Google's socially awkward geeks craft socially awkward AI bot that calls people for you Google today opened its annual I/O developer bash with details of how it’s going to lob machine-learning software at everything you do online and offline, and it truly means everything. CEO Sundar Pichai took to the stage in Silicon Valley to explain how artificial intelligence will make life easier, safer, and more fun for …
But will its word be an enforceable contract? Who pays for the consequences of bugs? What happens if it makes a call and gets another one at the other end? How long before it gets hacked?
"Where's all my spondoolicks?"
"You called me yesterday and told me to transfer $10,000,000 to an offshore bank account."
"No I didn't"
"Oh, yes you did!"
"Oh, no I didn't!"
...
Exercise for the student: in the above conversation, is either or both of these interlocutors a Google bleepy thing?
Exercise for the advanced student: continue the following conversation:
"Hi, Darling."
"Hi, Mommy!"
"Sweetheart, can you stop by the drugstore on your way home? There's a man in a black sedan who has got something for me."
>
No, its "the box" from Star Cops, 1980's british SF series.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088613/
The writer planned that the box would use the owner's voice, but the director used a different voice. Making some dialog strange. The box had to ring his girlfriend and reserve a restaurant, the dialog said "be annoying, she won't know the difference". Bit of a fail on that side but the whole thing was worth it. I bought the DVDs when they came out...
Keep your pity, calling people is awful and I hate doing it - I put off cancelling internet for 2 months after moving out of my last house because the ISP required you call them - it bothers me that much.
Now if only this weren't usable for so many malicious purposes...
That's because you're not the CEO of a US giga corp that makes it's money shoveling as much of your personal data as possible into it's data bases to sell ever more advertising at ever higher rates to ever more customers who are desperate not to be left behind in online advertising, who you also happen to generate most of the statistics for.
If you were you'd have been hugely tumescent listening to the presentation.
This post has been deleted by its author
"Fingers tightly crossed the robot overlords appreciate El Reg's puns, sarcasm, and irreverence toward corporate power."
If they called an operating system Android Pee and nobody laughed so much that they were in danger of doing so themselves, I think we can safely conclude that that's a "No".
"Just the thing for phones with a shit compass, like my Nexus 6P"
My phone doesn't have a compass at all. Not to worry though, there's no chance it will actually get updated to the current version of Android, let alone the next one. That seems to be the big thing these sorts of announcements always miss - there's no point trying to get us excited about all the amazing features you've come up with when we know our phones won't actually get to use them.
"Waymo CEO John Krafcik, shows how its fleet of fully self driving cars can now travel on public roads, starting in Phoenix, Arizona."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrJ4-AUL4U0
I was hoping to see a self-driving car drive on to the stage and run over the CEO. But it was not to be
Happy: The "AI" voices are to the point of being (mostly) unrecognizable from living humans. Their banter, grasp of grammar and speech patterns is now very good. Their speech recognition is at last climbing above the 90% correct wall.
Sad: So what are we going to HATE about this technology? Every bad attitude, user-abusing company on the planet is going to be using this "AI" (Artificial Imposter) technology within a higher level of social engineering scams. Inevitable. Horrifying. Such is humanity.
(o_O)
Next up: Artificial Imposter (AI) CGI faces for video calls. Watch the techno-hate meter hit the red zone. Neo-Ludditism becomes a craze.
:-Q*****
One can only imagine what robo-callers are going to do with [Duplex].
One can only imagine what this will do to robo-callers: let them talk, indefinitely, to a mumbling AI that asks them repeatedly to go over the amazing offer in more and more detail, thus wasting their time. They will go our of business in a month once this technology becomes ubiquitous!
When the phone rings, start by asking "Hello, What is the capital of Turkmenistan?"
If the caller answers correctly, put the phone down.
I'm tempted to do this next time I get a human cold caller. It'll confuse the hell out of them.
Oh, and for those who are wondering: Ashgabat.
Heh, I once asked an unscheduled skype conversationalist a similar trick question.
"Who's the President of the United States?"
To which they answered "it's me!".
which seemed to me a humourous answer.
But it was just a bot trolling for "friends".
And then the next one I chatted to (I was bored at a previous work place...) was a real person and I was real cynical and hard on them, lol.
Taking you seriously...
The Amish do have some good points. Those I have met have been without exception nice people. Their precautionary principle approach to technology is in many ways admirable.
But their way of life isn't actually sustainable for a large population. If they continued to have large families and expand due to the availability of modern sanitation (reduces infant mortality) they would eventually come up against severe land use pressure and eventually you'd get Amish resource wars, infanticide or probably both.
That they don't is largely because the rest of us have adopted the modern technology that they don't use.
Also see Quakers still being around in the UK because the rest of the population didn't adopt their attitude to non-violence in 1939.
An in-between is needed and some of the Amish are adopting it. Personally I would like to see a lot more regulation of social media and AI. The problem is finding anyone I would trust to regulate it - and I certainly wouldn't trust myself. Too many media proprietors hanging from lamp-posts makes things untidy.
Since it's the elephant de jour. I've not heard any noises about how Android will be dealing with GDPR. Would it required, when you're setting up a new phone, to go through a proper detailed list of opt-in selections. What happens to ones you don't opt-in? Or is Google going to push getting consent to the OEMs? I bet they'll just assume existing accounts are opted in and treat them as no-ops.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
