I registered this account just to say that you just gave me a little bit of hope that I'm not the only human alive who hasn't completely lost my mind. Thank you. Really.
I'm sure this will be downvoted (edit: maybe I was wrong, which makes me feel better yet) because it doesn't really add anything to the discussion, but I've been increasingly depressed about this stuff lately, and hearing/seeing someone else basically put the words in my brain down here, helped a lot.
Being surrounded by people who think that anything involving computers or technology is automatically good and something to be supported and defended no matter the cost to our freedom, humanity or privacy, is incredibly frustrating. As someone who first pushed many of these people towards the internet and technology in general, I almost feel responsible for what they've become.
As someone who has done very well as far as careers go, thanks to an early start with computers and technology as a child in the late 70s / early 80s, I know without a doubt that I'm partially responsible for some of what I hate now, whether directly by way of cash-induced moral ambiguity, or indirectly thanks to projects I've contributed to.
I love technology and progress. I just wish that progress actually meant doing important things, rather than finding newer, more invasive ways to surveil and manipulate people as it has for the past decade or more.
As a programmer, I hate the modern world in general. None of these technologies are for the good of humanity. I once went on a survival camp for a month out in the middle of nowhere. It was the best time in my life. This really is a profound observation. I am sure technology can enrich people's lives. Even out in the middle of nowhere I was using primitive forms of technology. But our modern world is not full of the kinds of experiences that enrich our lives - quite the opposite.
Mobile phones may sound like a good technology until you realise that people are using them because all of their friends are miles away, or because they have to and their boss calls them all the time, or they are so bored at work that they would rather browse facebook.
Cars are something that could allow you to travel long distances but we mostly use them to sit in traffic or travel long distances simply because we have paved over everything around us and nature is so far away. Cars have contributed to pollution and cities that resemble car parks.
To me, and this is obvious from my experience in the jungle, the modern world is a complete failure that has not improved our lives at all.
My best experience in life was away from the modern world. I mean my mental and physical health ended up being completely different by the third week. My experience of life.... I was actually living. I have never felt that since. I feel like I know a secret about the world that others who have never had that experience will ever know.
I have a feeling that modern technology and life is guided by corruption, not by what is best for humanity.
Should we now have an existential crisis when the smart reply is exactly what we were going to say? Should we type it anyway just to teach the machine it was right?
Should we save our outrage for something more then a feature in an announced chat app?
Not every part of every conversation needs to be genuine and engaging. I've found smart replies to be quite helpful for transactional conversations, like setting up dentist appointments and lunch meetings. It's almost like having an assistant pen a response for you when getting the gist of the intent is simple and not every word matters.
Letters to friends, or letters with significance (e.g. a resignation letter) will of course always be written by hand, word for word, but there's room for smart replies to be useful without having it diminish the human race
I guess I just don't get the hate. A large portion of my communication is all about getting the intent across without any need to be a wordsmith. If that can be automated, why not?
If someone sends me a picture of their cute dog, I'll happily acknowledge it. But I don't see the difference between picking a somewhat simple, canned response over writing essentially that same thing out myself. It's about acknowledging that you received their picture and agreeing that it is cute.
There are many things where automating stuff feels wrong. But most of these involve some kind of manipulation: help with writing a sweet message to your lover, optimizing your email response to the particular personality of the person you're talking to so that they'll 'like it more'. Stuff like that.
But automating away things that are kind of inane to begin with doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. It's no different from the 'hello how are you' and 'how was your weekend' talk. It's not quite pointless (in my view), but it's also not something so authentic that any protocol or automation in the matter is a bad thing (in fact, we already do this).
Why even use keyboards? They're just a lazy, creativity-free version of writing by hand. We should be having this discussion by sending each other postcards, with REAL doodled faces, every one of them unique, none of this ASCII ":)" nonsense :P
I like smart replies. They are not quite the exact words I would normally use, but they're close, so I kind of enjoy selecting them as a sort of novelty. In that sense, it's kind of like spellcheck (which tells me I just misspelled spellcheck). If I was replying to those texts, it would have gone something like that:
> What are you up to?
>> Work.
or
> Want to hang out?
>> Sure.
The suggestions Google provides are a little bit more upbeat and amusing to me.
> What are you up to?
>> I am working!
or
> Want to hang out?
>> I'd love to.
