So this is sort-of following on from yesterdays post.
Specifically the last line of yesterday’s post.
The bit about AI/VR.
You see a few weeks ago, I was invited to speak on a panel about the future by Frog Design.
No, I don’t know why they asked me either.
Anyway, it was a great panel and I learnt a lot of stuff but where things got a bit sticky was when the subject of AI came up.
OK, I was the reason it all got a bit sticky, but that’s because I feel companies are approaching AI with the sole goal of enabling the lazy.
Yes, it’s still early days but automating the most common/basic of tasks feels such a waste of potential.
I get they have to get people used to things before they can push them to new things, but to focus on such mundane tasks doesn’t naturally push the industry to explore the bigger possibilities of it.
My suggestion was that I’d like to see it being used to take people to new places.
New opinions … thoughts … possibilities … experiences.
More inspirational intelligence than artificial.
When you ask for news headlines, it reads you how different news sources see the same story.
When you ask for a countdown, it plays you music you haven’t heard before until the timer is up.
When you ask for the weather, it tells you some places you can go to, to take advantage of the climate.
In other words, make you benefit from the AI beyond the fact it’s performing a function that saves you approx 0.3 seconds doing. Kind-of like the premise behind user-unfriendly tech I wrote about a while back.
Of course to do this means that they have to do more than just follow the data.
It means they have to add something to it.
Context. Insight. Humanity. Creativity.
Things that companies are seemingly valuing less rather than more.
To be fair, Amazon are trying to do this with some of the more quirky aspects of Alexa … but I still would like to see more being done, because not only does this add real value to the tech, it means brands have a chance to build additional value with their audience rather than sit back and watch their engagement get less and less.