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this is a story about a large tech company releasing a new feature that i still found super interesting: wired.com/2015/08/facebook-launches-m-new-kind-virtual-assistant/
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1) Huh! Guess people really are leaning into conversational UI (as per dangrover.com/blog/2014/12/01/chinese-mobile-app-ui-trends.html & interconnected.org/home/2015/06/16/conversational_uis)
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2) The last paragraph (about what it's like when this stuff reaches people with problems that aren't having too much money & living in SF)
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3) Tech cos making things that don't scale. And then... hoping they'll figure it out on the way? Or just throwing bodies at the problem.
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4) Badly paid bodies of course. The "trainers" may sit next to the engineers, but they're explicitly called out as contractors.
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5) And all of this as a platform play! I am so sick of my choices being constrained by large companies vying to get underneath each other.
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6) and also! (cc @martinhollis) i like using self-service machines because you can fuck up and no-one judges you. cyborgs give mixed signals
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like, you're free to explore limits & break things in a way you shouldn't if there's a real person on the other end.
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people aren't learnable systems, and you should be considerate when demanding things from them. what about sometimes-people?
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what about people whose existence has been purposefully erased in favour of "magic"? (ie these screenshots getmagicnow.com/)
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is the entire reason people want AI so they can have a servant they don't have to feel bad about or treat like a person?
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i bet there's way more women on the trainer team than the engineering team working on M