Google and Facebook will build indispensable personal assistants. How will this disrupt the future?
Kurt
Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five and J.K.Rowling’s series of Harry
Potter novels describe the time travel paradox. Traveling through time
changes the future from the point in time where the traveler arrived.
The personal assistant that will arrive at some time in the future will
change humans from that point in time forward, but in a more impactful
way than GPS.
1. Artificially intelligent personal assistants will be part of our lives
Google
and Facebook have recruited the best artificial intelligence (AI) and
machine learning talent in the world to build personal assistants in
small increments.
The
personal assistant’s intimate knowledge of users’ likes and dislikes
and awareness of situational context could be like Samantha depicted in
the movie Her, but without an emotional relationship so users will not
fall in love with their assistants. Compared to Samantha, Google and
Facebook’s progress is modest, though Google Now and its recently
announced sibling Google Home promise a future with a conversational
personal assistant that knows the user. When exactly Samantha will
arrive is not predictable because researchers have not yet completed all
the work to create her.
Likewise,
Facebook’s progress in interpreting images and text comments proves
that machines can understand the context of a scene and conversations in
the comments to a post or dialog with a Messenger Bot. Add camera
subsystems, such as Google’s Project Tango, and a few other research
projects, such as Qualcomm’s 3D object detection, and machines will
have human-like 3D perception.
Google
and Facebook have the data about us to teach a personal assistant with
machine learning to be contextually relevant to our daily lives. Neither
company has a plan to hatch a Samantha-like personal assistant that is
indispensable from their research yet, but it is their goal. The
usefulness will increase little by little as AI and machine learning
research is applied in increments to consumer products.
2. The personal assistant will be a trade of personal information
It
is not an altruistic endeavor. Both companies want to make their
products more relevant by complementing their data troves with the
intelligence of the personal assistant to motivate users to spend more
time using their products and make ads more relevant, increasing
click-throughs. Google demonstrated that it is aware of personal privacy
concerns during the announcement of its Home personal assistant,
stating that Home would have access to only personal information such as
calendars with the user’s explicit permission. It is a fair trade to
have Samantha.
3. How will people use their surplus cognitive capacity
The
personal assistance of GPS has become pervasive. Drivers once bought
multi-fold maps to study their routes before heading out on a trip and
to spot check their progress during the journey. Now drivers use GPS
even in familiar circumstances when they already know how to reach their
destination because it frees up cognitive capacity.
Artificially
intelligent personal assistants will free up even more time. How will
people use this cognitive capacity made available by personal assistants
that (maybe the pronoun who is more appropriate here) take over the
mundane tasks in our lives? We might have to wait 50 years to
retrospectively measure the effects of the time travel paradox of AI.
But it will change humans. Perhaps the question is better expressed by
the narrator of John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden:
“A
man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have
left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I
done well—or ill?”
