{"id":7400,"date":"2016-10-05T11:21:43","date_gmt":"2016-10-05T15:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7400"},"modified":"2016-10-05T12:01:04","modified_gmt":"2016-10-05T16:01:04","slug":"terms-of-endearment-computer-generated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7400","title":{"rendered":"Terms of endearment, computer-generated"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAs for living,\u201d wrote the French symbolist Auguste Villiers de l\u2019Isle-Adam in his 1890 play Ax\u00ebl<\/a>, \u201cour servants will do that for us.\u201d Silicon Valley seems intent on giving the infamous remark a new, digital spin: \u201cAs for living, our computers will do that for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The latest evidence is Allo, the new Google messaging app that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to generate replies on a user\u2019s behalf. \u201cIf your friend sends you a photo of their pet,\u201d Google explained<\/a> when it launched the software two weeks ago, Allo\u2019s \u201csmart reply\u201d feature will suggest a suitable response, such as \u201caww cute!\u201d Tap it, and you\u2019re done.<\/p>\n

As Evan Selinger and Brett Frischmann pointed out<\/a>, it\u2019s like an autopilot for friendship.<\/p>\n

The smart-reply system, which is built into<\/a> the Pixel phones Google introduced<\/a> yesterday, has been in the works for a while. Back in 2012, the company filed for a patent<\/a> on the \u201cautomated generation of suggestions for personalized reactions in a social network.\u201d In the application, Google pointed to birthdays and anniversaries as occasions when a person might want a machine to compose a congratulatory message to send to a friend. What with juggling Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, who has time to pen a personal note anymore?<\/p>\n

Some\u00a0might point to Allo as yet another example of the trivialization<\/a> of innovation. Now that the smartphone has become our all-purpose mediator of existence, Google is in a competitive war with rivals like Facebook, Apple, and Amazon to corner the market on human attention and agency. No feature is too trifling to exploit as a potential advantage.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s something deeper going on here. Allo\u2019s message-generation algorithm reveals, in its own small way, the strange view of personal relations that seems to hold sway in Silicon Valley. To the entrepreneurs and coders who run today\u2019s massive social networks, our conversations are data streams. They can be tracked, parsed, and ultimately automated to enhance efficiency and remove kinks from the system.<\/p>\n

We already use computers to converse, so the next logical step, in this view, is to use software to conduct the conversations themselves. By relying on an AI to compose our messages, we can optimize our productivity in managing our relationships. Call it the industrialization of affiliation.<\/p>\n

Last year, in an online question-and-answer session, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said<\/a> that he thinks \u201cthere is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about.\u201d Stripped to our essence, we humans are just aggregations of data, and it\u2019s only a matter of time before information scientists discern the statistical pattern that defines our beings. At that point, we\u2019ll all be perfectly programmable.<\/p>\n

I expect most people would find such a pinched view of the human condition off-putting, if not repulsive. But as we continue to adapt to the digital processing of our thoughts and words, we may find ourselves embracing, without really thinking about it, the Silicon Valley ethos. We already consider\u00a0it normal\u00a0to respond to a friend\u2019s message or photo with a quick click on a like button. Is it really such a leap to let a computer dash off a reply?<\/p>\n

The German sociologist Theodor Adorno, in his prescient 1951 book Minima Moralia<\/em>, warned of the dangers of allowing the values of the business world\u00a0to creep into our personal lives. Behind the push to make communication more streamlined and efficient, he wrote<\/a>, lies \u201can ideology for treating people as things.\u201d Allo and its myriad<\/a> kin<\/a> would seem to bear out Adorno\u2019s fears.<\/p>\n

In its patent application, Google wrote that an \u201cunstated protocol for behavior\u201d often governs conversations between friends. What to a programmer might look like a formal protocol is actually something fuzzier yet much\u00a0more meaningful: an expression of kindness, affection, care.\u00a0It will be interesting to see whether we’ll come to draw a line between\u00a0artificial intelligence and artificial emotion, or just take\u00a0them as a package deal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAs for living,\u201d wrote the French symbolist Auguste Villiers de l\u2019Isle-Adam in his 1890 play Ax\u00ebl, \u201cour servants will do that for us.\u201d Silicon Valley seems intent on giving the infamous remark a new, digital spin: \u201cAs for living, our computers will do that for us.\u201d The latest evidence is Allo, the new Google messaging […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7400"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7409,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7400\/revisions\/7409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}