I especially like how it inverts how I'd normally use exclamation marks and periods. "I'm working." "I'd love to!" etc.
Anyway, neat feature. The author doesn't like it, I do, so she can not use the feature and I can use it :P
Perhaps its the smartarse Australian larrikin in me, but these kinds of automated responses depress me, because I can see them working like corporate new-speak: they're going to push us to limit our communication down to a bunch of canned responses, emotions and interactions.
Sometimes I think AI isn't advancing at all, its just that we're all working more and more to fall in line like good automatons...
I love sarcasm, dead-pan, violently black-humour...and I'm watching it all slowly disappear and we all become pidgeonholed, public, on-show, quantised and sanitised.
I'd much rather bring back:
>What are you up to?
>> In middle of school shooting. Cops on way. Call you back in 5?
>Want to hang out?
>> I'm in the bathroom, so in a way, I already am...
> sends through that picture of child holding flower
>> Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah...
> >What are you up to? >> In middle of school shooting. Cops on way. Call you back in 5?
These days, that sounds like something that would make SWAT invite themselves into your house, through a window.
The responses are sure cute and creative. I seriously doubt whoever writes like this today will change their ways because of "smart replies". Most people don't write stuff like that, definitely not during most of the conversations.
I don't really have a formed view yet. I think getting outraged over someone using augmented software to respond faster is wrong, and only a problem with the person who gets outraged. On the other hand I do appreciate the effect of limiting the potential conversation space if people get too dependent those reply suggestions.
It is also true though that a lot of conversations one has over e-mail or IMs follow so common patterns that there were many times I wished I could just automate it away, to have a bot reply to them without the other side knowing. Maybe I'm just antisocial? But I tend to differentiate between requests for information from requests for personal attention, and wouldn't mind having my bot handle all of the former.
(Then again, I wouldn't accept anything except a bot I wrote myself, so maybe I'm not that antisocial - since I'd be just spawning a part of myself as an external process. That's also one reason why I'm so pissed about all the modern bot / AI tech from Google, et al., which has zero configurability, zero ways to plug your own stuff in yourself.)
Your examples are exactly the reason why I do not like Smart Replies: it says a lot about a person what he/she is writing. The choice in words (or lack of) is very important. Typing already misses a lot of non-verbal information. That's how we got smiley icons. Smart Replies makes the replies even less informing.
Conversions will become more predictable and shallow then they already are.
I'm not really bothered by the distinction. When you repeat someone's words, you're taking on the responsibility of having used them, so to me, the meaning is the same whether you press letter-shaped screen widgets or press word-shaped screen widgets.
I don't think anyone is going to think "I'm not really sure if I love my partner, but Google says I do, so I guess I do." I also don't think people are using mobile apps to have the deep types of conversations where this would matter.
Like I said, I see it as a more interesting spellcheck. I usually say things like "yup", Google offers more amusing suggestions that I enjoy.
The author didn't exactly spell it out, but I found the suggestions to be so adequate that they become what i want to say. They become limiting in a sense.
The simulated conversation image is a great example. After seeing those responses, the response 'aww so cute' or 'Love the daisy' are about about the same or better than what I can or would care to think of in a text conversation. Is there really a better way to think answer that and why should I waste the time to do so?
I think that's the point of the article: using "smart replies" makes it seem like you're so disinterested in your conversation partner that you consider coming up with your own responses a waste of time.
> The author didn't exactly spell it out, but I found the suggestions to be so adequate that they become what i want to say. They become limiting in a sense.
This effect is the only one thing that worries me with those replies. It won't be good if people start to choose only from suggestions instead of choosing them only when they are appropriate. And, as you observed, the effect can be subtle.
But the very idea of a computer typing up the response for you? I don't mind that at all - that's what computers are for, to let you do more with less effort.
Yeah, and please also don't send me any messages where you chose autocompletions for the words, or messages where your phone autocorrected the spelling of. Heck, don't even send messages where you pressed the keyboard buttons to spell out the words, it's far to impersonal and dehumanizing to be limited to the options your phone presents; people should communicate like they were meant to: by talking to each other face-to-face.
