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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

There is some dystopian crud in here in just the few minutes I've watched.

- Google will write your emails for you so you don't have to. Is this Gmail user writing me an email or is Google? I no longer know.

- Google Assistant can now impose Google's parenting values on your kids by making them say please. Combine with the mandatory Chromebooks in my school district for full-on indoctrination from childhood.

I am so uncomfortable with this. All the people cheering for it is even worse.

EDIT: HOLY CRUD, they're unleashing their AI to call and harass people on the phone.

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I'm not sure I agree 100% with what you said, but I get the sentiment. If someone is worried about a dystopian crud, why would they purchase a Google Home or use the Google Assistant? Also, the parenting values I thought was nice, and optional to turn it on.

I can't escape it when Google's implementing their AI to call and message other people. They just demonstrated Google's AI calling and trying to converse with unsuspecting users who aren't even notified they're talking to Google.

What's the issue/reason you see with Google Assistant calling to make a reservation for a business? Why do you need to avoid it?

Not saying I agree with the parent but it's not like Google is going to call it quits here and not try to improve the tech to use in more situations.

Maybe it'll work out well.. Maybe not.

But right now, people being called have an expectation of talking to a person, and this shifts that expectation without the business opting-in to the change.

That's going to be frustrating to some businesses, and there may well be legal issues in some areas.

It's creepy because it's pretending to be people. Phone trees suck, and now a phone tree is calling you and we don't expect phone trees to call us. Now you have to wonder when you get a call wether you are talking to a person or a robot. At the minimum they should announce themselves.

Also, they recorded this call and are using it for their internal dataset and also sharing it publicly with hundreds of thousands of people. Should the recipient be informed of this data collection, much less have a say in it?

Either the calls given in the example were staged, permission was solicited outside the bounds of this call, or they did it outside of California's jurisdiction. Recording calls without both parties' consent in California is illegal.

If you can't tell, does it matter?

The reason people don't like phone trees is not because they are robots. Rather, because they often make it difficult to get the help you need or reach the right department. If a live human read the script of a phone tree to you it would be equally (more?) infuriating.

If I called a companies number and got a conversational bot masquerading as a person instead of a phone tree, that would be a dramatic improvement.

Yes. Because if I'm having a bad day and I'm rude to the caller (not knowing it's a machine), I will feel guilt afterwards. The guilt will be unnecessary, because no human was offended.

That may be a trivial case, but more generally our social contract is that we owe a duty of politeness and consideration to fellow humans. When you're interacting with another human, a big part of your brain is actively engaged in following social norms. By masquerading as human, machines co-opt this part of your brain and extract a duty that they don't deserve.

I think every machine caller should be required to identify itself as such. Restaurants will still be happy to take reservations from them. If one calls me to sell me something, I can tell it where to go without any guilt.

The problem with phone trees is not that they suck at getting you to the right department, it's that the options required mostly aren't there. It's that it makes it soooo cheap for the company implementing the phone tree to waste your time just to improve the metrics of some low-level idiot manager at the company.

Voice will make this a LOT worse, not better.

If the people are worried about police surveillance, why would they purchase CCTV cameras and data centres?

CCTV cameras and the data they collect are generally under the control of the people who purchase and run them (short of a court order) - Google-connected bits, not so much.

To be honest Gmail auto-replies have been amazingly on point for me. The reply options they give me in quick, transactional emails are generally _exactly_ the sort of reply I would have typed out, so they save me a lot of time.

Until you train yourself to respond with such limited set of pre-baked answers to everything!

We don't know each other (I don't think!), but trust me, no one who knows me would believe you if you said I'm at risk of that!

My comment does not implicate that you as a single person necessary have to succumb to this, at least immediately, or that you are not a good person in any way. By you, I implied every person using that technology over time, including me, you, and everyone else. Short-term, we might control this, but over time it is inevitable. Something that is done over and over again becomes automatic. That's called training and conditioning :)

You can imagine a feedback loop though:

Some people use Gmail auto-replies more > Other people therefore receive emails in the style of these auto-replies > These other people then start manually sending emails according to this style > More people then become happier using auto-reply (since it produces replies in a style they've come to expect)

In this way, an auto-reply feature, even if used by only a subset of the population would start to move language trends.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with this, I don't know. But there is a feedback loop there, which means there's a blurrier line than we'd like between "this AI algorithm does what I'd expect" to "my expectations have become shaped by AI algorithms."

This happened to Google Translate. They were scouring the web looking for bilingual corpuses to ingest and they found… texts translated by Google Translate. Things got funky and they had to stop.

The majority cheers for parental control. Having control over a child's laptop comes as psychologically obvious to most parents.

Consider the audience. 20-something and childless, with an underdeveloped sense of right and wrong, which is what has led to so many problems in the tech arena today.

Get some context, FFS. These are seem close to "dystopian crud" because they are new technology.

I'm sure that people seeing a hypothetical AT&T I/O 1980 would think that automated telephone attendants were the end to human communication, commercial internet would ruin good letter writing and therefore society, and fax machines would be used as another form of government control. Imaginary dystopian futures never happen, but people keep imagining new ones.

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