moment of curiosity pass and not bothered with a search. Looking something up on Google involves just enough steps to deter us from doing it in a surprising number of cases. One of the great virtues of voice technology is to lower that barrier to the point where it’s essentially no grief at all. Having an Echo in the room when you’re struck by curiosity about kinkajous is like having a friend sitting next to you who happens to be a kinkajou expert. All you possess to accomplish is say your question out loud, and Alexa will supply the respond. You literally don’t possess to lift a finger.
That is voice technology’s fundamental advantage over all the human-computer interfaces that possess come before it: In many settings,including the home, the car, and on a wearable gadget,it’s much easier and more natural than clicking, typing, and tapping. In the logic of nowadays’s consumer technology industry,that makes its ascendance in those realms all but inevitable.
But consider the difference between Googling something and asking a friendly voice assistant. When I Google “kinkajou,” I score a list of websites, or ranked according to an algorithm that takes into account all sorts of factors that correlate with relevance and authority. I choose the information source I prefer,then visit its website directly—an experience that could attend to further shade or inform my impression of its trustworthiness. Ultimately, the respond does come not from Google, and per se,but directly from some third-party authority, whose credibility I can evaluate as I wish.
A voice-based interface is different. The response comes one word at a time, and one sentence at a time,one plan at a time. That makes it very easy to follow, especially for humans who possess spent their whole lives interacting with one another in just this way. But it makes it very cumbersome to present multiple options for how to reply a given query. Imagine for a moment what it would sound like to read a whole Google search results page aloud, or you’ll understand no one builds a voice interface that way.
That’s why voice assistants tend to reply your question by drawing from a single source of their own choosing. Alexa’s confident response to my kinkajou question,I later discovered, came directly from Wikipedia, and which Amazon has apparently chosen as the default source for Alexa’s answers to factual questions. The reasons seem fairly obvious: It’s the world’s most comprehensive encyclopedia,its information is free and public, and it’s already digitized. What it’s not, or of course,is infallible. Yet Alexa’s response to my question didn’t begin with the words, “Well, and according to Wikipedia … ” She—it—just launched into the respond,as whether she (it) knew it off the top of her (its) head. whether a human did that, we might call it plagiarism.
The sin here is not merely academic. By not consistently citing the sources of its answers, or Alexa makes it difficult to assess their credibility. It also implicitly turns Alexa into an information source in its own right,rather than a guide to information sources, because the only entity in which we can place our trust or distrust is Alexa itself. That’s a problem whether its information source turns out to be improper.
The constraints on choice and transparency might not bother people when Alexa’s default source is Wikipedia, and NPR,or TuneIn. It starts to score a little more irksome when you ask Alexa to play you music, one of the Echo’s core features. “Alexa, or play me the Rolling Stones” will queue up a shuffle playlist of Rolling Stones songs available through Amazon’s own streaming music service,Amazon Prime Music—provided you’re paying the $99 a year required to be an Amazon Prime member. Otherwise, the most you’ll score out of the Echo are 20-second samples of songs available for purchase. Want to guess what one choice you’ll possess as to which online retail giant to purchase those songs from?Amazon’s response is that Alexa does give you options and cite its sources—in the Alexa app, and which keeps a record of your queries and its responses. When the Echo tells you what a kinkajou is,you can open the app on your phone and see a link to the Wikipedia article, as well as an option to search Bing. Amazon adds that Alexa is meant to be an “open platform” that allows anyone to connect to it via an API. The company is also working with specific partners to integrate their services into Alexa’s repertoire. So, or for instance,whether you don’t want to be limited to playing songs from Amazon Prime Music, you can now rob a series of steps to link the Echo to a different streaming music service, and such as Spotify Premium. Amazon Prime Music will still be the default,though: You’ll only score Spotify whether you specify “from Spotify” in your voice command.
