Big tech products are mostly useless

Big tech products are mostly useless(theguardian.com)

173 points by ahjones 8 years ago | 135 comments

The comments here seem to focus on the specific examples, but this misses the point of the article, which I take to be that _every_ new product or feature, no matter how minor or how incremental, is treated as the second coming of the 100x engineer and the cheering crowds hand-picked to promote whatever they see aren't helping by covering it rabidly.

He's not wrong, but I've heard that complaint about the tech press in general for years, so I'm not sure its bringing anything new to the table on HN.

But at the same time, "some of these will surely turn out to be revolutionary eventually" isn't a great excuse to treat everything as revolutionary before it has a chance to even be seen in the field.

TheOtherHobbes 8 years ago | |

I don't think the messianic cheering is the real problem.

Here's a short and not very complete list of unsolved meta-problems:

Even when products and systems are revolutionary, there are unexpected negative consequences (e.g. FB and Cambridge Analytica)

All systems can be trolled and abused, and if they can be, they will be (e.g. fake reviews on Amazon etc.)

AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test, which means there's a lot of guessing about whether or not any novel request will generate a useful response.)

IT systems and products of all kinds are brittle, unreliable, and often downright stupid. Users don't trust updates and feature changes, and often they're right to do so. Given that, why would AI "products" be any better or more reliable?

icc97 8 years ago | | |

> AI doesn't actually work all that well yet. (Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test...)

When we pass the Turing test it means we've got actual AI.

But I'm not sure there'll ever be a clear line. So Duplex kind of passes it in a very narrow context. Whether or not the person at the end of the line was actually fooled or not is a slightly different question. They could have just been humouring what they figured was a weird automated system.

But it's not like Google won't improve exponentially with this. They've now got a basic AI conversation system that they hope people will use and feed it data of actual conversations.

So Duplex v2 will have an expanded system where they can handle ten times the number of scenarios and questions.

The more I think about it, the more impressive it seems. Most attempts at a Turing test are text only where the subject is supposed to be a 13yo immigrant boy. Here Google's jumping straight to voice conversations.

acdha 8 years ago | | |

> Neither Siri nor Alexa truly pass a conversational Turing test

Even with the constrained grammar, neither of them passes the test of reliably producing the same result for the same phrase under good conditions. If the error rate is well into the double digits for simple structured queries using a constrained vocabulary it seems like the Turing test is still pretty far off.

Clubber 8 years ago | |

New and improved Tide. New formula! Better than ever! I think that's just the hyperbole of marketing. Most people should be immune now. That's probably why marketers target youngsters so much; most haven't caught on to the enormity of the BS just yet.

tabtab 8 years ago | |

Re: "some of these will surely turn out to be revolutionary eventually" -- It may be true, but the real question is do YOU want to be the guinea pig to test them. Unless your job or shop is R&D, it's usually best to let other companies kick the tires; get the kinks out; and most importantly, test it for your particular domain.

Domain-mismatch is a common problem: something is expanding rapidly, but in the end doesn't work on many or most niches. One size does NOT fit all.

An example is the no-sql movement. People started writing ALL new applications with it, thinking "it's the future". Turns out the regular RDBMS are still the better option 98%+ of the time. "Microservices" are a similar boondoggle. Make sure you really need it.

sharemywin 8 years ago | |

I think it's the scale. Be in love with the future products we're using your money to play with don't focus on our actual products because they're really just more expensive than before(no control over life cycle, same features as before) and don't actually add much value but have huge margins.

tim333 8 years ago | |

If his point is that "_every_ new product or feature, no matter how minor or how incremental, is treated as the second coming" then he's picked a bad example in Google Duplex in that it does seem noteable - the HN coverage was the second highest voted and most commented story this month (1875 points, 750 comments). It's not that booking hairdresser is a big deal - it's not. It's that it seems kind of half way between Siri and passing the Turing test which is a big deal.

