What will the next must-have technological innovation be? Jetpacks? Hoverboards? Wind-powered calculators?
The next great technological innovation will be synthetic emotional personalities that will be embedded in our mobile devices. Right now for iOS and Android (the two real competing smartphone operating systems) there are “personal assistants”, like Siri for iOS. I only use iOS so I can only speak to my experience of using Siri. Siri is a great start, but it is pretty much a simple voice-based macro interpreter. She picks up only syntactical chunks and tries her best to interpret what the user wants, and appears to be “neat” because she’s arranged in a way where if we speak “plainly” she “gets what we want”. The problem with Siri is she has no emotional life on her own. She’s a personality that is brand new each time a human being engages with it. Even when describing Siri you feel it’s more appropriate to use it than her – and that’s where the next innovation is going to address.
How can you change an “It” to a “Her” or “Him”? It takes memory, appropriate emotional responses, and in many ways, almost all the way to a synthetic consciousness. Humans are creatures of wild exception, that is what we excel at. Humans are clever, imaginative, we have memories and motives and we have knacks and talents that let us handle wild exceptions that drive technology bonkers. We can do things that technology cannot, like contemplate the nature of existence, ask “What is the purpose of life?” and so on and so forth. These abilities we have allow us to handle exceptions that technology just fails to address directly and often times simply. Humans just “get it” and “get what we mean”. There isn’t any battle over context, no agreement/gender problems as we can consume signal and noise and handle them both gracefully. This is going to be the central pillar that these new synthetic systems have to master. You hit a button and your personalized assistant, whom you’ve named, remembers all the previous things you’ve discussed with them and have access to a gigantic index of human experience to draw from in order to understand something like “Open a new file for the saint louis file company. Also, remind me sometime later about my dry cleaning and around 7ish, call my husband and find out when we are heading to Missouri.” In many ways, we have an already existent mockup of what this is all about, and that is Marvel’s Jarvis. For these advanced synthetic personalities requests like these, the requests of lists, rambling, verbal noise like “oops, no not that…” do not end up with failure but are accepted in stride. With these synthetic personalities it may also serve as an entryway to automated education and even elder companionship. You have a relationship with Jarvis and he helps you do things, you live longer because you have a relationship with a machine that is nearly indistinguishable from another person and so there is a reason to live to see another day.
It’s a collision between human ingenuity, laziness, creativity, and our drive to be social creatures. We’ll create these synthetics because the rewards will be worth the costs of development. Imagine having a durable piece of technology with you (or inside you) that you can talk to, that can assist you in times of trouble. Nobody would kidnap a child with one of these synthetics attached to them. The synthetic would find a way to connect to the Internet and know exactly where the child is and what state they are in. It would eliminate a lot of these sorts of crimes and could possibly also banish loneliness as a complaint in our world. You won’t ever have to be alone again with Jarvis in your life.