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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

#71

Post by freehunter »

hosh wrote: post #50
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…

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 w…

I've said this before, but in reality strong AI will be another species. Every species of any moderate intelligence is expected to be treated with some courtesy and respect, but their social norms are far different from that of a human and we tailor our interactions with them in different ways. If I'm chewing gum and a human sees me, I might offer them a piece too. I'd never do that to a dog, no matter how much the dog wanted me to. If I saw a human chewing on the grass, I might stop them and ask them some questions to see if they're okay or need medical attention. If I saw a rabbit doing it, I might take a picture because it's cute, but I'd leave it alone (unless it was in my vegetable garden).

There is no reason to expect that strong AI will share the exact same feelings we do unless someone explicitly programs it to (which would be a mistake). Any truly emergent emotional behavior on the part of an AI would be very likely to differ substantially from ours. Making a chatbot "sad" is not the same as making a sapient (or even sentient) being sad. If AI ever achieves sentience, we're going to have to learn what makes it uniquely happy and sad.

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

#72

Post by pavel_lishin »

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…

> The ship has really already sailed on longform communication, perhaps out of laziness or cost/benefit.

Maybe, but you could choose to be optimistic and interpret it as getting communication closer to what it is in real life - I don't expound to my friends when I'm with them in real life; a lot of our communication is carried out through expressions and gestures. "IRL Emoji", some future archeologist/sociologist could call it.

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

#73

Post by Tactic »

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…

Given that if you write more than three paragraphs you get slammed with "I'm not reading that wall of text" and that "tl;dr" is a thing, is it surprising that people are employing the short form instead?

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

#74

Post by stcredzero »

mseebach wrote: post #56
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…

Honest question, this seems to be a long term issue for you, why don't you disable autocorrect? I've found that the "half-way house" of seeing the suggestions, but having to manually select the one you want, is a good compromise.

I think I'll do that. Actually, I think I did do that, and somehow it came back.

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

#75

Post by ocdtrekkie »

emodendroket wrote: post #66
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a red line, not the red line. For a while I've felt like the solution was that I needed to be detached from Google products and services (along with similar data-driven companies), and that was good enough. I feel like we're rapidly approaching the territory where I need to make sure nobody I talk to is attached to Google products and services. I feel like this is line we're crossing now, where Google has inser…

What makes it so different from canned text messages?

The worst I've seen there is the sort of shortcut when your phone rings to automatically say you can't talk at the moment. It's not the same as having custom canned messages written even on a desktop client.

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

#76

Post by kolpa »

Freak_NL wrote: post #44
fjsolwmv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Surely you could solve this problem quite simply by having both participants and the experimenter join a group chat using COTS software+accounts (Skype, Hangouts, Whatsapp...) pre-installed on the machines?

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

#78

Post by ocdtrekkie »

pgodzin wrote: post #65
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it affects two way communication. You might be okay with the trade off, I am not. But you may subject me to it. While a few niche businesses will make news stating they'll reject robo call based appointment scheduling because they care about their actual human employees, most will just accept it. The employees won't have a choice and will just be subjected to this. Same for email. I want to hear from p…

What are they being "subjected" to? Presumably the conversation will go similarly to how it would with a person? We aren't talking about spam calls, just a difference of who does the talking. This will increase business for places where people wouldn't want to go through the effort of calling themselves. For email how will you know if I auto-completed my sentence or typed it? You are free to not use the feature, and…

I suspect people who made Comcast's telephone system had exactly the same notion. Feel free to experience it yourself at 1-800-COMCAST.

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

#79

Post by walshemj »

brightball wrote: post #59
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

The closest I've ever actually gotten to having an assistant was a stretch of about 2 years after we had our 2nd child. Since my wife and I both work full time, we needed child care. It was about the same price to hire a nanny as it was to send 2 kids to daycare, so we did some interviews and hired one. That 2 years was probably the easiest stretch of dual working parent life that we ever had. She did a load of laund…

Seconded ;-) a few years in the UK ago I was a committee that ran the national raft race for an organisation like rotoract (the youth side of rotary) about a hundred teams and 1500 participants over the weekend (we also laid on camping and entertainment for the 3 days).

One of the other members was the PA to the chief fire officer for the county (State in us terms) and they where so efficient it was amazing.

At the first meeting before it started they had already worked out what formal letters need to be written updated them from last year and got the other committee members to sign - two copies on to send an done for the file.

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

#80

Post by p2t2p »

mikeash wrote: post #41
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.…

However you’d expect an Mmmm-hm as reaction to certain phrases as an ACK. What it does is just ACKing the phrase from other user. I wonder if other user would get worried and started asking “are you there?” if they didn’t receive the ACK

Edit: typos

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