The Hilarious Chaos of Surrendering Your Life to an AI Assistant

“What Happens When You Turn Your Life Over to an AI Assistant?”

“We recharge overworked lab mice by putting them in a tiny VR headset and tricking their brains into thinking they’ve hopped on a plane to the Bahamas. We fine-tune the performance of athletes by feeding them personalized diets based on their biometric data. What difference does it make if we’re crafting a personality for a box that talks back to you?” As per an interesting take on AI in Wired’s recent podcast ‘Uncanny Valley.’

This piece focuses on the surreal future we’re fumbling into, where we hand out customized diets to athletes based on their biometric data or trick lab mice into a neurologically simulated vacation. Most notably, it delves into the technical, ethical, and creative implications sparked by the development of a personality for that chatty box sitting on your table, also known as AI-powered voice assistants.

Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant- aren’t they just mechanical embodiments of coding brilliance? They don’t watch soap operas or have existential crises, they’re engineered to respond and assist. However, their programmers’ incessant bid to humanize them often leaves an uncanny aftertaste. Wire’s podcast episode 9 beautifully encapsulates this ‘uncanny valley,’ a phenomenon wherein humanoid objects bereft of lifelike nuances strike an eerie chord.

Artificial Intelligence, with its sprouting branches like Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, is rapidly pervading our lives. But should we just nod and welcome these disembodied voices into our daily routines or should we probe further? This blog post explores the fantastic, frightening, and sometimes just outright odd landscape of AI assistants. Are they just glorified search engines or a cybernetic imposition of human idiosyncrasies?

Reality check – crafting a personality for a voice assistant is a tall order. It involves juggling multiple factors, including linguistic traits, tonality, cultural sensitivities, and user demographics. God forbid, the talking box has a regional accent or rhythmic tone that doesn’t sit well with you!

Ultimately, the journey to humanize voice assistants can sometimes feel like wandering in an algorithmic maze. Are these attempts at creating believable personages helpful, or do they just create a layer of confusion between humans and machines?

The blog certainly isn’t dictating for or against the uncanny valley of AI assistants, credit to Wired. Instead, it’s merely pointing out the surreality of it all. The next time you ask your voice assistant to set a reminder or read you the news, remember, you’re essentially conversing with a carefully coded persona that lacks human quirks and fallacies. And that, indeed, is a peculiar reality to exist in.

Read the original article here: https://www.wired.com/story/uncanny-valley-podcast-9-ai-assistants/