---
With Smart Replies (as with other communication-helping technology), meaning comes from how and when you choose to use them, and there's no reason you shouldn't choose to use them when it communicates what you were intending. If I was going to say "Yes!" and that's a Smart Reply option, why shouldn't I save the time and choose it? It was still my action that sent that message, still my choice to send it, still the meaning that I wanted to communicate. Smart Replies save time for the simple stuff, so you can better spend your time on other messages that you might write manually.
The reason smart replies seem a bit sad to me is that, unlike new forms of communication that have come before, they don't introduce any new scope for creativity.
Text messages, twitter and snapchat may have made conversations lighter, less substantial and more throwaway, but they have cultivated a rich flora of memes, silly jokes, new ways of sharing. Even emoji, which at first blush also seem like a very lazy way of communicating, have taken on cultural relevance and can be used in interesting and fresh ways.
A smart reply is a smart reply. The best case scenario is that it was close enough to what you were going to say anyway that the small difference in content is outweighed by the reduced effort of not having to type or think. It cannot lead to new forms of creative expression because its very use demands not expressing yourself more succinctly but instead expressing yourself less precisely. Expressing less of yourself.
I like the smart replies. And my girlfriend loves it too. The replies look to be relevant and optional. So when you don't have time to type out a proper response, use the suggestion. Otherwise who's stopping you from typing out by hand?
>Further, I don't care how intelligent these Smart Replies are: They can never capture the personality and character of a real human conversation.
Really? Tell that to the people living in the time before Alphago made it's 37th move and astounded Lee Sedol himself. AI is here, it is as smart or smarter in some areas. The number of such areas is going to grow. Get used to it.
Please find a way to get that idea in front of Charlie Brooker. It could make for a pretty good Black Mirror episode.
(And while we are on the subject.. There was a blog post back in 2005 about the inverse situation: if the person behind the other screen has the preconception that you are a bot, convincing them of your humanity is nearly impossible. The post now lives as a PDF document.[0])
How would the recipient know whether I've used the "Yum clams!" smart reply or typed in the same thing myself? If you can't tell then how is the author of the article going to act on his self-righteous anger about what his friends choose to do with their time?
That's exactly my feelings too. If the author gets outraged about the possibility of using autosuggested responses instead of typing them in manually, I suggest that the author has some issues.
I'm gonna copyright my smart replies so you can't use them! I don't want anyone to sound like me because people are going to realize I am just smart replying.
About 8 years ago I was jokingly going to write this for guys who were too dumb or lazy or to much of a 20 something to auto write back to girls they met out. My girlfriend, future wife was horrified by the idea. The waitresses at the bar were like "Meh... at least he though enough to enter me into the system and he'll remember to talk to me." My wife threatened bloody murder on me as she couldn't trust that I wasn't using it on her... and now google wants to do it on a facebook level, eg society wide. Well this will be worth a good laugh and cry with my wife.
Yeah that's was mostly my reaction to my wife's reaction. My thought was it would help people get over the awkward part. This seems like it'd be more endemic to all communications.
Then again I remember seeing on the palm pre a feature that showed you notes about the caller on the call screen. Supposed to be for sales people to put stuff like "Wife Jane, 3 kids, Bobby, Sue, Jamal" to read before they picked up.
I have had exactly the same idea before when I was trying to get with a bunch of girls. There is this whole "initial" part, where you just talk about garbage. It is so time-consuming and it is all a numbers game. If you could automate it, you could reel in lots of girls with no work.
I have a friend who did this with meet and craigslist. He just sent a message to every single posting of "Hey". If the person responded then he would actually look at the profile and see if he wanted to send another. He automated it to where he just could click a yes or no link and it would send "want to meet?" This is essentially tinder I guess as people are generally active currently on tinder and just looking to go out.
Anyway he would go on dates about 3-5 times a week with new people. He also ran into a lot of crazy.
He's always been more of a surface level relationship person. We were talking about this last night and he's just coming to grips with having a real relationship that has settled and become comfortable as opposed to awkward. He's somewhat at a loss. I'm telling him that now is when he can really have fun. But that part is anecdoteal I guess.
Readit News
Are your friends selfishly taking up time trying to talk to you when you could be adding more people to your friends list instead?
Do you have a craving for increased amounts of non-genuine social interaction?
Has your life become so depressingly repeatable that our algorithms can accurately represent your superficial chatter?
If so, we've got something for you: SMART REPLIES!
SMART REPLIES! For when your communication is so valuable and necessary it doesn't need you!
