Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone

Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by ecwilson on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @05:18PM (#17025227)

There's a great Black Mirror episode in here somewhere. Imagine five years from now, this tech and Google's Smart Reply (https://blog.google/products/gmail/save-time-with-smart-repl...) have evolved to the point where they can basically write entire email responses or have whole conversations without your input. You could develop elaborate friendships where both parties are just having their AIs converse and aren't truly aware of each other. What would the social implications of that be?

Then a couple years later, the AIs learn how to do business strategy, real-world problem solving, programming, etc and start doing more of our jobs for us. A virus goes around that directs AIs to steal our identities and drain our bank accounts and become autonomous, digital versions of us. The humans have to stage an uprising and use a massive EMP to take back the earth, but destroying all electronics in the process and starting another dark age.

I know that's not how AI really works (it's highly specialized and limited), but I'd definitely watch that movie!

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by halflings on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @02:10AM (#17027709)

> Imagine five years from now, this tech and Google's Smart Reply have evolved to the point where they can basically write entire email responses or have whole conversations without your input.

Ahum. Did you watch the keynote?

"An extension of Gmail’s Smart Reply feature, Smart Compose will suggest complete sentences within the body of an email as you are writing." [0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17331960/google-smart-comp...

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @09:22AM (#17029552)

That's just one step to the story in Avogadro Corp.

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by vertexFarm on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @05:45PM (#17034449)

Jesus. We're really reaching an age in which it's too inconvenient to talk to other people. I gotta wonder if the huge spike in anxiety disorders is somehow connected in there somewhere.

We're not using technology to do fantastic things. We're largely using it to enable fantastic laziness and entertain the habitually bored. I wonder what trivial little convenience would actually spur us to draw the line and say "Enough. Get out of my life." I'm envisioning a device which would access all your most secret sexual urges, but it would allow you to fart while sitting down without lifting one ass cheek. I bet we'd leap at that.

I'm extremely disappointed in us.

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by StavrosK on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @05:32PM (#17025364)

There was a (bad) book written about this, basically how Gmail's AI took over the world by sending email on behalf of people.

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @09:23AM (#17029565)

It was Avogadro Corp. and I didn't find it bad. So to counter your opinion, I give my recommendation here as a light sci-fi with plenty of mocking of Google and Apple included, and AI that - unlike in most stories - makes sense.

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by tomaskafka on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @05:55PM (#17025583)

Yes, this one https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13184491-avogadro-corp

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by ecwilson on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @06:46PM (#17026000)

Oh god that sounds awful. One of the reviews has all the spoilers. It's truly stupid.

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by StavrosK on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @06:54PM (#17026053)

Yeah, it was pretty badly written and rather simplistic. Not recommended, you're probably better off reading the spoilered review.

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by qooleot on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @08:10PM (#17026459)

Are you sure it wasn't Google's AI that wrote it?

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by jeremiem on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @07:37AM (#17029029)

Sounds a bit like "Death Switch", a short story from "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives" where our personal algorithms outlive us.

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Re:Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World ... by oliv__ on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @08:51PM (#17026646)

To be honest, perhaps a temporary self-imposed technological dark age wouldn't be such a terrible thing

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