Trundle 8 years ago | |

Claques are nothing new. People have been rigging crowds for a very long time. It certainly doesn't seem newsworthy to me that tech is doing it.

kei929 8 years ago | |

Look at all the hours we get to spend on making voice apps that make phone calls when both sides having access to quickly update the ledger is already a thing: calendars

So instead of debating solutions to local needs with neighbors, we fetishize juicing Googles stock price and enabling them to build things that mathematicians already figured out the theory and limits to years ago

This is nonsense.

It’s one thing to theorize the Higgs and build an LHC

It’s another to build chat bots with our time so we can avoid menial scheduling.

Feed people misdirection about how the economy needs this cause we’re all too dumb to figure out our own lives (translation: elites lose power if we do that) and you keep getting these stupid generational pyramid schemes: we buy in now on some vague promise of a future payout we’ll not be around to collect on

Corporate is the church now. Love it or be ostricized.

DylanDmitri 8 years ago | | |

While your points on the economy are valid, I disagree with your take on Duplex.

Duplex isn't about scheduling or calendars, it's about robots conversing with humans. It's proof of concept, a stepping stone on the path to general artificial intelligence.

Zak 8 years ago |

Now, when was the last time you came to book a haircut or restaurant table and concluded that the task was so onerous that you would ideally delegate it to a machine? And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to?

I hate talking on the phone. If I can't fill out a web form (login-free please) or send an email to complete some task like that, I'd love to have a robot do it for me. I don't see anything unethical about this as long as the robot performs the task reasonably well, doesn't waste the receptionist's time, etc....

The classic hacker ethic says it's bad for humans to be required to waste time on something a machine could do, and Google has just expanded the list of things machines can do. Of course, under that framework, it would be preferable to automate the receptionist taking the call as well.

I'm eager for this technology to become more general-purpose. For months, I've had a case open with an airline over an item that went missing from my checked bag. The only way to get updates is to call them on the phone. It first goes to an IVR, then a call center in India where the call is screened by a person, and only then to the actual department that can give me useful information. There is no direct line (I asked). The process is obviously designed to frustrate users so they give up. The hassle is arguably not worth the $90 they owe me, but I don't want to let them get away with it. I really wish I could have a robot talk to them.

loblollyboy 8 years ago |

Of course, like raking leaves in your lawn, you’re going to run into a kind of diminishing returns situation. So I agree, albeit with an obvious point, My only qualm (beyond the banality of the thesis) is that this dude is forgetting about some other cool advances, such as the sharing economy (Uber/Lyft and airbnb) which kind of changed the world a little, messenger apps (which made day to day life a little more convenient for many and also played a role in some big geopolitical events). Also just b/c google launched its search engine in 99 or whatever doesn’t mean that they stopped innovating - incremental improvements in search have made it 1000x what it was then, and if you showed google maps to someone from 2000, they would think it is magic. The tools for making tech have gotten a lot better too, even if most of the use cases have already been covered. AI and blockchain can be revolutionary. The problem is how we structure society, where we’re all either just trying to make our daily bread or get rich, and this leads to a lot of misdirected effort.

ribchinski 8 years ago |

Well... I don't particularly agree with everything this guy is saying, but he is right about the internet of things. In my experience, it is quite useless, and it is a danger to privacy. One of the my friends constantly uses Amazon Alexa and Siri for even the most basic questions like, "What is x + y?" which could be easily done faster on a desk calculator. Either I am a person who likes to make things more inconvenient for myself, or I just don't understand modern technology.

mLuby 8 years ago |

"It’s years since Silicon Valley gave us a game-changer. Instead, from curing disease to colonies on Mars, we’re fed overblown promises" Come on. "We don't have a colony on Mars yet" doesn't mean there isn't crazy innovation going on with extremely tangible benefits. Any of the following is a game-changer.

