Keeping it real in the age of artificial intelligence

Amid technology-focused hype cycles, the job of human-centred practitioners is to remind everyone: the main reason people use technology is to enhance our connections with other humans in the real world.

The current crop of technologies that are being described as artificial intelligence are one such moment. Even though large language models work like a big version of autocorrect (to simplify somewhat), the fact that they have been described as intelligence has led some people to think they can become a replacement for human connection.

I am becoming more sceptical as I get older

I need to be mindful of my attitude towards technology as I become older. It’s about that Douglas Adams quote:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I got started in my career by making websites, which definitely felt new and exciting and revolutionary. Many technological advances over the 2000s and 2010s grabbed me.

Since I turned 35, most new technological developments have indeed seemed against that natural order of things to me. I have seen technologies like the metaverse, NFTs, cryptocurrencies and other web3 ideas come onto the scene.

I struggled to understand why I was meant to be interested in them. So the fact that they disappeared more quickly than they arrived reassured me that I wasn’t living out the Douglas Adams quote for real.

Artificial intelligence seems to be sticking around

Artificial intelligence, however, poses more of a challenge to my position. Since it seems to be sticking around, I might be turning into a 2020s version of one of those sceptics of the early days of the world wide web, who I used to find tedious.

I am grappling to understand the role large language models can play in my life given my view of technology — that it should enhance human connections rather than seek to replace them.

Marco Rogers collected some examples of artificial intelligence hype. He thought these were driven by a desire among some people to answer the question: “What if you didn’t need other humans in order to be successful?”

…it’s a reaction to a dynamic that writers are very familiar with and frustrated by. It’s very hard to get your work seen and published. Because other humans get to decide to pick it up or to discard it. And other people’s judgment seems arbitrary and capricious.

Some technology seeks to replace human connection

I have seen some really experienced people describing how they are using some artificial intelligence tools as a sort of “second brain”.

I recognise the impulse. I have felt the fear of sharing half-baked ideas with other people. I’m sure that when I was younger I would have jumped at the chance to use technology to push my ideas forward rather than bouncing them off other people.

“What if my idea is ridiculed? What if it is rejected?”

But the artificial intelligence hype seems to go beyond just avoiding relying on humans to be successful. It even seems to suggest you shouldn’t need other humans to be even be happy.

The idea that we may want to entirely replace human interactions seems central to many new technology ideas.

For example, Mark Zuckerberg recently spoke about Facebook–Meta’s plan to develop chatbots to “supplement” your real life friends.

Another example is Friend, a pendant that listens to you talking and sends you text messages in response. The YouTube trailer for Friend has attracted many comments remarking on the dystopian nature of the idea. I can’t imagine how empty it would make me feel to use this thing.

But human connection is the point of technology

I get it. I’m an introvert as well. When I’m tired, I want to avoid conversation. In those moments, I think the self-service checkout is history’s greatest invention.

But avoiding human interaction is like having an unhealthy diet. The shortcut may provide pleasure or convenience in the moment. But if you keep at it, you end up becoming unwell.

Interacting with people is like eating your greens. It is occasionally a bitter experience. But it puts you in better shape in the long run.

As Jim Nielsen said: “it’s humans all the way down”.

Crypto failed because its desire was to remove humans. Its biggest failure — or was it a feature? — was that when the technology went awry and you needed somebody to step in, there was nobody.

Ultimately, we all want to appeal to another human to be seen and understood — not to a machine running a model.

Interacting with each other is the whole point.

In a more recent post, he wrote about how the original joy of the web was that you could come across a piece of writing and feel a connection with someone. Now we are asked to construct a prompt in exchange for machine-generated slop that gives you no connection whatsoever.

As Curtis Smith said:

Humans are losing our humanity. We use avatars or filters on our photos so we don’t even look like ourselves. We use AI to write things for us, so we don’t express ourselves. We use auto tune, so no one sings off pitch in the slightest. I don’t know where this leads, but I’m not digging it

Katalin Bártfai-Walcott wrote about the perspective of a 97-year-old who has lived through every technological innovation since the 1950s.

“…I can tell you, none of them started with the question: ‘What does the human need?’ They all started with: ‘How do we make this faster?’ Or cheaper. Or more trackable. Or less likely to require Ted from Records.”

…“We optimized everything,” he said. “The forms, the processes, the outcomes. But we never optimized the human experience. Because the system was never really built for us.”

Learning lessons from mobile apps

Those pushing artificial intelligence technologies urgently need to heed the lessons from last decade’s main innovation — mobile apps.

A Center for Human Technology study published in 2018 analysed the responses of 200,000 iPhone users. It discovered which apps made people feel happy or unhappy, and how much time they spent in each app.

The apps that made people the most unhappy were dating apps, social media, and addictive games.

Among the apps that made people happy were apps dedicated to mental health, weather apps and Google Calendar.

It was also found that the more time people spend in an app, the less happy they become.

The only app that made people happier if they spent more time in it was Google Maps.

In other words, the apps that make people happy are either dedicated to improving mental health, or about helping people get out there in the real world and do real things: weather, maps and calendars.

Enhance the human experience

The lessons are clear. Technology needs to help us do real things in the real world with real people.

The artificial intelligence innovations that will become most valuable will be the ones that seek to enhance human experience, not replace it.

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