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No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

tomshardware.com

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Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#41

Post by mikeash »

Zanni wrote: post #5

I like to be clear on whether I'm interacting with a human or a bot because different social conventions apply. If you're human, I'll treat you like one, and that means giving you some consideration at the expense of expediency. If you're a bot, let's just cut to the fucking chase. So a bot that acts like a human (with hems and haws) is just wasting my time. Ditto a human being that has been reduced to a bot by follo…

Unless they’re being used to cover up computation delays on the back end, I feel like the hems and haws go beyond merely making the system more realistic and enters into outright fraud. By all means, sound natural and good, but don’t actually pretend to be a human if you’re not.

(And suddenly I have a vision of that last sentence being used against me in court in a few decades, with a jury consisting entirely of AIs....)

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#42

Post by aestetix »

For reasons that I suspect are now obvious, I pretty much hate all the tech coming out of the Google/Facebook/Twitter complex. If you need to ask why, I suggest asking them why they don't comply with GDPR.

However, there is one fantastic use case I can see for Google Duplex, the service that makes phone calls for you: dealing with health insurance companies.

If this AI is half as good as they claim.... does that mean it can call into your health insurance company, wait on hold for two hours, and then spend another hour arguing with the rep who is trying to deny your claim, including waiting on hold, and correcting them on incorrect details and making sure they don't lie to you about their policies? Because that would be amazing.

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#44

Post by Freak_NL »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #38
gyom wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who was participating often in psychology experiments at Stanford, and he became familiar with the whole procedure of letting the subjects believe that they were interacting with another person via a computer, when in fact they were interacting with a program (makes everything more standard and easier to analyse). One day he participated in this "split or share" kind of experiment, and he was ruthless…

If I know anything about college psych experiments, the woman was an actor and the study was about your reaction to seeing her cry.

Actually setting up a software environment that connects two participants in the same simulation, and have it run without any bugs is usually way beyond the capabilities of the psychology students running the experiment. Not to mention the bother of coordinating the different teamed up participants (“Did you click start? The other participant is waiting for you to click sta— oh no it timed out. Hang on I'll restart the pairing sequence…”).

If you participate in one of those studies on campus, you are facing a computer running a local bit of standalone software, or a webservice running a questionnaire.

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#45

Post by dawnerd »

aestetix wrote: post #42

For reasons that I suspect are now obvious, I pretty much hate all the tech coming out of the Google/Facebook/Twitter complex. If you need to ask why, I suggest asking them why they don't comply with GDPR. However, there is one fantastic use case I can see for Google Duplex, the service that makes phone calls for you: dealing with health insurance companies. If this AI is half as good as they claim.... does that mean…

Alternately calling up frontier/other isps and automatically correcting billing mistakes.

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#46

Post by emodendroket »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #40
cromwellian wrote: post #6

The art of letter writing has been declining for a century. Most people don't even use email for most daily communication, but instant messaging. And it seems a lot of instant messaging boils down to pictures, emoji, memes, and short responses ("I'll be there at XXX") The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. Part of what we're seeing with the automation go…

>Part of what we're seeing with the automation going on is giving ordinary people some semblance of what the elite have had for a long time: administrative assistants/personal assistants. "Take a memo for me, write up an invitation letter and send it to my wife's sister" For much of the uber powerful and wealthy, gruntwork communications have taken the original person out of the message. >We could argue whether or no…

Speak for yourself.

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#47

Post by emodendroket »

joshuamorton wrote: post #13
cromwellian wrote: post #6

The art of letter writing has been declining for a century. Most people don't even use email for most daily communication, but instant messaging. And it seems a lot of instant messaging boils down to pictures, emoji, memes, and short responses ("I'll be there at XXX") The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit. Part of what we're seeing with the automation go…

People have been saying the art of letter writing has been declining for a century for a century.[1] > A hundred years ago it took so long and cost so much to send a letter that it seemed worth while to put some time and thought into writing it. -- Percy Holmes Boynton, in 1915, 103 years ago The pace of modern life has been accelerating since before some of our grandparents were born. [1]: https://www.xkcd.com/1227/

I can never remember exactly how a block letter is even formatted because I write them so infrequently.

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#48

Post by aquamo »

After reading some of the responses to the google demo, my first reaction was to assume this natural language processing magic was just a placeholder until the business had a proper api in place. After all, that would be more efficient, right?

Google doesn't take human phone calls so why should anyone else have to? And as good workers, efficiency and productivity should trump any expression of humanity we might have left in this end game of automation :-)

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#49

Post by emodendroket »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #39
stcredzero wrote: post #33

I've had autocomplete seem to deliberately try to break me up with my girlfriend. I don't have time to dig up the most egregious of those. Here's one that happened just yesterday with my wife: Wife: Thank you. Love you too. Me: Are you going to be honest nary? Me: Hungry Me: Darn spell check! My wife, having grown up in China, still didn't understand and I had some 'splainin to do when I got home. It's absolutely ter…

Remember this story? A Cellphone's Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail https://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-tw...

No, but I remember this one, where a court determined "give me a lawyer dog" meant "give me a lawyer-dog" rather than "give me a lawyer, dog" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/11/02...

Re: No Thanks, Google. I'll Speak for Myself

#50

Post by hosh »

gyom wrote: post #15
Zanni wrote: post #5

I like to be clear on whether I'm interacting with a human or a bot because different social conventions apply. If you're human, I'll treat you like one, and that means giving you some consideration at the expense of expediency. If you're a bot, let's just cut to the fucking chase. So a bot that acts like a human (with hems and haws) is just wasting my time. Ditto a human being that has been reduced to a bot by follo…

I have a friend who was participating often in psychology experiments at Stanford, and he became familiar with the whole procedure of letting the subjects believe that they were interacting with another person via a computer, when in fact they were interacting with a program (makes everything more standard and easier to analyse). One day he participated in this "split or share" kind of experiment, and he was ruthless…

There's the reverse where, what if AIs do develop feelings like that? Why shouldn't they be treated with the courtesy we treat other humans?

Just thought of these:

- Would this kind of personal assisstant be useful for people on the autism spectrum, to help navigate the kind of implied and unspoken narratives that people with autism seem to have difficulty with?

- Would there be a call to train Duplex to speak in a way that is more comfortable for people on the spectrum?

- Or any of the neurodivergent tribes for that matter?

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