1. Dec'15 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on land.

2. Apr'16 SpaceX performs first ever orbital-class rocket landing on a ship.

3. Mar'17 SpaceX reuses first orbital-class rocket.

4. Feb'18 SpaceX launches Falcon Heavy, the highest payload capacity of any currently operational launch vehicle.

5. May'18 SpaceX launches Falcon 9 Block 5, set to give USA direct human access to space (in late 2018) for the first time since Mar'11.

icebraining 8 years ago |

Unfortunately, this article seems as empty and uninteresting as the products it's criticizing. The Guardian should ask idlewords to write one for them instead.

jannes 8 years ago | |

For us living inside the feedback loop of the tech world it might be hard to see the relative importance of some of the things. I think he brings up an interesting topic from the perspective of someone living outside of the tech world.

icebraining 8 years ago | | |

I don't disagree that the topic is important, I just think we have much better critiques being written on that topic regularly, from both inside and outside the tech industry.

Also, the SV reality distortion field hasn't infected all the tech industry. In the companies I worked, nobody was convinced we were changing the world, we're just writing some tools for cash.

arca_vorago 8 years ago | |

I'm not surprised since the day I got into an argument with the guardians senior tech editor and he tried to argue Foss didn't matter and Linux was a fanboy fad...

The senior editor...

acdha 8 years ago | | |

If you're a software developer that's certainly a valid gripe but what if you're part of the 99.999% of people who use computers but don't run servers? Linux doesn't run your desktop or iOS devices and if Google swapped the kernel on Android the users wouldn't notice.

akvadrako 8 years ago | | |

Well from a desktop perspective that's kinda true.

jaimebuelta 8 years ago |

The main point of this article is mostly misguided, IMO. The real one is that you don't know which tech innovation will have a great impact before hand.

Most of the things that has big impacts are actually things we skip through. For example, we have a pretty decent camera in our pockets at all times. We take pictures constantly. The "selfie" revolution, one that has big impacts in how we perceive ourselves and want other to perceive us is enabled by having an small quality camera around. At some point passing from "terrible quality" to "good enough quality" made a jump in that. Sure, not everyone takes selfies. But it has been a big change in photography in the last 10 years or so. So big we have a new name for something it exist before.

I'm pretty sure that being able to track a run and share it on social networks is a big motivator to do exercise, for example.

I seems weird to me talking to AI, and even weirder that "the future" is calling to a shop with an AI instead of using some sort of web shop/app/whatever to get an appointment.

But who knows...

redial 8 years ago | |

Most revolutions have been silent revolutions. The only one that was an instant world event was the iPhone launch. All the technologies named in the article; Wifi, Google Search, Facebook, Twitter, even YouTube and Wikipedia were not introduced to millions of people at once in a Silicon Valley event. AI will change the world, but it'll be slow, like how the internet changed the world little by little replacing retail, letters, phone calls, and now maybe 40 years later, TV. AI is a process revolution, not a product revolution. So he's right, big tech products have been mostly useless, specially compared to their promises.

deweller 8 years ago |

My takeaway: Many technological innovations don't turn out to be world-changing events. And those that do take several years to trickle down to mainstream usage.

For those of us that keep a skeptical mindset when evaluating new technology, none of this comes as a surprise.

redleggedfrog 8 years ago |

Let's remember this, from the last few years, written by numerous major media editorial pages (paraphrasing, of course): "Silicon Valley never tackles the big issues. They just invent frivolous new gadgets which no on really needs, or some new app that shares pictures of cute kittens or is the next social network. They should focus on big picture issues - hunger, housing, crime, etc."

Those are harder to approach and solve, and you need more patience for results. Now we see complaining that the nifty gadgets aren't coming like they used to. Hmm.

philipov 8 years ago | |

Hunger, crime, these are not technological issues solvable by tech companies, unless your idea of a solution involves building a more effective police state. These are political issues our leadership has neither the will nor incentive to solve.

For example, Housing isn't a problem, it's an investment opportunity. The people donating to your campaign wouldn't like it if their investments were pushed down in value.

