Whatever happened to the human touch?

Whatever happened to the human touch? If you believe the latest fad from the tech world, it won’t be long before we give up talking to real people and start talking instead to machines — or “bots”. Or it might be machines pretending to be people, or people pretending to be machines. The permutations of human and artificial intelligence are about to become interesting

But if it works as advertised, we will move one step further beyond a world of direct human interaction towards a future when screens — and new ways of engaging with computer intelligence — govern much of our lives. For sheer convenience, it will be hard to resist. Less obvious is what might be lost in the process

Facebook has just given this trend its biggest lift with the release this week of a way for companies to plug their bots into Messenger, its chat system. Want to know the weather? Ask a question and an intelligent agent will answer. Interested in buying something? Bots on hand will show you the latest offers and guide you through to the checkout

If people take to the idea, entire call centres could be rendered obsolete. Why hold on waiting for a human when you can get an immediate response from a bot on your smartphone? The call-centre reps are operating from scripts anyway and these are interactions that could be programmed into a piece of software

Whether the bots catch on will depend on not stretching the technology beyond its limits. Microsoft’s wayward chatbot Tay, the algorithm pretending to be an adolescent girl that started spouting racist comments on Twitter, is Exhibit A for what can go wrong. Most artificial intelligence is not very intelligent and when the main technique for training the new systems involves something called machine learning, it turns out that machines can be taught bad behaviour as well as good

Not that the chatbots on Facebook are about to have a mind of their own and turn rogue. Most take a very limited approach to AI, using machine learning to “understand” the questions being put to them and returning largely pre-scripted answers. They try to identify a need, then draw you down a chain of conversation to a result

Deeper levels of intelligence will also be on tap. But it is as likely to involve a human brain as one made from silicon. M, another Facebook chat service, relies on real people sitting in the background, returning answers, though to the user, it is not at all clear whether information is being generated by a person or a computer. As the machines become smarter they will take over more of the responses, eventually pushing human workers out of the loop altogether

The prospect of another layer of human interaction being lost to technology is bound to bring a pang of regret, not to mention a wave of concern about the impact on jobs. But then, who would want to give up ATMs and go back to queueing up for a bank teller? Most people won’t mind at all when the days of call-centre queueing have receded into history