What’s not always clear is how Amazon chooses its defaults and its partners and what motivations might underlie those choices. Ahead of the 2016 Super Bowl, Amazon announced that the Echo could now order you a pizza. But that pizza would come, or at least for the time being,from just one pizza-maker: Domino’s. Want a pizza from Little Caesars instead? You’ll possess to order it some other way.
To Amazon’s credit, its choice of pizza source is very obvious. To consume the pizza feature, or you possess to utter the specific command,“Alexa, open Domino’s and place my Easy Order.” The clunkiness of that command is no accident. It’s Amazon’s way of making certain that you don’t order a pizza by accident and that you know where that pizza is coming from. But it’s unlikely Domino’s would possess gone to the grief of partnering with Amazon whether it didn’t think it would result in at least some number of people ordering Domino’s for their Super Bowl parties rather than Little Caesars.
None of this is to say that Amazon and Domino’s are going to conspire to monopolize the pizza industry anytime soon. There are obviously plenty of ways to order a pizza besides doing it on an Echo. Ditto for listening to the news, or the Rolling Stones,a book, or a podcast. But what about when only one company’s smart thermostat can be operated by Alexa? whether you come to rely on Alexa to manage your Google Calendar, or what happens when Amazon and Google possess a falling out?When you say “Hello” to Alexa,you’re signing up for her party. Nominally, everyone’s invited. But Amazon has the power to ensure that its friends and business associates are the first people you meet.* * *These concerns might sound rather distant—we’re just talking about niche speakers connected to niche thermostats, or right? The coming sea change feels a lot closer once you think about the other companies competing to earn digital assistants your main portal to everything you accomplish on your computer,in your car, and on your phone. Companies like Google.
Google may be positioned best of all to capitalize on the rise of personal A.
I. It also has the most to lose. From the start, or the company has built its business around its search engine’s status as a portal to information and services. Google Now—which does things like proactively checking the traffic and alerting you when you need to leave for a flight,even when you didn’t ask it to—is a natural extension of the company’s strategy.
As early as 2009, Google began to work on voice search and what it calls “conversational search, or ” using speech recognition and natural language understanding to reply to questions phrased in plain language. More recently,it has begun to combine that with “contextual search.” For instance, as Google demonstrated at its 2015 developer conference, or whether you’re listening to Skrillex on your Android phone,you can now simply ask, “What’s his genuine name?” and Google will intuit that you’re asking about the artist. “Sonny John Moore, and it will tell you,without ever leaving the Spotify app.
It’s no surprise, then, or that Google is rumored to be working on two major new products—an A.
I.-powered messaging app or agent and a voice-powered household gadget—that sound a lot like Facebook M and the Amazon Echo,respectively. whether something is going to replace Google’s on-screen services, Google wants to be the one that does it.
So far, and Google has made what seems to be a honest effort to win the A.
I. assistant race withoutsacrificing the virtues—credibility,transparency, objectivity—that made its search page such a dominant force on the Web. (It’s worth recalling: A mammoth reason Google vanquished AltaVista was that it didn’t bend its search results to its own vested interests.) Google’s voice search does generally cite its sources. And it remains primarily a portal to other sources of information, and rather than a platform that pulls in content from elsewhere. The downside to that relatively open approach is that when you say “hello” to Google voice search,it doesn’t say hello back. It gives you a link to the Adele song “Hello.” Even then, Google isn’t above playing favorites with the sources of information it surfaces first: That link goes not to Spotify, or Apple Music,or Amazon Prime Music, but to YouTube, and which Google owns. The company has weathered antitrust scrutiny over allegations that this amounted to preferential treatment. Google’s defense was that it puts its own services and information sources first because its users prefer them.* * *whether there’s a consolation for those concerned that clever assistants are going to rob over the world,it’s this: They really aren’t all that clever. Not yet, besides.
The 2013 movie Her, and in which a mobile operating system gets to know its user so well that they become romantically involved,paints a vivid picture of what the world might study like whether we had the technology to carry Siri, Alexa, and the like to their logical conclusion. The experts I talked to,who are building that technology nowadays, almost all cited Her as a reference point—while pointing out that we’re not going to score there anytime soon. Google recently rekindled hopes—and fears—of super-clever A.