An app can't fix your economy being dominated by bad actors.

galieos_ghost 8 years ago | | |

hunger- Has been mostly solved thanks to GMO increasing crop yields.

crime- Is strongly correlated with poverty, which has been rapidly reduced globally thanks to technological innovation

Housing- Will be solved by tech making remote work viable and thus reducing demand in cities. Automation and some form of income stipend could also allow people to live in more affordable places rather than cities.

Your view of "tech" is pretty stunted if you only think web apps.

bertil 8 years ago |

Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it?”

Let’s ignore the shattering impact of incredibly convenient video streaming, content filtering via image tagging, electric cars, transportation or food on demand, having contactless payment available to anyone for pennies…

MTurk pays offensively little, sure, but thanks to ‘Silicon Valley’ anyone can work now, no matter how much discrimination or how remote they are — and buy groceries with it. If the accusation is “building”, Amazon built it. If you want it to be more lucrative, you can either legally enforce minimum wage, or start tasks that pay more.

Shelter, like food, is a problem we solved a while ago, as long as you can afford it: inequality is a problem, but you can’t blame AirBnB, SpareRoom and countless others for allowing people to find others with a lifestyle, a schedule that fit them so that they can save on rent. Let’s not talk about how internet empowered people to compare mortgages.

Crime: Well, yes, Silicon Valley has done a lot for Law enforcement, but expectedly and Thank God, not as a B2C business model.

I’m honestly more confused arguing that article than I would argue with a flat-earther. At least a flat-earther is probably right when they say that you have not personally checked yourself for what you claim.

redial 8 years ago | |

> Wait, is that article simply ignoring that self-driving car are now commercially available in Phoenix? That’s probably a bigger revolution than the steam engine, and someone’s take on this is “That’s it?

Are you being ironic? The steam engine literally reshaped the world. I think you express exactly what the author is talking about: Acting as if just by announcing it, it has already succeeded.

amarkov 8 years ago | | |

But imagine someone sitting there in 1804 Wales, looking at the first steam train, saying "slow down buddy you haven't actually changed anything yet". It seems like there's a sense in which this is short-sighted.

bertil 8 years ago | | |

The cars work. It’s not a stretch to understand what will happen as Waymo scales operation -- and it’s not ironic that not just replacing the vast majority of working class job, but making transport virtually free will have a bigger impact that the steam engine had. There is a lot that happens in history with understanding, threats and promisses.

kerrsclyde 8 years ago |

With constant innovation the temptation to jump to the next new thing is great. This mitigates the value you gain by using something regularly and consistently over a long term period.

I've used Evernote since 2012 - when I started it really wasn't that useful. But now, after over 6 years of using it daily, I have a huge body of content personal to me which I find tremendously useful. This only came about because I didn't jump to the next shiny alternative.

jannes 8 years ago |

I predict that AI has 5-10 more years of "mostly useless" ahead until it suddenly becomes interesting.

Another thing he criticised was the Internet of Things and other gadgets: I agree with the author on that one. I hope it dies a quick death. If there's a tradeoff between an internet-connected device that lasts 1-2 years and a not-connected device lasting 20 years, I would always chose the longer-lasting one.

Larrikin 8 years ago | |

The crowd on here seems to have a valid complaint against the IoTs while being very short sighted on what actually can be done.

Currently most companies want to be Facebook or Google and collect all the data they possibly can while putting out a mediocre/bad product with no security that only works when there is an internet. No consumer actually wants this.

Instead of killing the industry, we need a new generation of companies that put out products that function the same or ideally better than their analog competitors. Data collection, such as usage information, and internet connectivity will be what sets these products apart from their traditional competitors. However, the emphasis should be on sending that data to the owner of the product, instead of sending it to the cloud for the companies benefit. Optimizing energy usage, learning usage patterns, etc will be great differentiators. My products working together will be an even bigger differentiator

Aggregation of that data can be useful, and could be opt in. I'd love to know that I seem to use way more energy than other people around me. Perhaps I have a bad AC, or my insulation is particularly bad.

The biggest issue right now is that companies are putting out insecure products that are completely broken if the parent company of the product are left out of the loop. The products need to work locally, with no reliance on the parent company, and only rely on a company server for true enhancements that can not be calculated locally.

jannes 8 years ago | | |

You are describing the ideal. But for some reason all that companies can come up with are closed "ecosystems" where systems work well with each other as long as you buy everything from the same manufacturer. Interoperability and open standards seem to be in no companies' interest. Where is that new generation of companies going to come from?

jannes 8 years ago | | |

> I'd love to know that I seem to use way more energy than other people around me. Perhaps I have a bad AC, or my insulation is particularly bad.

Or perhaps you are running too many always-on IoT devices :-) SCNR

philipov 8 years ago | | |

If the established players are all interested in siphoning that data, who will fund the development of such technology?

beat 8 years ago |

The problem is a lot of these world-changing technologies seem inevitable only in hindsight. Read decades of science fiction before the '90s, and nobody predicted the idea of everyone carrying a personal phone with them at all times. Much less connecting it to a global data network.

These things always look inevitable in hindsight. But it takes some real cleverness to get them in foresight.

redial 8 years ago | |

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

- Nikola Tesla, 1926.

https://kottke.org/18/04/nikola-tesla-predicted-the-smartpho...

zerostar07 8 years ago | | |

to be fair that was not science fiction

icebraining 8 years ago | |

Not only were personal wireless communications predicted, but also that we'd be absorbed by them in social situations!

https://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I00006GHuH4c0Ojo

ilkan 8 years ago | |

Dick Tracy in the 40's Edit: Star Trek communicators, 1960's

beat 8 years ago | | |

Star Trek communicators seem a lot more like walkie-talkies than phones.

edit: Note that only active duty Starfleet personnel seem to carry communicators. Civilians do not.

Noos 8 years ago |

I don't know about this. I think they can be useless, useful, and terrifying all at the same time. I walked into my local petco one day and saw these:

https://www.glofish.com

Useless, all that technology expressing itself in making glowing fish. The tech behind it however is incredibly useful. But wow, the existential dread watching them swim around under a black light was considerable.

Or on the other shelves, looking and seeing dog or cat "calming collars" that use pheromones tailored specifically for individual species. I mean, its funny at how useless and useful it is at the same time. Is your dog a worrywart? Use pheromones to make him stress free! But you wonder some day if some bright tech baron will start to make human calming collars, or bracelets, or what have you...

Maybe not big tech per se, but the writer of this article might have a failure of imagination if they only see the uselessness.

swalsh 8 years ago |

This is dense, I think there are a few threads of reason though. The exaggeration in marketing common in tech is quite tumultuous. The AI behind duplex is a staggering technical achievement, and really is a small whistle at how AI is going to start to change some fundamental aspects of society. To say AI is not going to be a fundamental change to our literal society in the very near future is naive. But I can understand how the trivialness of the use case is playing down the real achievement here.

I do think though that AI is the last "fundamental" change information technologies will bring though. From here out, the future is in the convergence of other hard sciences with advanced IT. Each "Big thing" has been a fundamental building block. By themselves small, but they get significant as they combine.

markatkinson 8 years ago |

I feel like more than half the earths population already talks in 'preordained cliches'.

tim333 8 years ago |

He cites social media as "These things have changed the world" and rubbishes Google Duplex. But back when they started Twitter and the like seemed a bit of a joke but increased in scope. And AI like Duplex will do so too. The fact that AI is a bit rubbish in some ways just now doesn't mean it won't change the world shortly.

013a 8 years ago |

This is only one small part of the article, but: I think the revolution in Duplex isn't about letting customers use it to schedule appointments and stuff. I think its much more significant from the perspective of using it as a way to improve Google's data for themselves. They mentioned they're going to use it soon to improve the accuracy of their business open/close times. Imagine other applications; asking businesses how busy it is right now, confirming road closures with municipal governments, etc.

