I'm a big fan of the coming anthropomorphisation of computers. It seems so clear (to me) that the future is heading that way.
Apple have already hired writers for Siri; how many more years before its personality starts to change to match the tone and manner that you ask questions? Young children have already started to mis-identify Siri as a real person! There was also the film Her the other year which seems quite prescient. Regardless of if we ever get to real AI, it seems quite clear we're going to face intelligent-seeming computers in the near future, and we're going to start to interact with them almost as if they were intelligent. It's going to be an interesting future.
This is a huge tangent, I know. It just seems like compilers speaking to you like a human being is just one more facet of this change.
> Software isn't "cautious" or "ambitious", those are qualities of alive beings. But maybe it serves us to think so.
Also this:
> Our minds respond to speech as if it were human, no matter what device it comes out of. Evolutionary theorists point out that, during the 200,000 years or so in which homo sapiens have been chatting with an “other,” the only other beings who could chat were also human; we didn’t need to differentiate the speech of humans and not-quite humans, and we still can’t do so without mental effort.
The future may be heading that way, but I'm personally not a fan of it.
As I understand it, we use different regions of our brain for interacting with tools, people, animals, etc. I enjoy using the tool part of my brain when computing. It feels "quieter" and contemplative. It feels like I am doing something, not like I am asking an assistant to do the work on my behalf.
I like social interaction a lot too, but as an introvert, it's kind of draining. I would have to leave computing if using a computer felt like being in an intense conversation with a computer-person all day. Even if the conversation is pleasant and fulfilling, it would be too much social interaction.
> I enjoy using the tool part of my brain when computing. It feels "quieter" and contemplative.
I totally get that. Personally though, I see conversational UI as an additional parallel mode of interaction, that you can use simultaneously. I can imagine e.g. coding, and interacting and thinking analytically about that, while still verbally being able to have a conversation with my computer for e.g. responding to email or calendar appointments. Not for everybody, of course.
Edit: I suppose, what I really mean, is that I'd like to interact with human things (email, meetings, messages, etc.) in a human way (conversationally, as I would a person), and I'd like to interact with machine things (coding, simulations, etc.) in a machine way. Trying to interact with human things in a mechanical way seems unintuitive, really, except it's all current technology affords, so we all have to learn these machine interfaces instead. And maybe that's why so many (non-techy) people find computers needlessly complicated.
I have tried to talk Evan (Elm's creator) out of the first person, but as you can see he likes it. But I think you bring up an important point: for some people, being able to use the social parts of our brain is like offloading to the GPU, and for others it's like firing up a generator when the power goes out.
Apple have already hired writers for Siri; how many more years before its personality starts to change to match the tone and manner that you ask questions? Young children have already started to mis-identify Siri as a real person! There was also the film Her the other year which seems quite prescient. Regardless of if we ever get to real AI, it seems quite clear we're going to face intelligent-seeming computers in the near future, and we're going to start to interact with them almost as if they were intelligent. It's going to be an interesting future.
This is a huge tangent, I know. It just seems like compilers speaking to you like a human being is just one more facet of this change.
I thought this blog post on conversational UIs really sums up some of these trends, and it only takes a bit of imagination to imagine where this will go in 10, 20 years: http://interconnected.org/home/2015/06/16/conversational_uis
> Software isn't "cautious" or "ambitious", those are qualities of alive beings. But maybe it serves us to think so.
Also this:
> Our minds respond to speech as if it were human, no matter what device it comes out of. Evolutionary theorists point out that, during the 200,000 years or so in which homo sapiens have been chatting with an “other,” the only other beings who could chat were also human; we didn’t need to differentiate the speech of humans and not-quite humans, and we still can’t do so without mental effort.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117242/siris-psychologica...