In
this article I have frequently pointed out that the careers of today will not
be the careers of tomorrow. The
Washington Post article copied below illustrates that point, and is important
information for all of us.
Until
recently, Robyn Ewing was a writer in Hollywood, developing TV scripts and
pitching pilots to film studios. Now
she’s applying her creative talents toward building the personality of a
different type of character — a virtual assistant, animated by artificial
intelligence that interacts with sick patients.
Ewing works with engineers on the software program, called Sophie, which
can be downloaded to a smartphone. The virtual nurse gently reminds users to
check their medication, asks them how they are feeling or if they are in pain,
and then sends the data to a real doctor.
As tech
behemoths and a wave of start-ups double down on virtual assistants that can
chat with human beings, writing for AI is becoming a hot job in Silicon Valley.
Behind Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are not just
software engineers. Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers,
and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a
fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools. “Maybe this will help pay back all the
student loans,” joked Ewing, who has master’s degrees from the Iowa Writer’s
Workshop and film school.
Unlike the
fictional characters that Ewing developed in Hollywood, who are put through adventures,
personal trials and plot twists, most virtual assistants today are designed to
perform largely prosaic tasks, such as reading through email, sending meetings
reminders or turning off the lights as you shout across the room. But a new crop of virtual assistant
start-ups, whose products will soon flood the market, have in mind more
ambitious bots that can interact seamlessly with human beings.
Because this
wave of technology is distinguished by the ability to chat, writers for AI must
focus on making the conversation feel natural. Designers for Amazon’s Alexa
have built humanizing “hmms” and “ums” into her responses to questions. Apple’s
Siri assistant is known for her wry jokes, as well as her ability to beatbox
upon request. As in fiction, the AI
writers for virtual assistants dream up a life story for their bots. Writers
for medical and productivity apps make character decisions such as whether bots
should be workaholics, eager beavers or self-effacing. “You have to develop an
entire backstory — even if you never use it,” Ewing said.
Even mundane
tasks demand creative effort, as writers try to build personality quirks into
the most rote activities. At the start-up x.ai, a Harvard theater graduate is
tasked with deciding whether its scheduling bots, Amy and Andrew, should use
emojis or address people by first names. “We don’t want people saying, ‘Your
assistant is too casual — or too much,’ ” said Anna Kelsey, whose title is AI
interaction designer. “We don’t want her to be one of those crazy people who
uses 15 million exclamation points.”
Virtual
assistant start-ups garnered at least $35 million in investment over the past
year, according to CBInsights and Washington Post research (This figure doesn’t
count the many millions spent by tech giants Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
and Microsoft). The surge of investor
interest in virtual assistants that can converse has been fueled in part by the
popularity of messaging apps, such as WeChat, WhatsApp, and Facebook’s
Messenger, which are among the most widely downloaded smartphone applications.
Investors see that users are increasingly drawn to conversational platforms,
and hope to build additional features into them.
Virtual
assistants have also received a boost from major advances in subsets of
artificial intelligence known as machine learning and natural language
processing, or the ability for computers to understand speech. Accuracy of word
recognition reached something of a tipping point in recent years, going from 80
percent in 2009 to 95 percent in 2014, said Christopher Manning, a Stanford
computer science professor and natural language expert. The rise of this technology is evident in a
wave of new jobs at the intersection of human and artificial intelligence. By
2025, 12.7 million new U.S. jobs will involve building robots or automation
software; by 2019, more than one-third of the workforce will work side by side
with such technologies, according to Forrester Data.
Some virtual
assistants are already becoming useful companions in the office. Howdy, a bot in the popular productivity
software Slack, can query employees on behalf of a boss and collate their
answers into a single document. Amy and Andrew, the meeting-scheduling bots
built by x.ai, can email back and forth with real administrative
assistants. Sophie and Molly, nurse
avatars built by the start-ups IDAvatars and Sense.ly, respectively, question
patients about their medical conditions and try to cheer them up. Another start-up, Botanic.io, is building a
guru avatar that can coach users in meditation and weight loss. In most cases, users could go online and get
the information themselves, without the help of a virtual assistant, though it
might take a bit longer, Ewing said. “So if the character doesn’t delight you,
then what is the point?”
At a recent
meeting of Microsoft Cortana’s six-person writing team — which includes a poet,
a novelist, a playwright and a former TV writer — the group debated how to
answer political questions. To field
increasingly common questions about whether Cortana is a fan of Hillary
Clinton, for instance, or Donald Trump, the team dug into the backstory to find
an answer that felt “authentic.” The response they developed reflects Cortana’s
standing as a “citizen of the Internet,” aware of both good and bad information
about the candidates, said Deborah Harrison, senior writer for Cortana, and a
movie review blogger on the side. So Cortana says that all politicians are
heroes and villains. She declines to say she favors a specific candidate.