Also imagine it opened up on Google Cloud, in a product similar to AWS Connect.

Finally, imagine this: They've always had a huge amount of data for human voices to train their AI models. Here's one more; being able to call anyone on the planet and get them talking in a way that is natural, then using the data on the other end of the phone to further train the accuracy of the voices they use. Kind of like ReCaptcha, but for voices.

zrobotics 8 years ago | |

Great, so Google can get even more data. Huzzah!? Why is that a good thing, and what benefit does it provide to consumers? The only thing you mentioned that has even marginal benefit to the public is better search data, and I get less and less convinced that this will happen. I may be an outlier, but I have found Google search less useful in the past year, unless I go through steps to avoid personalization. Rather than search the part # that I requested, it just thinks I want to go to digikey.

And dear God, spam calls are already bad enough, why do we want to make them even more realistic? I fail to see even one application where I would prefer to talk to a more realistic robot.

lmm 8 years ago |

The big picture innovations take longer and arrive slower, but the small, life-enhancing improvements deliver so smoothly and consistently that you don't notice until they're taken away. It's only when you have to use a 5-year-old phone or application that you realise how much worse things were back then.

mrob 8 years ago | |

I use a 6 year old phone. It has a third party extra thick battery and a microSD card slot. It does the core functions of a phone just as well as a modern one (voice call, SMS, clock, calculator, flashlight, music player). The camera is worse, but if I cared about quality I'd use a standalone camera. As for apps/Internet, it's roughly the same as modern phones: a whole lot of barely usable garbage only suitable for emergency use when you don't have access to a desktop. It seems to me that any modern phone would be a downgrade.

Drakim 8 years ago | | |

I saw a funny cloud today, I took a picture of it. I usually don't carry an extra standalone camera with me all day just for moments like that.

I can also google up information about light-bulbs when I'm standing at the store wondering if I should get X or Y. Or if some product doesn't specify if it's gluten free or not and the ingredients look a little iffy.

There are plenty of tiny improvements. It doesn't revolutionize my life, but having my old Nokia would definitely be a downgrade.

SiempreViernes 8 years ago | |

Five years ago I had a phone with buttons and rarely had to stop the impulse of trowing it into a wall because google kept installing updates to apps I don't want and can't do more than factory reset.

Sure, I didn't have a fancy app to look at the timetable for the bus, but there was a wap-page I could use and frankly the apps are about as frustrating but now because touch interactions so often go wrong without real buttons.

And I use both vim and ssh daily, rarely wishing I had an new app to replace them with.

Yetanfou 8 years ago | | |

Swap out the stock distribution - I'm assuming Android here - for something like AOSP, leave off the Google-specific bits (i.e. do not install 'gapps' or anything which depends on it, install the mock-google-bits instead if you want to run something which depends on Google play services. Use F-Droid instead of the Google play store. Voila, a phone which does not do silly updates behind your back, does not install apps you do not want and which should last for years and years - mine is about 7.5 years old now.

jeffreyrogers 8 years ago |

Regardless of whether big tech is doing anything useful it's obvious that we have fewer important innovations now than in the period around the late 19th, early 20th century when we got: electricity, electric motors, dynamite, phones, cars, concrete, planes, tractors, radio, plastic, assembly lines and modern forms of business organization. If we go a little further into the 20th century we get nuclear power and the transistor.

I don't think we'll see another time period like that. But that's not really a bad thing. You can only discover really important things once and then they eventually become part of everyday life. A more interesting question is how to sustain our standard of living when we can no longer expect high economic growth from new innovations.

squarefoot 8 years ago |

To me many products are just the result of management asking engineers to apply the company IP to make something that can be sold. The market is saturated in every niche with a huge load of products compared to the number of potential buyers, so they have to act creatively in the hope one day they make a killer gimmick. Example: if IoT and AI are the new words, then everything must be connected and/or exhibit human-like intelligence, at the risk of developing junk product with no actual usefulness, like shoes asking politely the user if they can twit in real time how much his feet stink after a long walk. But again that is rather the result of management looking for money in every possible way than brilliant minds attempting to solve vital problems.

