Wacky Jabber (2022)

As someone who learned a foreign language as an adult, I really enjoyed this.

And, I think it represents two important issues with the technology industry:

1. the status of information provided by computers is usually missing

2. there is a complete unwillingness to return negative results

By #1 I mean that you ask a computer a question, whether it be Google, an AI or probably any other service, and you get an answer.

What you don't get:

• feedback on whether the question was clear or nonsense

• whether the answer is know to be true, is a best guess, or is probably nonsense

• whether the answer is copyrighted or protected in some other way

By #2 I mean that where in many cases a human would say:

• I didn't understand

• I understood but don't know the answer

• I have some ideas but am not sure how useful they are

• I tried to get an answer but the library was closed

Computers just supply an answer in a vacuum, even if any observer could instantly tell that the answer is garbage

Example #1: I ask Alexa to play "playlist late Beatles" and it plays something completely different, instead of saying "could you come closer and repeat the question" or "there's a lot of background noise, I couldn't understand"

I presume that Amazon is afraid that if they gave these kinds of answers it would become blindingly obvious how unreliable their service is. Providing cheerful-but-wrong responses pushes the blame onto the user: "your question wasn't clear enough".

Example #2: Apple products have an increasing tendency to refuse to display any kind of error message. It's as if want to inspire confidence, and saying "iCloud Synchronization failed" would break that. Better to just have random delays and forums filled with complaining users.

Example #3: AI has proven to be extremely useful, but since the status of the results is completely missing one is handicapped from using them in the real world:

• is this answer copyrighted

• is it completely wrong

• was your question incomprehensible?