Thomas Friedman wrote a piece for the New York Times last month in which he coined a phrase that may define how we think about ourselves as human workers in the age of intelligent machines. What makes us different from the intelligent machines which can reason, process and decide faster and better than we ever will be able to, is our heart. Humans will be valued in the age of artificial intelligence for the kind of interactions that even the best programming cannot emulate.
Friedman writes “…jobs that still have a large technical component will benefit from more heart. I call these ‘STEMpathy’ jobs — jobs that combine STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) skills with human empathy, like the doctor who can extract the best diagnosis from IBM’s Watson on cancer and then best relate it to a patient.”
What a great concept – the idea that we can use intelligent programs to do the computational work while we focus on building emotional intelligence in our knowledge workers. Watson can do the diagnostic work, but will rely on an empathetic and gifted doctor to deliver the diagnosis and help the patient make decisions.
Heart, imagination and empathy are becoming hot commodities in Silicon Valley as tech companies work on creating appealing and more humanistic personalities for virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and the Amazon Echo. As companies are developing programs to serve older patients at home or in nursing facilities, they are hiring poets, playwrights and fiction writers to develop characters and craft responses that will strike the right tone with ill or elderly patients as they ask about symptoms or make reminders about medications.
A Washington Post article described a new wave of technology distinguished by the ability to chat, so writers for AI “must focus on making the conversation feel natural.” For example, designers for Amazon’s Alexa have built “humanizing ‘hmms’ and ‘ums’ into her responses to questions.” Siri is programmed to tell jokes and respond to silly inquiries with wry humor.
Even smaller devices are capable of interactive chat; my Xfinity TV remote at home will bring up movies based on their catch phrases. When I press the microphone on my remote and say “bah-nah-nah,” movies featuring the “Despicable Me” minions will come up.
The writers create entire back stories for these assistants, which writers know is the key to creating consistent and relatable characters. They have to decide the right level of energetic, upbeat and quirky dialogue to include in the virtual assistant responses, and how to respond to vulgar language or requests.
They struggle with whether a reminder like, “You said you wanted to meet with so-and-so” sounds pushy. They’re also working on tweaking phrases and personality for other cultures and languages. How to respond, for example, to Canadians, whose national equivalent to “As American as apple pie” was “As Canadian as possible, under the circumstances”?
Writers and programmers build in features that make the artificial personality seem less perfect (like the occasional “um,”) to try making the assistant’s personality likeable and approachable, but not more human. The AI scientists in the Washington Post article describe a phenomenon known as the “uncanny valley,” in which attempts to make robots seem human can inspire eeriness or revulsion instead of empathy. Negative critic and audience reactions to the animation in the 2004 movie “The Polar Express” exemplified this phenomenon.
Another complexity for writers deals with gender. Some AI personas are programmable to be male or female, but some are locked (IBM’s Watson is male and Microsoft’s Cortana is female.) Writers worked hard to make sure Cortana did not conform to female stereotypes by apologizing too much or using self-deprecating humor.
That’s for our benefit, however, not hers; the team that created her said that “she knows that gender is a biological construct, and since she’s not biological, she has no gender. She’s proud of her AI-ness.”
Candace Moody is vice president of communications for CareerSource Northeast Florida. She can be reached at [email protected].
THE FUTURE OF WORK | 7th in a series