bmans94 8 years ago |

My problem with the innovations mentioned in the article lie mainly in the ‘predictive text’ emails from the google presentation. Such a small, minutely helpful feature, and yet like the author mentions could lead to an even more technologically led “groupthink” society, where machines determine our current cliches, which no one will break from. Anyways, I get that big innovations really come as several small innovations, but who out there is imagining the future of this technology, as some were imagining the smartphone or tablet a decade before it’s advent? I have yet to read anything by anyone who has a vision for the next big AI innovation, no matter how moonshot-y

imgabe 8 years ago |

And even if you can easily think of a scenario, would there not be something ethically questionable about doing so, if the person at the other end had no idea who or what they were talking to?

Generally I consider something ethically questionable when a person is harmed in some way. Can someone explain how a receptionist might be harmed by unknowingly booking an appointment with a robot instead of a person? The real person shows up. The business gets an appointment. The receptionist does their job. Where does the ethical question come in?

Hydraulix989 8 years ago | |

Deception is a form of harm.

imgabe 8 years ago | | |

So children are harmed by believing in Santa Claus? If you politely tell someone you enjoyed their cooking even if it wasn't to your taste, you've harmed them?

Context matters. Deception, in and of itself, is not inherently harmful.

It makes literally 0 difference in the life of the person booking the appointment if it's a robot or a human telling them the desired time and date.

nmeofthestate 8 years ago |

>might Duplex be a grim portal into a future in which high-flyers get digital “assistants” to do their chores

High flyers = people that own an Android phone and get haircuts.

QueensGambit 8 years ago |

Its a good thing and that's how i should be. Startups have 1% chance of success and probably less when it reaches IPO. If big tech with deep pockets have far better shot (say 50%), then the level playing field would slip further and further away from startups. Innovation would stop and we will go back to the era of Microsoft/Oracle killing companies like Netscape.

gymshoes 8 years ago |

Tech inspires science fiction and science fiction inspires tech.

Although we won't ever have a time machine that travels backwards in time, there are a lot of commonplace things that were once science fiction.

triviatise 8 years ago |

Self driving cars

Tesla electric cars and electric car infrastructure

The sharing economy where we rent instead of buy things hopefully will stop or at least slow our rabid consumption

These are huge changes in the way we will live our lives.

M_Bakhtiari 8 years ago |

>I thought about a vision of the near future in which half the human race will converse in preordained cliches.

Maybe that's how the "Darmok and Jalad" language came about.

ape4 8 years ago |

Duplex has the possibility of being huge. Think of how many boring / transactional phone calls are made each day.

fortythirteen 8 years ago |

> Every now and again, at some huge auditorium, a senior staff member at one of the big firms based in northern California – ordinarily a man...

Absolutely irrelevant to the topic. I already ignore the hype, but I think I'll also ignore this author's hyperbole.

IshKebab 8 years ago |

This is just pointless pessimistic ranting.

barry-cotter 8 years ago |

It’s a journalist with an opinion on something he has no expertise in. I recommend not reading it. He doesn’t understand that the toy apps that are barely usable by enthusiasts today improve rapidly until using them is mundane and normal. There’s a pg essay on how the best startups are the ones where people think it’s a toy or a feature that’s relevant.

Don’t read the article.

travis_brooks 8 years ago | |

I agree! Hy Brasil is not sinking, ignore the panic mongers, there are others with more experience in these matters than you... https://youtu.be/qJh6EQ5gv7g

barry-cotter 8 years ago | | |

For anyone else who didn’t get the reference that was sarcasm.

http://www.subzin.com/quotes/M106664b34/Erik+the+Viking/Hy-B....

On a non-sarcastic note the toy that’s barely usable by hobbyists is the early adopter segment, after the innovators. There’s a reasonable explanation at businessdictionary.

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/early-adopters....