May be it’s just me, or the fact that I am too old to embrace new ways of doing things. Yet, when reading of ones of Google’s Area 120 experimental products I cannot help but feeling unfit for this brave new world!
It is about a “bot” that can replace you in responding to messages you are receiving. Indeed, we are getting so many messages that we (may) feel overwhelmed and the idea of some Google’s researchers is to have a bot taking care on answering… This is an evolution of the Smart Reply feature, based on AI, that has become part of Google email client to help you manage the growing inbox. The bot can be assigned to look at your chats and take care of answering. I have no doubt that it can be useful, that it will be able to provide sensible answers, right to the point, yet I feel totally uneasy!
In a way it seems to me a sort of outsourcing my brain to a “cold” machine!
The problem is that it is not a black or white situation. Today I am already “outsourcing” my brain
- every time I use an electronic calculator (that is my smartphone) just because I am too lazy to do the math by myself;
- when I am not doing any effort in remembering things, knowing that I can turn to on-line resources to help me when need arises (and it seems there are plenty of people hard at work to make this off-load of my brain effort to my smartphone and to the cloud easier and easier);
- when I am relying on my car navigation assistant rather than learning the way as I did just few years ago;
- when I rely on “Google translate” for a quick reading of a German article (even if I know a bit of German and with some effort I could work out the meaning…);
- when every day I leaf through Flipboard to get the latest news, rather than taking the time to go through several sources…
The list is long, and it is getting longer. We have been used since thousands of years ago to rely on tools to help us in our daily chores. It is only in the last millisecond of our humankind history that we have started to rely on tools to help our mental capabilities. We might be excused if we are not feeling ready to this evolution.
Having a tool that automatically engages in chats, with friends and acquaintances seems like cheating to me, cheating to the person that is expecting me to respond, not a machine. Notice that this goes beyond the point of the machine being able to provide a sensible response. It is not about technology, about trusting technology: it is about my responsibility to my social environment.
But again, may be it is just me!
Excellent post – I do not even know my children’s cell phone numbers because they are stored in my phone. And they have never read a map to navigate. I love the phrase “outsourcing our brains”.