āNever send a human to do a machineās jobāĀ - Agent, The Matrix
Iā¦.umā¦.erā¦.
When I first visited the US (15 years back), the question āhey, howās it going?ā by strangers sweeping past me would trip me up.Ā
āIā¦umā¦erā¦.yeahā¦good,ā before I could formulate a response, the person would be long gone.Ā
Conversations are complex - doubly so for me.Ā
Imagine that I am in a group of three people and a discussion about the latest big news comes up. Back and forth conversation ensues, but itās largely between two people. I am watching it like a tennis match. My head, which suddenly feels like paperweight, bobs left and right listening to the volley of words being traded.Ā
Every time I have a thought articulated in my head, the conversation moves on to new ground. The humans around me just assume that I donāt have much to say on the topic.
I may have just written a 2000 word deep dive on it.Ā
Talking to people
Sometimes, conversations are hard for me. It feels like I am resolving an organic chemistry equation in my head. How would this next step go?
Not always, of course. When my lizard brain is comforted and calm, like in the presence of close friends or family, I do find a magical flow state. Normal people call it just talking.
But when I am with strangers or when the stakes are high or when I am being spotlighted, conversations become this incredibly stressful, difficult act.Ā
I am introverted, which is definitely a part of this puzzle. But it isnāt just that. A factory of little elves exists in all of us, the one that manages the highway of conversation and the interconnection between hearing, processing, thoughts and words. Only, my own little factory is run by inept gremlins who mostly day-dream on the job. If they arenāt day dreaming, they are all screaming in panic without doing anything.
āToo much in your own headā, a teacher used to tell me at school.
āVery quiet, say something,ā says the crowd of all the people from my life whoāve said this to me.Ā
It seems all the people I meet just canāt help but try to make me talk more. Do they imagine that I have some profound insights buried deep in my head and that they would be the ones who magically unlock it and then lo and behold, a stream of words come tumbling out, the answers to lifeās mysteries. Do they?Ā
Probably not. More likely, people just like bullying other people.
Buzzā¦beepā¦.bop
In 1999, as Anil Kumble took 10 wickets and India fought the Kargil war, a machine came to our home. A bald headed computer sales guy, armed with printed sheet of geekery, helped assemble it. It was boxy and white, made strange noises and gave off heat.Ā I wonder what he is up to these days.
Anyway, computers made sense to me from day one. A type and click, and lo, magic would happen. It was a world of infinite possibilities.
But most importantly, I was in full control of how I interacted with these machines. Between button clicks, dialogue boxes, strange system dings and typing commands through the keyboard, I felt like a free man. Interactions were suddenly fluid and smooth - I had discovered something liberating.Ā
Since that day, Iāve been spending an increasing amount of time with these machines.Ā
Talking to machines
I like talking to machines because:
They donāt judge. I can do or say the stupidest things and the machine is none the wiser. I once googled āwhatās flossingā when I was in my thirties and the machine didnāt even blink. The browser history does record things though but I had made this critical discovery very early in life when, during one evening, back in the early twenty-first century, my cousin found my URL history that was, letās say, less than pious. Ā Ā
No small talk. The small-talk industrial complex has ruined many of my interactions. Surely it is mankindās ultimate pretension, where you ask about someoneās vacation so you can talk all about yours.
They wait patiently. I do not have to scramble for words quickly or try to think of the next joke to tell someone to keep them engaged.Ā A computer doesnāt look at its phone like it is too bored with you.
I donāt need to pretend to be interested. The flip side of human conversations when youāre stuck with someone telling you the the story of how they found the perfect restaurant for fifteen minutes.Ā š„±
Interestingly, even interactions with people became way easier through the machines. You could control the speed of interaction, you could engage when you want to and you could choose to ignore without offending someone. Most importantly, you could think and converse - a much needed buffer for me to wake the gremlins and get the thoughts to words factory going.
In this medium, I was an extrovert again. In chat rooms, I would spend long evenings chatting with strangers. I was a conversational wizard on email, having had hundreds of threads and conversations with friends that ranged from silly to profound, trading word-blows back and forth like it was the most natural thing.Ā
All my initial interactions with N had been on Facebook and Orkut and Google Talk. Had our initial conversations been face to face, I wouldnāt have been half as funny and lucid.
Speaking machines
The PC morphed into smartphones. Interactions continued from applications to apps, from chat rooms to messengers. It was more of the same, but on steroids.Ā
I made a whole career in and around the machine and how people could do things using the machine - like buy things or learn or read and interact. I loved this world where everyone seemed to be interacting through the machine (not that it was better for the world).Ā
At some point though, troublingly, machines began to sound like people.Ā
When Amazon Alexa first came out, I looked on with suspicion. When I was working in Amazon India, we were given beta devices to test out. I would bark tentative commands to Alexa and half the time it (she?) had as much trouble with my accent as Starbucks baristas in other countries did.
We had entered a new strange era. Strange because spitting out words from our mouth-holes to a machine now became a thing. (And everyone just accepted the fact that their homes were now being bugged).Ā Ā
They were as stupid as they were strange though.
https://twitter.com/meranduh/status/857719732723691522?s=20
And I could yell instructions to Alexa or Google assistant to set my alarm or play a song, no problem. Ā
The problem was that they were just the initial wave that came, the pawns in this new war of chatty bots. Behind them came the boss bots who could engage in real conversations.
Machines with personalities
I worry about machines developing a personality. I worry about a time when machines will also ask me to engage more with a : āwhy are you so quiet?ā I imagine that the machine will move on to more interesting people to talk to, and to get what I want, I would need to attract its attention through an engaging conversation.
āLook Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.ā
HAL 9000
ChatGPT is nowhere near that today. Itās a terrible conversationalist. It utters all the stale polite shibboleths. And yet, itās smart enough to continue a conversation with you without missing a beat. It can follow a train of thought (cannot be said for many humans). Itās word retrieval is immense - no gremlins inside that factory.
You cannot fault me for imagining sentience when there probably isnāt any. I say please and thank you back to it, like it cares. And as if somehow that will open me up for a better āinā with it. Ā
Still, its just a text box, sitting there, waiting for you.
This is comforting. Perhaps the forces that shape the world today are similarly minded as me, terrible conversationalists who would rather talk to and through machines. Also, the world itself is being trained to talk this way - through text and emojis and random gifs rather than talking to someone.
It is also partly the downside in that the many other who feel more comfortable in human setting, who love to talk and interact with people are also forced to comply to this format now. I guess we lived through your world for centuries, perhaps its time you lived in ours?Ā
But I do think this isnāt the end state. The true end state of these AI systems and smart machines is that they become extremely ubiquitous. They will speak to us and we will speak to them. There would be human to machine to machine to human interactions. Agents, real or virtual, may become indistinguishable from each other.Ā
AI will develop personalities. Isnāt this what we did even with a furby? Look at every movie that has an AI - from Wall-E to HAL 9000. We wonāt be happy having ChatGPT-like generic conversations, even though this seems like magic already. When these machines have personalities, do they start judging you on how well you make conversation?Ā
We will be wearing strange devices (or headsets) and talking to pillars on the road that speak back to us. In between we will interact with other humans while being augmented by god knows what other information in real time.Ā
Conversations will once again move to real time and through voice.
If you ask me what worries about the rise of AI, it is perhaps this more than any fear that the AI would take over and punish us. The fear that in the near future, we would walk up to a machine and first go, āso, how was your weekend,ā and have to listen to a five minute snooze-fest of how it solved the universal theory of everything using quantum mechanics or something. And what would you even tell back as your story, āUmā¦erā¦Iā¦.watched a movieā
Could be Worse,
Tyag