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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

> In Google’s view, computers help you get things done — and save you time — by doing things for you. Duplex was the most impressive example — a computer talking on the phone for you

But who is "you"? Obviously, "Duplex" talks on the phone on behalf of people needing an appointment, ie, not everyone. And specifically, not the people tasked with answering the phone, who are duped into thinking they're having a human interaction when in fact they're talking to a machine. It's even worse than that. We're used to telling machines to do things for us. But the people answering Duplex calls are being told what to do, by a machine.

When GPS became popular I had a friend who absolutely refused to get one because, she said, she "wouldn't take instructions from a machine".

At the time, I thought that was the silliest thing ever.

Now I completely get her point.

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It is a silly example, because GPS (or rather, GPS-based nav systems) really, 99% of the time, is better than you at navigating. Also, the technology itself is pretty much purely informative - a map with a path displayed. Voice instructions are optional and something implicitly understood as friendly directions, not orders.

I think most examples of machines telling people what to do still happen in context of paid work, and even there, quite often there's a good reason for that.

Personally, my worry with Duplex is all the abuse - er, growth hacking - that will happen.

99% of the time? Where did you get that?

GPS is better than human only wherever it has better data. Bring it to a place where it has no data and its useless. Meanwhile, humans can easily adopt to find themselves in places they've never been before.

There are good, honest use-cases for this technology though: for example a food ordering platform that needs to gather holiday openings hours for hundreds of thousands og restaurants globally. These restaurants are not tech-savvy: so the only alternative is using people to call them.

I don't disagree. I'm not condemning the whole product right now. I have only two primary worries:

1/ Huge increase in amount of robocall spam.

2/ Given the discussion on the Duplex HN thread, I'm starting to seriously worry people will try and do machine-to-machine communication through Duplex, which is something completely idiotic and wasteful, but might also become easier than doing the right thing (agreeing on an API).

Yeah. These two "philosophies" are merely marketing. Absolute fluff. Does anyone actually believe that google is "obsessed" with giving users back their time, as the article says?

No. Fuck no. Are these guys kidding me? They're obsessed with scooping your data and serving ads to you that are so seamless with your experience that you mistake them for your own decisions. Like google actually wants to help you personally, just out of the goodness of their heart. Who the fuck believes that? These things don't exist for the common good, they exist to increase value for their shareholders. They're like paperclip maximizers in that respect. And you aren't the client. They are not out to make your day happier and healthier and more human or whatever.

Never trust a service that is so integral to your life you can't abstain from it, yet you don't pay for it.

Calling these "philosophies" is probably marketing fluff, but the dichotomy is definitely a real thing in interaction design; interacting with a computer as an agent (querying, dialogs, etc.) vs interacting with a computer as a tool (physically manipulated interfaces). All of the companies cited build products in both categories, but Google (and now increasingly Facebook) definitely skew towards the computer-as-agent applications, and Microsoft and Apple towards computer-as-tool.

At an organizational level I'm inclined to agree with you that the altruism ascribed by the article is far too optimistic, but I would imagine that there are individuals in each company who do think along these lines and try to design along them. (I do, however, find Google "giving users back their time" a bit hilarious as their business model is precisely to get users to spend as much time as possible looking at ads - maybe they free us from mundane tasks so we have more time to browse ads).

True. And Microsoft and Apple are starting to show worrying signs of going to the other side with their own garbage AI "assistants" among other things. Windows 10 supposedly lets you switch it completely off, but it's a very dark pattern. They make it incredibly esoteric and there's no telling if a future strongarm update might just turn it back on and expand its capabilities dramatically without telling you except for some obscure never-read EULA footnote. Give it even more power to gobble up your data for dubious advantages. There's really no way to use Windows 10 satisfactorily without hacking at the registry with a machete.

I do think that individual developers and designers have good human hearts and altruism, but the corporate structure is devised to keep that under control and serve shareholder value above everything.

There was a talk at the latest CCC which likened corporations to very slow, analog AI which responded to stimuli and attempted to increase share value by any means necessary over years and generations. And that this slow, silicon-free AI has already taken over our governments and captured almost all regulation. It was an interesting idea.

I disagree with this particular dichotomy being a real thing. The "computer as an agent" vs. "computer as a tool" interactions are functions of the problem being solved. You'd think that CLI interfaces are tools, but then tools like ls or mysql are clearly agents querying things.

IMO all those companies are on the spectrum of trying to remove user's agency from the problem. That happens when you build your tools to perform ever more complex queries and actions, while simultaneously making the user unable to see all the relevant details and tweak them. That happens when you dumb down your tools. All of the companies mentioned are guilty of it. Apple software is powerful and mostly very well made, but it's continuously dumbing down and locking the user away. Microsoft software used to be "bicycle for the mind", but it too is getting dumbed down every iteration and evolves towards pretty fluff. Google is simply much further down this spectrum, but they're not in a separate category.

It's not about productivity. A big part of productivity is interoperability, and that's not something platforms want to give you. It's all about getting you to use their software, so they'll bait you with pretty interfaces and faux-productivity promises, in hope you pay for it (with money or data).

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