SMART REPLIES! Yum clams! So cute!
SMART REPLIES!...if you thought twitter and social-networking was inane, you ain't seen nothing yet...
Edit: I apologise, i just had a reflex reaction. Wow...this is the world we're making for ourselves...
I'm sure this will be downvoted (edit: maybe I was wrong, which makes me feel better yet) because it doesn't really add anything to the discussion, but I've been increasingly depressed about this stuff lately, and hearing/seeing someone else basically put the words in my brain down here, helped a lot.
Being surrounded by people who think that anything involving computers or technology is automatically good and something to be supported and defended no matter the cost to our freedom, humanity or privacy, is incredibly frustrating. As someone who first pushed many of these people towards the internet and technology in general, I almost feel responsible for what they've become.
As someone who has done very well as far as careers go, thanks to an early start with computers and technology as a child in the late 70s / early 80s, I know without a doubt that I'm partially responsible for some of what I hate now, whether directly by way of cash-induced moral ambiguity, or indirectly thanks to projects I've contributed to.
I love technology and progress. I just wish that progress actually meant doing important things, rather than finding newer, more invasive ways to surveil and manipulate people as it has for the past decade or more.
Mobile phones may sound like a good technology until you realise that people are using them because all of their friends are miles away, or because they have to and their boss calls them all the time, or they are so bored at work that they would rather browse facebook.
Cars are something that could allow you to travel long distances but we mostly use them to sit in traffic or travel long distances simply because we have paved over everything around us and nature is so far away. Cars have contributed to pollution and cities that resemble car parks.
To me, and this is obvious from my experience in the jungle, the modern world is a complete failure that has not improved our lives at all.
My best experience in life was away from the modern world. I mean my mental and physical health ended up being completely different by the third week. My experience of life.... I was actually living. I have never felt that since. I feel like I know a secret about the world that others who have never had that experience will ever know.
I have a feeling that modern technology and life is guided by corruption, not by what is best for humanity.
Should we save our outrage for something more then a feature in an announced chat app?
..and still feel a little bit guilty for being so bloody shallow.
Letters to friends, or letters with significance (e.g. a resignation letter) will of course always be written by hand, word for word, but there's room for smart replies to be useful without having it diminish the human race
If someone sends me a picture of their cute dog, I'll happily acknowledge it. But I don't see the difference between picking a somewhat simple, canned response over writing essentially that same thing out myself. It's about acknowledging that you received their picture and agreeing that it is cute.
There are many things where automating stuff feels wrong. But most of these involve some kind of manipulation: help with writing a sweet message to your lover, optimizing your email response to the particular personality of the person you're talking to so that they'll 'like it more'. Stuff like that.
But automating away things that are kind of inane to begin with doesn't seem like such a big deal to me. It's no different from the 'hello how are you' and 'how was your weekend' talk. It's not quite pointless (in my view), but it's also not something so authentic that any protocol or automation in the matter is a bad thing (in fact, we already do this).
> What are you up to?
>> Work.
or
> Want to hang out?
>> Sure.
The suggestions Google provides are a little bit more upbeat and amusing to me.
> What are you up to?
>> I am working!
or
> Want to hang out?
>> I'd love to.
I especially like how it inverts how I'd normally use exclamation marks and periods. "I'm working." "I'd love to!" etc.
Anyway, neat feature. The author doesn't like it, I do, so she can not use the feature and I can use it :P
Sometimes I think AI isn't advancing at all, its just that we're all working more and more to fall in line like good automatons...
I love sarcasm, dead-pan, violently black-humour...and I'm watching it all slowly disappear and we all become pidgeonholed, public, on-show, quantised and sanitised.
I'd much rather bring back:
>What are you up to? >> In middle of school shooting. Cops on way. Call you back in 5?
>Want to hang out? >> I'm in the bathroom, so in a way, I already am...
> sends through that picture of child holding flower >> Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah...
Oh, but the two are unrelated you say...
Well no. I'm not certain that they are...
These days, that sounds like something that would make SWAT invite themselves into your house, through a window.
The responses are sure cute and creative. I seriously doubt whoever writes like this today will change their ways because of "smart replies". Most people don't write stuff like that, definitely not during most of the conversations.
I don't really have a formed view yet. I think getting outraged over someone using augmented software to respond faster is wrong, and only a problem with the person who gets outraged. On the other hand I do appreciate the effect of limiting the potential conversation space if people get too dependent those reply suggestions.