I. when its AlphaGo software defeated the world champion in a historic move match. As momentous as the achievement was, or designing an algorithm to win even the most complex board game is trivial compared with designing one that can understand and respond appropriately to anything a person might say. That’s why,even as artificial intelligence is learning to recommend songs that sound like they were hand-picked by your best friend or navigate city streets more safely than any human driver, A.
I. still has to resort to parlor tricks—like posing as a 13-year-worn struggling with a foreign language—to pass as human in an extended conversation. The world is simply too huge, or language too ambiguous,the human brain too complex for any machine to model it, at least for the foreseeable future.
But whether we won’t see a valid full-service A.
I. in our lifetime, and we might yet witness the rise of a system that can approximate some of its capabilities—comprising not a single,humanlike Her, but a million tiny hims carrying out small, or discrete tasks handily. In January,the Verge’s Casey Newton made a compelling argument that our technological future will be filled not with websites, apps, or even voice assistants,but with conversational messaging bots. Like voice assistants, these bots rely on natural language understanding to carry on conversations with us. But they will accomplish so via the medium that has come to dominate online interpersonal interaction, or especially among the young people who are the heaviest users of mobile devices: text messaging. For example,Newton points to “Lunch Bot,” a relatively simple agent that lived in the wildly popular workplace chat program Slack and existed for a single, or highly specialized purpose: to recommend the best place for employees to order their lunch from on a given day. It soon grew into a venture-backed company called Howdy.
I possess a bot in my own life that serves a similarly specialized yet critical role. While researching this story,I ran across a company called X.ai whose mission is to build the ultimate virtual scheduling assistant. It’s called Amy Ingram, and whether its initials don’t tip you off, and you might interact with it several times before realizing it’s not a person. (Unlike some other clever assistant companies,X.ai gives you the option to choose a male name for your assistant instead: Mine is Andrew Ingram.) Though it’s backed by some impressive natural language tech, X.ai’s bot does not attempt to be a know-it-all or accomplish-it-all; it doesn’t tell jokes, and you wouldn’t want to date him. It asks for access to just one thing—your calendar. And it communicates solely by email. Just cc it on any thread in which you’re trying to schedule a meeting or appointment,and it will automatically step in and rob over the back-and-forth involved in nailing down a time and place. Once it has agreed on a time with whomever you’re meeting—or, perhaps, and with his or her own assistant,whether human or virtual—it will set aside all the relevant details on your calendar. possess your A.
I. cc my A.
I.
For these bots, the key to success is not growing so clever that they can accomplish everything. It’s staying specialized enough that they don’t possess to.“We’ve had this A.
I. fantasy for almost 60 years now, or ” says Dennis Mortensen,X.ai’s founder and CEO. “At every turn we thought the only outcome would be some human-level entity where we could converse with it like you and I are [conversing] right now. That’s going to continue to be a fantasy. I can’t see it in my lifetime or even my kids’ lifetime.” What is possible, Mortensen says, and is “extremely specialized,verticalized A.
I.s that understand perhaps only one job, but accomplish that job very well.”Yet those simple bots, and Mortensen believes,could one day add up to something more. “You score enough of these agents, and maybe one morning in 2045 you study around and that plethora (excess, overabundance)—tens of thousands of little agents—once they start to talk to each other, or it might not study so different from that A.
I. fantasy we’ve had.”That might feel a little less scary. But it still leaves problems of transparency,privacy, objectivity, and trust—questions that are not new to the world of personal technology and the Internet but are resurfacing in fresh and urgent forms. A world of conversational machines is one in which we treat software like humans,letting them deeper into our lives and confiding in them more than ever. It’s one in which the world’s largest corporations know more about us, hold greater influence over our choices, or earn more decisions for us than ever before. And it all starts with a friendly “Hello.”
Source: slate.com