Talking to Yourself: Deconstructing Chatbots

Scanning is a tool used in foresight to uncover weak signals that herald shifts within different industries, behavioral changes, and other emerging movements that will shape the future. To uncover the types of signals that give way to true breakthroughs, our goal must not simply be breadth of exploration, but also depth of analysis if…

Walking in a Winter INSERT HUMAN CONCEPT HERE

OpenAI, one of the front runners of AI-based text generation, recently made their GPT-3 platform available without waitlist review. Though still in the beta phase, GPT-3 represents a seismic jump forward in the quality of algorithmically generated text. While this might not seem like a huge deal, what must be now realized is how easy…

Developing a Digital Asshole

In this day and age, AI is far too safe. No, I’m not talking about autonomous weapons – those are a real concern – I’m talking about social automation. Organizations and brands are releasing chatbots that are wholesome, kind, polite, accommodating, and completely fucking boring. The problem is that humans aren’t nice all the time. Sometimes…

Half Man, Half Machine, All Centaur

A robot is going to steal your job. AI is only a handful of years away from being smarter than you. The bot uprising is coming to enslave or kill us all. Deep learning is creating code that we can’t understand. The great digital divide is coming. Maybe. Or maybe there is another path forward….

Posthumous AI and the Digital Confessional

Many people are stuck with their eyes fixed on the AI horizon and the believed-to-be-inevitable singularity when humans transcend their physical form into a world of digital bliss. Regardless of which side of the singularity debate you fall on, there are many stepping-stones ahead of this extreme that warrant recognition and discussion not in five…

Talking to Yourself: Deconstructing Chatbots

Scanning is a tool used in foresight to uncover weak signals that herald shifts within different industries, behavioral changes, and other emerging movements that will shape the future. To uncover the types of signals that give way to true breakthroughs, our goal must not simply be breadth of exploration, but also depth of analysis if…

Artificial Innovation: Teaching Computers to Speculate

When most people discuss robotics and artificial intelligence, the discussion of tasks and capabilities tends to lean towards the mundane. How can we teach robots to assemble parts? What kind of a recommendation engine can we build for movie watchers? How can we automate basic household tasks? However, as our understanding of deep learning algorithms…

Nymphomaniac Bigot Bots and Your Artificial Brand

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock or in a Faraday cage for the past week, Microsoft recently created and launched Tay, a chatbot modeled after the conversation of teenage girls, in an attempt to improve on their own customer service AI. Tay was designed to interact with other users on Twitter and a…