Not Like Us is our monthly column exploring the minds of intelligent machines – and how we live with them

“I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.” So goes the joke every time artificial intelligence threatens to supersede humans in another job. Fast-food servers, pharmacists, paralegals and journalists are among the most recent targets.

But have we been thinking too much about the jobs such technology could take away, rather than those it could create? Now, ventures like Facebook’s digital personal assistant, M, suggest that “robot’s helper” might soon be a job description in many of our futures.

M is a new AI-fuelled digital assistant built into Facebook messenger. It can book your next hotel or flight, recommend a restaurant and reserve a table, purchase items for delivery or send news updates and reminders. Launched this summer, it’s currently being beta tested in the San Francisco area, assisting more than 10,000 Facebook users.


So what’s the high-tech secret sauce that makes M so good? Humans. Or, in Facebook parlance, AI trainers.

Ask M to recommend a local restaurant with good pad Thai and an AI trainer will review its suggestions before they’re sent back to you. Tell it to reserve a table for two, and the AI trainer may be the one to actually pick up the phone. Everything that M says is observed, validated or tweaked by a hired human being. “We’ve invented a new kind of job,” says Ari Entin, a Facebook spokesman.

Listening in

Facebook isn’t the only tech company to think of using humans as a hack. Clara Labs, a start-up in San Francisco, builds a virtual assistant that you can email to help set appointments in your calendar. Clara is AI, but when you include her in email chains, you’re also unwittingly including a number of humans who check over her work.

Then there’s Interactions, based in Franklin, Massachusetts, which builds “digital conversational assistants”. These entities handle the customer service hotlines for big corporations, such as health insurance company Humana and Texas utilities company TXU Energy. Interactions calls its human helpers intent analysts. When the automated assistant bumps up against a string of words it can’t quite understand, it zips them over to an intent analyst for interpretation. The human listens in, tells the software what to do next, and the caller’s conversation is back on track.

It’s a simulation of great AI – but companies like Facebook, Clara Labs and Interactions aren’t just using services like these as an elaborate ruse. It shows that engineers have learned a lot about how valuable humans can be.

Non-human helplines have developed something of a reputation, spawning an entire online service, GetHuman.com, dedicated to helping people escape technology’s uncomprehending clutches. The website contains specialised tips and tricks for different corporate contact numbers that are meant to ensure you speak to a human.

Robot’s Girl Friday

So why not just stick with humans? Plenty of Silicon Valley assistant apps have gone down that route. One called Magic lets you text requests to a team of operators who can grant them, whether it involves food delivery, reservations or even medical marijuana. Invisible Girlfriend, based in St Louis, Missouri, lets you invent a fake sweetheart and text with her for a monthly fee. In this case, “she” is a crowd of human workers who take turns crafting flirty or sentimental responses.

But people can be troublesome and expensive. Assisted AI marries the flexibility and creativity of the human brain with the tireless speed – and frugality – of automation.

The benefit of this hybridisation is well established for companies – but what is it like to be a robot’s assistant? At first glance, assisted AI doesn’t seem any better or worse than any other call centre gig or sedentary office job.

Interactions’ offices look like call centres, says Phil Gray, a vice president at Interactions. But they don’t sound like call centres. Here, the clamour of conversation has been replaced by the tapping of computer keys. “Some people compare it to video game playing,” adds Jane Price, also a vice president at Interactions.

On anonymous job review board Glassdoor, the comments concerning Interactions are mixed. Some employees praise the casual atmosphere and flexible schedules, and say they enjoy the fast pace of the work. Others were numbed by its repetitive nature. “You will feel like you’re turning into a zombie sometimes,” wrote one former analyst.

Whatever you call these brave new workers – AI trainers, intent analysts – they serve a dual purpose. For now, they function as the AI’s backup, filling in gaps when automation encounters a problem it can’t yet handle. But they are also there to teach the AI not to make those mistakes again. Each individual coached decision will aggregate into a massive library of training data, which the system’s machine learning algorithms can draw on to handle future, unfamiliar tasks.

As more data is collected and M’s algorithms improve, it’s likely that at least some tasks will become totally automated. Will that leave the human trainers out of a job?

Alex Lebrun, who is in charge of M at Facebook, says it’s not that simple. “We will always need the trainers,” he says. “Once we learn something, there is something else more complex, it’s like a threshold that is expanding. The more we learn, the more there is to learn. It is never-ending learning.”

AI and I

There are plenty of ways to trip up an AI. At Interactions, Gray says, it can be something as simple as a customer’s answer to “How may I help you?” A question so open-ended invites a wealth of responses, far too many to handle without some level of human assistance. The bots also struggle when callers spell out an email address or a phone number, speak with an accent or when there is a lot of background noise.

Training is supposed to chip away at these challenges. In the meanwhile, do you know whether that seemingly great AI you’re chatting with is a human, a robot, or something in between? It’s a sudden intrusion of the Turing test into real life.

Even if you’re not in the beta testing group for M, or in the market for a personal assistant like Clara, you can dial up one of these human-computer hybrids for yourself. I called the Hyatt’s reservations line – “staffed” by Interactions – which fields the seven million or so calls the hotel chain receives every year.

A pleasant male voice answered. It sounded human, but too crisp to be a live operator. “How can I help you?”

“I’d like to book a room,” I said. I wanted to make my voice too hard for the AI to parse, so I tried to mumble when I spoke. Spanish pop music blared through cafe speakers behind me.

Then there was a pause. It lasted maybe three seconds, the amount of time I might attribute to someone studying a sheet of paper or typing my request into a computer, if I’d been on the phone with an ordinary person. Was this my moment of human contact? Was anyone listening?

Image credit: Colin Anderson/Getty