The group,
which meets every morning at Microsoft’s offices in Redmond, Wash., also
brainstorms Cortana’s responses to new issues. Some members who are shaping
Cortana’s personality for European and Canadian markets dial in. (Cortana is
available in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Italian, German, limited
Chinese, and British and Indian English.)
When the team was preparing to launch a feature that has Cortana sifting
through emails and suggesting people to meet with, members debated whether a
reminder — “You said you wanted to meet with” so-and-so — sounded pushy. They
considered whether “Star Wars” jokes were appropriate or too cultish. And they talked about how to shut down vulgar
comments and respond to a tendency, among some users, to goad Cortana into
repeating sexual comments.
Across the
Microsoft campus, a different group apparently didn’t heed that lesson: Tay, a
chat bot Microsoft recently released on Twitter, was terminated within a week
after it started talking like a Nazi. The bot was parroting comments made on
the Internet. “We will do everything possible
to limit technical exploits but also know we cannot fully predict all possible
human interactive misuses without learning from mistakes,” Microsoft said on
its blog after it took Tay down. Such
incidents reflect a fundamental challenge in building AI: Negotiating the
virtual assistant’s relationship to human beings. Writers and designers said
the trickiest question they wrestle with is how human can — and should — the
bot sound? Should the virtual assistant be purely functional or should it
aspire to connect emotionally with the user?
Human beings have higher expectations of software that is personalized
than they do of automation software that can perform similar tasks, said Mark
Stephen Meadows, founder and president of San Francisco-based Botanic.io. When
software can talk and is personified, it opens up a Pandora’s Box of human
behavior. People don’t go out of their way to trick or use vulgarities with
other types of software, he pointed out.
Moreover,
studies of human-robot interaction have described a phenomenon known as the
“uncanny valley,” in which attempts to make robots seems humanlike can inspire
unease or revulsion instead of empathy.
For that reason, many developers of artificial intelligence make a point
of adding a weird element to their avatar designs — such as an asymetrical face
or an odd joke — something that signals that the virtual assistant isn’t human
and doesn’t aspire to be, Meadows said.
At the same time, the imperfections are meant to be endearing. A robot without such flaws could seem cold
and alienating. If you ask
Cortana if she is human, she says no, and then she adds a meant-to-be endearing
joke: “But I have the deepest respect for humans. You invented calculus — and
milkshakes.”
Not aspiring to be human — and having a sense of humor about
it — are attributes that can have the added benefit of making users more
forgiving of a virtual assistant’s limitations and mistakes, said Cathy Pearl,
director of user experience at Sense.ly.
And as anyone who has used a virtual assistant knows, they make a lot of
them. The technology is still young, and
its capacity to handle situations is restricted by the limited information it
has been exposed to. Artfully conveying
that a bot recognizes that it doesn’t know something is one of the most
challenging aspects of writing for AI, she said.
Another difficult question concerns gender. While Cortana is “crystal clear” that she is
not human, the team gave her a female voice because early users expressed a
preference for a female virtual assistant, Harrison said. Siri and Google Now also have female voices
by default, though you can configure them to be male. Amazon’s Alexa can only
be female, while IBM’s Watson has a male voice.
Nonetheless, Cortana’s developers were concerned enough about playing
into female stereotypes that they attempted to avoid them. The design, for instance, limits the number
of times she apologizes and eschews self-deprecating remarks. And despite the voice, the team insists that
Cortana isn’t a woman. “She knows that gender is a biological construct, and
since she’s not biological, she has no gender,” Harrison said. “She’s proud of
her AI-ness.”
The
possibilities for technology seem to have no boundaries. This fact is both daunting and significant
for education professionals. It makes us
wonder what the future will hold when we realize that some of the professions
and industries students are preparing for may no longer exist even 10 years
from now.
What will
the jobs of the future look like? Our
administrative team is currently reading a very insightful book called The
Industries of the Future, by Alec Ross, that examines this topic. I have been astounded to learn about new
careers that exist now or are emerging.
Industries such as robotics and genomics (a field that will become
standard in the medical industry) are eagerly seeking new employees. The effect of technology gains in the financial
industry may possibly result in a virtual currency in the future that will be
used world-wide. It is our
responsibility to constantly review course offerings and make changes that will
prepare our students for the careers of the future. This is
the challenge for educators across the nation, and one that we take seriously
in Vermilion.
