I just spent an hour or so reading I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison aloud to my friend who’s never read or seen it before. He’s not paying attention and has been trying to sleep. He needs to be awake at 6am. :)
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AI - Two Letters, many meanings
Over the past few years, two letters have sparked a revolution, akin to many, which have experienced both triumphs and challenges. These two letters carry diverse meanings, some of which are unequivocally understood, while others remain somewhat ambiguous.
iWave, the top-rated fundraising intelligence solution, announced today that it has launched Smart Alerts, the industry's first automated intelligence delivery
“Jobs that require strong cognitive abilities and analytical thinking will be very difficult to replace with AI.”
“We need more traditional liberal arts grads.”
-Mark Cuban
I would have to disagree with this statement. I think that any quality education you receive should qualify you to think critically about what you’re learning, what you’re doing, and in general. I don’t feel like people should tailor their education and major in something in fear that an AI will take their job. I feel as though if you major in accounting and your job is soon replaced by an AI after you graduate, if you received a quality education then you will be situated enough to find another job whether or not it is in accounting.
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Writers are all too familiar with that feeling you experience when you see someone else capture something in words in a way which you wish you would have yourself. I’m having that today with Anil Dash’s writing about the dichotomy between what he calls the “usage and provisioning” of Echo (italics mine):
Alexa’s “skills” (the equivalent of apps) are not very good. One reason why is the disconnect between usage and provisioning — you talk to the Echo, but install skills by going to the Alexa app on your phone.
And:
More than on any other platform, being able to seamlessly change defaults for particular functions is going to be critical.
I said essentially the same thing in this post about Echo, where I griped about the speaker’s lack of an “always-present GUI” to make it clear what you can do with it, comparing it to Google’s Now on Tap in Android. But Anil conveyed this with less words, and I think, more elegantly, so he wins here.
But back on point, this seems like quite an issue for Amazon and its third-party developers alike. Echo is designed specifically for use without sight or touch, so how does one discover new skills? Messaging is a similar place where the introduction of bots has left people wondering whether or not a command line-like interface would be without much friction, but much usage of bots is in conversation with friends, so people end up discovering new ones through sharing and thus bots have a mechanism to spread virally. There’s also the digital-physical bridging of a service integrated into Messenger, like Uber (cue corny bits and atoms video), where the car shuttling you around serves as a marketing tool itself. Echo, though, is sedentary and primarily meant for interacting with objects within the confines of your home, like lights and sound systems.
I don’t have a solution here. More intelligence for certain functionality like recommendations, certainly. Developers could on their own advertise through Amazon’s own portals and those of others, namely Facebook and Google. Good thing Bezos has 1,000 people to crack this nut.
So it happened: yesterday Google unveiled its assistant-powered speaker and competitor to the Amazon Echo, dubbed Google Home, during the company’s I/O keynote.
I wrote a few days ago about why I think Google is in a solid position to release the smart-home speaker to be beat. Home definitely validates those beliefs, but so does how the company’s automated intelligence and machine learning competencies were weaved into practically everything demoed during the three-hour roadshow of new products.
From a macro-level, Google has shined with a value proposition of, give us all your data and we’ll soup up otherwise commodity products — Maps, Photos, Inbox, and the list goes on and on. It doesn’t have necessarily have taste, but it can take other companies’ innovations and out-execute them on UX. Take my iPhone home-screen. That alone has six Google apps on it versus three from Apple. Apple by far makes the best hardware out there, but I’m far more likely to choose Google software over theirs when it’s available. The downside of the company’s choice to not store and utilize user data.
Amazon has certainly produced quite a few raved hardware innovations like usable e-Ink displays and most recently Echo with its microphone able to capture voice from a distance with incredible accuracy. But Google is going to win on interface.