It is also true though that a lot of conversations one has over e-mail or IMs follow so common patterns that there were many times I wished I could just automate it away, to have a bot reply to them without the other side knowing. Maybe I'm just antisocial? But I tend to differentiate between requests for information from requests for personal attention, and wouldn't mind having my bot handle all of the former.
(Then again, I wouldn't accept anything except a bot I wrote myself, so maybe I'm not that antisocial - since I'd be just spawning a part of myself as an external process. That's also one reason why I'm so pissed about all the modern bot / AI tech from Google, et al., which has zero configurability, zero ways to plug your own stuff in yourself.)
It's not. It's bigger and faster, and being applied to situations it wasn't previously applied to.
Conversions will become more predictable and shallow then they already are.
(Looking forward to the day that that sort of reply can be generated. I'm sure it would be far more fun than "wanna hang?" "ya")
> Want to Hang out?
>> I'd love to!
>> Nah, I am busy.
In that case, I don't think anyone should have a problem.
I don't think anyone is going to think "I'm not really sure if I love my partner, but Google says I do, so I guess I do." I also don't think people are using mobile apps to have the deep types of conversations where this would matter.
Like I said, I see it as a more interesting spellcheck. I usually say things like "yup", Google offers more amusing suggestions that I enjoy.
Deleted Comment
The simulated conversation image is a great example. After seeing those responses, the response 'aww so cute' or 'Love the daisy' are about about the same or better than what I can or would care to think of in a text conversation. Is there really a better way to think answer that and why should I waste the time to do so?
Do people on chat with their nearest and dearest? Or do they chat with a mix of people who they may like or even dislike.
This effect is the only one thing that worries me with those replies. It won't be good if people start to choose only from suggestions instead of choosing them only when they are appropriate. And, as you observed, the effect can be subtle.
But the very idea of a computer typing up the response for you? I don't mind that at all - that's what computers are for, to let you do more with less effort.
---
With Smart Replies (as with other communication-helping technology), meaning comes from how and when you choose to use them, and there's no reason you shouldn't choose to use them when it communicates what you were intending. If I was going to say "Yes!" and that's a Smart Reply option, why shouldn't I save the time and choose it? It was still my action that sent that message, still my choice to send it, still the meaning that I wanted to communicate. Smart Replies save time for the simple stuff, so you can better spend your time on other messages that you might write manually.
Text messages, twitter and snapchat may have made conversations lighter, less substantial and more throwaway, but they have cultivated a rich flora of memes, silly jokes, new ways of sharing. Even emoji, which at first blush also seem like a very lazy way of communicating, have taken on cultural relevance and can be used in interesting and fresh ways.
A smart reply is a smart reply. The best case scenario is that it was close enough to what you were going to say anyway that the small difference in content is outweighed by the reduced effort of not having to type or think. It cannot lead to new forms of creative expression because its very use demands not expressing yourself more succinctly but instead expressing yourself less precisely. Expressing less of yourself.
Deleted Comment
>Further, I don't care how intelligent these Smart Replies are: They can never capture the personality and character of a real human conversation.
Really? Tell that to the people living in the time before Alphago made it's 37th move and astounded Lee Sedol himself. AI is here, it is as smart or smarter in some areas. The number of such areas is going to grow. Get used to it.
(And while we are on the subject.. There was a blog post back in 2005 about the inverse situation: if the person behind the other screen has the preconception that you are a bot, convincing them of your humanity is nearly impossible. The post now lives as a PDF document.[0])
0: https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/ALife/Striegel_Failed_Turi...
This and indoctrination of presence of surveillance is the problem with all those features.
[Edit: spelling, clarification]
Then again I remember seeing on the palm pre a feature that showed you notes about the caller on the call screen. Supposed to be for sales people to put stuff like "Wife Jane, 3 kids, Bobby, Sue, Jamal" to read before they picked up.
Anyway he would go on dates about 3-5 times a week with new people. He also ran into a lot of crazy.
He's always been more of a surface level relationship person. We were talking about this last night and he's just coming to grips with having a real relationship that has settled and become comfortable as opposed to awkward. He's somewhat at a loss. I'm telling him that now is when he can really have fun. But that part is anecdoteal I guess.