Things Are Getting Really Weird
#NEWSLETTER | While the cost of eggs has tripled & Americans are just trying to get by, corporate America has gone all in on *AI-ing* at the expense of our nerves. But it won't be like that for long.
AI will transform our lives in ways impossible to fully imagine right now. But who has the time or energy to consider a bright shiny AI future anyway (or a dystopian horizon if you are a glass-half-empty kind of person) when the cost of eggs has tripled and day-to-day life is a struggle?
That said, corporate America is having a ball. And as companies do their AI thang it’s looking more like a funky chicken dance than a serious go at saving the world. And we are all being forced to watch them flail (you are welcome 👇).
AI is Consuming Corporate America
Professor Scott Galloway recently shared a graphic illustrating the increase in Fortune 500 companies noting AI on their earnings calls. The current tally is represents roughly a 20000% increase over 10 years.
Unfortunately this means we all have to endure corporate PR students and technology failures with a hope that the gaffes are more laughable than damaging (this humorous blog post from an annoyed data scientist is another, um, *take* on the nonsense)
But don’t let the nonsense fool you, this period of insanity won’t last long, so the general public should take the opportunity to get up to speed.
What Crazy Looks Like Now
McDonalds went all in on using AI at its drive throughs and found chaos ensued. “Apparently” the tool “couldn’t “interpret different accents and dialects” (in case you were wondering there are at least 30 in the US… seems an obvious issue to work through before deploying an dialect challenged AI…). There was also the women who had more than $200 worth of chicken nuggets added to her order or the alleged ice cream served with bacon. Do we think that was mentioned on the McDonald’s earning call?
A chatbot running for mayor. A man in Wyoming filed paperwork for a chatbot to run for mayor. He said he would serve as a “meat avatar” (say, what?) but let the chatbot make all of the decisions. Hahaha, right? Well, we might be laughing in a decade…and even might welcome it considering the appalling tenure of some of the nation’s mayors (Oakland, anyone?)
You sound angry, said no Softbank customer service rep. If you’ve ever spent what feels like hours waiting to talk to a customer service representative over the phone (let alone being forced to press zero furiously to actually connect to a human) then you’re not going to be anymore pleased to learn about Softbank’s “Emotion Cancelling Voice Conversion Engine.” The Tokyo-based company has dreamed up this dystopian invention where any anger in one’s voice is cancelled out and rendered more neutral for the customer service team on the other end.
Researchers analyzed Friends and Big Bang Theory to learn sarcasm. Not sure I’m ready to go tête-à-tête with a bot on the sarcasm front. But alas a professor at the University of Groningen speech technology lab has been teaching AI this very thing. As I’ve written about before emotional AI and voice detection is no joke and has the capacity to amplify the influence this technology has over kids. So it’s one to keep on the radar…
What to Keep in Mind…
There are a few things I’m considering right now when reading these stories:
Let’s not be too okay serving as corporate collateral damage. It’s all fun and games until we need to spend precious time sorting out that $200 chicken nugget tab. If AI experimentation by corporate America is going to burden us all we shouldn’t accept these escapades so easily.
Data fuels even the ridiculous. Don’t be distracted from remembering that all of these *experiments* are fueled by our data. Before, during, and after. And we will continue to see epic data breaches (anyone get the Ticketmaster email this week?) so keep data savvy and aware.
It’s summer, embrace IRL. To center us along this journey we need to remember what makes us human and embrace it…so go run along a beach with your kids.
Flex those critical thinking skills. Between ridiculous AI fails there are opportunities to work that critical thinking muscle. Specifically, as we approach the presidential elections don’t fall prey to the suggestion that disinformation is afoot and some supreme truth oracle can fix it. Instead work with your family to consume as much information as you can, and talk frequently about what you find. Make it fun too and suggest each family member seek out primary source data and then discuss.
Happy start of Summer!