(2016-04-19) Ohno Bot Capitalism Will Fail

John OhnoBot capitalism will fail. There’s been a lot of hype surrounding chat bots lately. I love bots, and usually I’m all for getting excited about the things I love, but I think the recent hype is very misguided. The reason is that the people contributing to the current hype bubble surrounding bots are not natural persons but corporate persons: they are excited about bots as products.

it’s worth talking about this specific case nevertheless, because with bots, the commercial focus of yuppies and suits is fairly likely to ultimately convince everyone outside the core art-bot community that bots are something worse than useless: that they are supremely uninteresting.

The first thing I’m going to discuss is conversational interfaces.

I am largely unimpressed with conversational interfaces

The thing about conversational interfaces of the latter type is that, by being english-like, the language understood by the interface will never be sufficiently minimal for a non-casual user, and by being ‘entertaining’, the error messages will never be sufficiently specific for a casual user to be able to trivially determine what he or she is doing wrong.

Commercial bots, to the extent that they are expected to reliably perform potentially dangerous operations like making purchases, editing calendar entries, and controlling home automation systems, are going to remain quite close to the second form. This is a shame, because there is absolutely nothing revolutionary about a shitty command line, and it doesn’t do justice to bots in general to imply that all of them are like that.

Consider the non-commercial bot: the art-bot.

The art bot, because it is art, focuses on tasks relating to recontextualizing ideas, words, images, and perceptions. The art bot is a meaning factory

Freed from the shackles of needing to please a core user base and be immediately useful without ever screwing up, art bots are allowed to be interesting.

Ultimately, conversational interfaces fall into two categories: interfaces that try to keep up the illusion of intelligence and personality by ignoring most input and searching for particular keywords, and interfaces that are effectively special-purpose command lines with snarky or otherwise unprofessional error messages.

although other examples include Alice and Eliza.

Siri, Cortana, Echo/Alexa, and Google Now are all combinations of these two forms.

The thing about conversational interfaces of the former type is that they are inflexible and difficult to predict.

The ideal end-game for such an interface is for a user to memorize a handful of commonly used patterns in their most consise form and otherwise use it for its novelty value as a conversational partner — a world of people barking “MOVIE SHOWINGS BROOKLYN DEADPOOL” at their phones instead of typing the same query into google.

Taken to infinity, the ideal form of the first type is a search engine. Taken to infinity, the ideal form of the second type is a unix shell.

The former type is epitomized by the search engine “Ask Jeeves”, which achieved its “flexibility” by implicitly inserting an OR operation between each term.

The latter type is epitomized by the adventure game “Zork”, which had a somewhat english-like and very limited programming language it could understand and would mock you if you attempted to perform an invalid operation.