PART IV: THE FOURTH AGE — CHAT BOTS & MOTHER BRAIN

The final questions above lead us head first into a potential shift in the workforce during the Fourth Age — the emerging trend of Chat Bots baked within MaaP has already begun to take off (thanks #Slack).

For those of you not familiar with intelligent Chat Bots, they are autonomous entities in the messaging universe that try to convince us that humans are obsolete — or more simply a computer you can chat with.

There are two popular methods to creating chatbots:

Build: Make your own using Artificial Markup Language (AIML), Facebook’s Chat API (if you’re lucky), or fork an existing bot (ALICE) and build on top of it. Get a bot to do it for you — yes it’s brilliant. An emerging trend in the chat ecosystem, is to have a ‘giant spaghetti monster’ like bot help you create and customize a new bot to do your bidding. For the most part, these bots help you create a flowchart of logic to help your user navigate to a desirable outcome (think of a bunch of IFTTT scenarios)

So how can they impact our workforce? Think about your job, or personal interactions with businesses on a day to day basis:

How complex is the interaction?

Can you distill the activities into a series of if-else statements?

Can the task be replaced with a nested survey? a switch? a loop?

Can you predict, with a high level of probability, what the next step in a process is, given specific inputs?

Does the interaction absolutely require a physical presence?

Are there logical connections between content types: text, images, video, sounds?

Are there logical connections between service types: travel + leisure, retail + payments, travel + transport?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, I think you know the answer.

And developers have already started going down this path for consumers: Facebook recently launched Facebook M, its AI messaging bot on Facebook Messenger to help consumers with search, day-to-day tasks, and making everyday purchases (note there is still some human supervision/intervention with Facebook M).

Webium

I’m not claiming a Chat Bot will a displace your job or a large portion services/support workforce overnight — what I am merely doing is throwing light on a gray future. What I can say, without any hesitation, is that these tools do have the ability to free up a lot time that we spend on mundane activities and trivial decision making — Slack is already making a dent in replacing administrative tasks like expenses, & team meetings using bots. And maybe that’s the end game:

Chat Bots should help free up our time (in both our personal & professional lives) so we can focus on the stuff that really matters.

So how will these bots manifest themselves? Seeing where the messaging incumbents are taking them, the first wave of bots will be driven by:

1) NLP tagging+service call logic

2) Nested surveying

3) NN methods.

However, the really ingenious stuff starts happening when we see the blending of the consumer/producer relationship in the MaaP construct, that is when Bots start talking to other Bots and take over the threads for us. So for example if I wanted to book a vacation, I could merely instruct a Chat Bot to “Book me a 1-week trip to Davos for WEF in 2017.” Following a series of prompts to refine some constraints, that Chat Bot could move ahead and:

Order my tickets to WEF //msg to Event Bot Book my flight // msg to Travel Agent Bot Book a place to stay //msg to AirBnB Bot Book an Uber ride from my location to the airport //msg to Uber Bot Check me in to my flight //msg to Airline Bot Modify my seat based on preferences //msg to to Airline Bot Book an Uber from airport to my AirBnb // msg to Uber Bot

Where logic/constraints needs more refinement, the Chat Bot prompts the user to fill in the missing information. Furthermore, you could potentially view the entire thread unfold between the Bots for auditing purposes.

Bots talking to Bots would be an interesting way to re-engineer existing app constellations & super clusters.

As the thread wars move to a higher level of digital warfare (amongst AI & Bots), the #MotherBrain still has yet to reveal herself. And I’m going to call it now:

Google will create the mother brain of all Chat Bots.

The Google Chat Bot — #MotherBrain for the time being — will be the outcome of years of data collection, web/app indexing, machine learning, social engineering, natural language processing, and translation — the largest set of training data the world has ever seen. Aside from the rumour, the breadcrumbs for an ultimate Chat Bot in the mobile ecosystem has been around us for the last few years:

Search — seeks out what it can’t understand App Indexing — knows where services, content, and data sit within apps Weave — communicates with other things outside of your mobile device Google Now — knows who you are and what you care about Google Photos — understands and refine its understanding of the physical world OK Google — knows natural language and how you speak Translation — communicates across borders and languages seamlessly Connected Car — helps you get to where you need to go Calendar/Inbox — understand how you plan

..the list goes on. As I started to go down this thought process, it also struck me that:

If the Google Chat Bot is for day-to-day life, then the Facebook Chat Bot is for life.

Say what now? Well, let’s go through some of the training data Facebook has on its hands:

News Feed — information preferences and consumption habits Likes — emotional connection to information Friends — circles of trust Sharing — how you connect to individuals + groups Messenger — how you interact with individuals + friends

So if that’s the case, do we essentially live on forever through the fourth age an beyond? To answer that, I would like to recall a blog post from the brilliant people behind the blog Wait But Why, entitled What Makes You You — I think it would be a fitting way to stay within the gray at the conclusion of my arguments: