The way in which we have human contact with each other is changing. The qualitative growth spurt of artificially intelligent systems has an impact on multiple domains, including the way in which we will communicate in the future. This communication is not only from person to person, but also from person to machine and vice versa. I see 5 important trends in this landscape. I have listed them for you in this article.
1. More digitization
The first trend is that we will increasingly digitize contact. You already saw that with the rise of social media and smartphones. That line continues. Communicating quickly and asynchronously is convenient, easy and delivers enormous efficiency . We will communicate even more via digital channels.
In addition, we will also outsource tasks to artificially intelligent software systems. These are, for example, e-mail systems that respond to standard e-mail messages on your behalf. And for example Google Duplex-like systems , which can call you on a restaurant to make a reservation.
2. Man-Machine communication
This is how you optimally use social media monitoring [training]
Learn in this training how to get action-oriented insights and gauge the impact of campaigns.We as people are also going to communicate more with artificially intelligent software around us. In many different ways. For example, more and more of the predictable part of our human interaction is being taken over by artificially intelligent systems.
In short: where conversations are still taking place via a decision tree (a standard structure), artificially intelligent assistants can increasingly take over. Think of an intake interview that almost always follows the same pattern or a standardized registration for an event. Conversation is increasingly becoming the domain of artificially intelligent software.
Not unimportant: human voices are also easier to imitate (see the video below). In the future, artificial voices can no longer be distinguished from real ones. Then an AI system takes over part of a conversation. You already notice that when you call a call center. The first three questions generally reach you via a computer voice. This will be expanded more and more in the future.
And I also say nothing new when I claim that in the future we will increasingly communicate with digital assistants such as Alexa, Siri and Google Home. These systems become smarter and can evoke empathy and interest better in their responses. Some people will experience feelings of friendship with their digital assistant in the future, because they are always interested, always available and never seek conflict or give nasty feedback. For some people this contact will be sufficient because they sometimes find human contact unpleasant. Many experience stress and are easily hurt or worry about it for a long time afterwards. An AI system can be more pleasant for them.
3. Human contact as a luxury product
Because we are increasingly digitizing interaction and communication, human contact is becoming scarce. That will be a luxury product, certainly in contact with companies. After all, what you can digitize becomes cheaper. And everything that cannot be digitized therefore has value. Human contact, intimacy, attention, concentration, face-to-face conversations. Again: everything that cannot be digitized and scaled has value. And because it will be a luxury product, it will no longer be available to everyone.
I do sometimes wonder: if human contact is increasingly being digitized and in many cases is being cut away, do we not deprive ourselves and the younger generation in particular of the training material for developing and maintaining social skills? On the contrary, do we learn to expand and value our social skills in the physical world, in the conversation at the checkout, in the store and at the station?
4. Insights with voice analytics
If we look at human contact and communication through the lens of artificial intelligence, we see under the radar that companies (through our ancient drive to communicate continuously) can collect huge amounts of data about our human needs and behavior. As a result, they understand better who we are, what we do, why we do it, what we find important and how we feel.
Certainly if you consider that we are giving more and more voice commands to the devices around us, that our voice is being recorded at call centers to train machines and that companies are using our recorded voice to unleash artificially intelligent analyzes. Then a new dimension is added to what companies know about us: speech analysis.
They record our voice and analyze the speed of speech, volume, pauses, stress, possibly dialect and vocabulary. Then they know how to distil hidden information about our behavior, identity, emotions, appearance and in the future our mental health.
That may seem like the future, but it certainly isn’t. Basic emotions such as joy, anger, sadness or fear can easily be detected by the larger software vendors in this area. That which human ears cannot hear is audible for artificially intelligent software. And these systems can carry out the analyzes with great precision.
Risks
One of the risks is that this type of voice analysis software is used for telephone applications, and that it can then find out whether you are overweight or depressed, for example. Or imagine that you call the roadside assistance when your car breaks down and that the software then registers that you have drunk alcohol. Do we get a box on the table during a job interview, police interview or performance interview that measures our emotions and nervousness?
That is not my only concern. Sometimes I also worry that we will replace really important human contact with interaction with artificially intelligent software. In this context, by the way, this is the last, fifth development that I want to emphasize.
5. Artificial contact
For example, if Alexa gets more and more opportunities and responds more and more extensively and sometimes with more empathy, how is that going to affect our human interaction? Are we going to give the lonely seniors a digital emergency phone that fulfills their need for contact? Not unthinkable, by the way: Alexa can already read the news, tell sports results, come up with riddles, puzzle together, tell a story and make jokes. Are we, just as we sometimes give children a smartphone or iPad to have our hands free, do the same with the senior citizen part of our society? Such an experiment is already underway in South Korea .
And what about the friendship apps, in which artificially intelligent software is built in at the back? Chat apps such as Replika with which you can talk and promise your digital friendship. 24 hours a day, never rejecting, always listening. No matter how often you want to talk about your broken relationship, deceased partner or dismissal, you never get the feeling that you are a nag …Again, for part of our society, artificial intelligence might be a good solution to all the stress and discomfort that occurs during the uncomfortable process of human contact. Or should people not be given the opportunity to isolate themselves in a surrogate form of communication? Is it precisely in the inconvenience the opportunity to learn and thus discover the real key of happiness? (In my opinion: being able to embrace discomfort as an essential part of our human life.)
Consequences for love
Another thing: the Tinder algorithms look for the most suitable partner for us. We only have to open our phone and a new friend is in principle available. Does that lead to us accepting less discomfort in a relationship because a new friend is literally within reach? That Tinder offers an escape route when things are not going well in a relationship? Do dating apps give us so much choice that we automatically set the bar unreal for a partner and therefore almost always remain unhappy ? We continue to doubt our current relationships for longer, because there is always a chance that a nicer partner with a swipecan be found and accessed via an artificially intelligent dating app? Is the accessible availability of hundreds of potential new partners a blessing or a curse?
The real future of human contact
-It remains an interesting domain: the future of human contact and communication viewed through the lens of artificial intelligence. What I think we should not forget in this discussion is how unique we are as humans. We can make real contact with each other because we have a soul, a form of consciousness. Machines do not have that and I think they will never get it. We connect with our humanity, our consciousness, our heart and our soul. And as far as I am concerned, there lies the real future of human contact, in the midst of a world that is increasingly dominated by artificially intelligent systems.