by Angela Guess
Jennifer Snell recently wrote in TechCrunch, “Gartner predicts that by 2018 a full 30 percent of our interactions with technology will be through ‘conversations’ with smart machines. Major players such as Microsoft, Facebook and Google are now focused on empowering development of smart bots, and IBM’s Watson is looking to find ways to integrate its cognitive computing platform deeper into businesses. We are being inundated with conversational tools and we’re seeing a considerable, but not entirely surprising, shift of operations to this new way of human-machine interaction. Increasingly, we are depending on these systems for both routine daily tasks and sophisticated business interactions. However, we have already seen these new tools stumble. We all remember Tay— Microsoft’s chatbot that was shut down within just a few days of launch after generating a series of offensive tweets.”
Snell goes on, “As we increasingly rely on intelligent systems and welcome them into our daily routine, it’s imperative that we are able to implicitly trust them. Inevitably, as we push the boundaries of AI, there will be more mistakes and more stumbles. The real question is whether or not the dozens of emerging players in the bot market will go to great enough lengths to earn the trust of their users. In the age of ‘early adopters’ and ‘influencers,’ that might sound quaint. However, our progress as an industry is contingent on building bots that earn digital trust and, in turn, their place in our everyday lives.”
She continues, “Remember when you first started using email? It may be hard to fathom now, but it became an almost knee-jerk reaction to hit send and subsequently ask: “Hey, did you get my email?” We didn’t yet trust email to consistently deliver (even if it did!). However, over time, as more and more emails were successfully delivered, we stopped questioning… Let’s take a more modern example that is still in progress — self-driving cars. It’s a bold concept, and one that shifts the paradigm of control from human to machine. In order to successfully establish this technology, self-driving cars must first embolden the masses to step behind the wheel, as it were.”
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