Like for aliens, you mean? https://www.economist.com/babb...
I think the problem (for us) with AI is that by the time it's got to the stage of negotiation, then we'll have no more ability to negotiate with it than rabbits or robins or chimpanzees do with humans.
Good point. Well made.
Mind you, ChatGPT says...
Me:
I have a spreadsheet of about 500 lines of customer feedback. Can you generate a summary of that for me?
ChatGPT:
Certainly! If you could provide a few sample entries or key themes from your spreadsheet, I can help create a summary for you. You can share the general sentiments, common issues, or any specific aspects you'd like to focus on. This will enable me to generate a concise summary of the customer feedback without the need to disclose the entire content of the spreadsheet.
Me:
That's not what I
By total coincidence today, I thought I'd try giving Bard a bunch of customer feeback about something (about 500 free form responses) to see if it could summarise it.
First I asked: "Can Bard summarise customer feedback?" It said:
"Yes, Bard can summarize customer feedback. Bard is a large language model from Google AI, trained on a massive dataset of text and code. Bard can generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way.
To summarize customer feedback, Bard can identify the main themes and trends in the feedback, as well as the overall sentiment. Bard can also quantify the feedback, such as by counting the number of times a particular issue is mentioned."
Then I asked: "How do I give Bard customer feedback to summarise?"
To get Bard to summarize a spreadsheet of customer feedback, you can follow these steps:
- Clean and prepare the data. Make sure that the data is in a consistent format and that there are no errors. You may also want to remove any irrelevant data, such as customer names and contact information.
- Export the data to a text file. You can do this using a spreadsheet program such as Excel or Google Sheets.
- Upload the text file to Bard. You can do this by dragging and dropping the file into the Bard interface, or by clicking the "Upload file" button.
- Provide Bard with a prompt. Tell Bard exactly what you want it to summarize. For example, you could say: Summarize the customer feedback in this spreadsheet.
Click the "Summarize" button. Bard will then generate a summary of the feedback, highlighting the most important points.
Welp, suffice to say that literally none of that worked. No "upload file" button. No drag/drop. No "summarize" button.
WTF??
From David "Accidental Brexit" Cameron:
I'm British, and among all the trans-Atlantic cultural differences between the English-speaking peoples of Britain and the US (the deep-frying of whole turkeys, the drinking of tea, etc.), I find the American aversion to swearing one of the more fascinating.
In private, I'm sure Americans swear as much as the British. Yet when they are in public or polite company, some terrifying taboo arises about it that the British just don't have. The only explanation I can give for it on the American side must be some throwback to the Puritans or something.
From a British perspective, it would never occur to us to spend time and effort in the production of a software system to collate lists of swear words to substitute. Political, racist or other sensitive terms, perhaps, but swearing? What reason would Apple even have to expend that effort? And they are not the only ones. I once installed a F/LOSS web BBS system that contained a constantly updated list of literally thousands of "bad" words and their possible combinations that were redacted by default! I turned it off of course, and never had any trouble with users about bad language.
Given the main idea here seems to be the projecting UI (which presumably allows you to interact with things on the palm of your hand), which in turn implies many possible device functions (timers, call notifications, weather, directions, etc. etc.) as well as things like language translation and voice commands - this just seems to be another attempt at making some tech, enshrouding it with "just suppose" vapours, and selling it to Samsung or somebody.
The palm projecting idea is also not new. Somebody blogged about exactly that (without any implementation) a number of years ago. And interactive projecting interfaces have been buzzing about for at least a couple of decades.
So this idea seems pretty thin to me, even if the central projection tech proves to be better than previous attempts.
This is demonstrably true - yet why does it happen? Why, even in the most primitive of "targeted" advertising worlds, do I see ads for toasters just after I've bought... a toaster?
All the people complaining about how bad CAPTCHA is are right.
Letting bad actors into the system then squashing them later if/when they act bad is what should happen. But it'll never happen because engineers don't want to spend time designing systems that have that ability. Easier for them to treat humans like a raw material, like something to mine and refine. And we let them get away with it. Tragic really.
Ugh, hungover Sunday. I meant to say anything that tells you what happened is orders of magnitude less useful in making a better product than something that tells you why it happened.
"If you idiots were able to record every synapse firing in my body while I use your web site, you still could not make a functional web site."
Designer here (currently termed "User Experience Designer"), mainly involved in interpreting research and coming up with interaction designs for software interfaces. I mainly work for large companies.
Everywhere I've worked over the past 10 or 12 years has had some system that tracks mouse movements, page scrolls and whatnot. Sometimes per session, sometimes aggregated into "heat maps", or both.
As a means of making supportable, or even particularly useful design decisions, these system are next to useless and I don't know anyone in my field who gives them the time of day. The budgets used to pay for these systems are not typically those of the design department, and the sales droids know this so tend to target CPOs, CTOs and customer services. I really wish all such "session tracking" would die in a fire, but they have a trivial attraction for those who want to "know" about "customer behaviour" so they keep hanging around like a bad smell. Worse, their existence is used as an excuse not to spend money and time doing proper customer observation and testing. I even considered leaving a job I once had because everyone kept staring at these damn things and interpenetrating them however they wanted.
My best guess for why this phenomenon of mouse tracking gets held up as "user research" is that it comes from a sort of mythology born of eye-tracking. Eye tracking is useful as a tool in psychological research to do with visual attention and perception. That kind of research is quite different to the kind of research carried out in the field of UX/design. But that didn't stop various marketing droids pushing the idea of eye-tracking on gullible C-levels to help with their UX. Here's a nice summary of the issues from somebody in my field, if you're interested. Fundamentally though, anything that doesn't help you work out why something happened is orders or magnitude less useful in making a better product than something that tells you what happened. The only real way you're going to get that is task-based observation in talk-aloud research sessions. There is no real alternative to that.
All this probably means that I and others in my field have failed in our duty to persuade those in non-design management positions about these issues. And I'm reduced to venting about them on
" it has degenerated into email with a shitty client interface"
This.
Incredibly, the *only* thing keeping Slack from being the same as some 1995-era proprietary email system is the fact that it has multiple inboxes by default. Which makes it worse than email. And even worse when you look at the stats for just about any organisation, and see that over 80% of messages are either private chats or DMs, Heck, it wasn't until last year that you could even CC anyone not in a channel. You had to first invite them to a channel, then wait for them to join, then when everyone you wanted to talk to had joined, you posted your message. That's INSANE!!
Agree completely on both of these counts. iTunes has for years be a stunning disaster in terms of usability and even function (which is saying something - normally you get one without the other).
As an aside, it seems Apple has never been any good at software design.
The "just leave and sort it out from there" vision of no deal attempts to frame the debate as being about wider issues of freedom and sovereignty, and downplays economics and trade deals as being things we can just get done on the side form a position of freedom from the EU.
The trouble with that is that you cannot disentangle trade and economics from freedom and sovereignty. Just ask North Korea.
For many people, a no deal Brexit will mean job losses and less money. And money, is unfortunately, freedom. A no deal Brexit will be case of "be careful what you wish for".
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
