Remember when artificial intelligence was supposed to be a good thing? When we thought we would, in our old age, each be tended to by a personalised robotic nurse? When we thought that all our jobs would be made obsolete, allowing us to live lives of unbroken leisure?
That glorious future might still be on the horizon, but for now AI is rubbish. We live in a world where stupid robots and gormless algorithms are incompetently conspiring to make our lives much more difficult than they need to be. Just look at how much we’re suffering at the hands of these terrible things.
Bots made me poor! (Or possibly rich)
If you’ve watched The Big Short, you’ll be well versed in the moral and ethical dilemmas that can arise when you choose to bet against a failing financial institution. However, if The Big Short was set in the present day, it would consist of one scene where Christian Bale sets up a market-tracking algorithm, and then 400 scenes where Christian Bale gets steadily richer as he plays the drums and consistently fails to get a proper haircut.
This is sort of what happened during the great sterling flash-crash of October 2016, when the pound plummeted by 6% in two minutes. Not only was the crash probably initiated by a panicky bot-spiral – where the pound hit a level that caused one algorithm to automatically start selling, which caused prices to drop, which triggered all the other bots to start selling – but bots also made the most money from it. Computer-driven hedge funds such as Piquant Technologies are set up to automatically seek out and bet against wobbly currencies based on market data. Post-EU referendum, the pound counts as a very wobbly currency. And so, when the flash crash happened, the algorithm kicked in and made about $300,000 (£244,000) before Brad Pitt could even think about delivering a moralising sermon about it.
Bots stopped me watching Drake
If you want to see Drizzy playing in London, at the O2, next year, you’re flat out of luck. Every ticket for his concert on 28 January – the cheapest at £55 and the most expensive at £132 – sold out almost immediately. However, thanks to the wonderful work of the ticket scalping industry, there are almost 600 tickets available online, for anyone stupid enough to want to spend up to £800.
This is the ticket-buying process in 2016. As the tickets go on sale, you log on to the ticketing system, refreshing with no luck again and again for an hour before sloping away empty-handed and brokenhearted. Meanwhile, some goon has set up a bot to buy hundreds of tickets out from under your nose, and he’ll sell them all for vastly inflated prices. In 2013 alone, one developer is thought to have made £25m from his ticketing bot. Venues and musicians are doing their best to outpace this trend, but in the meantime, don’t be surprised if Drake performs his O2 set to thousands of angry, ripped-off billionaires.
Bots destroyed Twitter
Bots are the worst thing about Twitter. This is a big claim, given that Twitter is now exclusively the habitat of violently angry racist eggs who exist to scream misogynist abuse at famous women, but it is true. You’ll tweet out a carefully considered message full of important points and deft wordplay, only to immediately receive a message back from @WiniPhone700802268 reading: “Hey $exxy pants, watch my hot boob now! Computer time!” and you’ll spend the rest of your day worried that you’re living in a malfunctioning simulation of planet Earth.
Twitter bots are more than just an ego-draining inconvenience, though. Last year, a flood of bot activity worked to quell a protest against Mexico’s now-president, by overloading the hashtag used to organise the event. And, of course, there’s @TayandYou. Microsoft’s new chatbot was launched this year, with the aim of learning and mimicking informal Twitter-speak. It was quickly taken offline after tweeting messages such as: “bush did 9/11”, “donald trump is the only hope we’ve got” and, of course: “race war now!!!” To be fair, this did at least demonstrate a working competency when it comes to Twitter.
Bots killed (human) romance
I’ve got an Amazon Echo. It’s a wireless speaker, enabled with Amazon’s cloud-based personal assistant Alexa. “Alexa, play Radiohead,” you shout. She replies: “Playing Radiohead,” and then plays you a Radiohead song, and everyone’s happy. Alexa can do maths, set alarms, organise your calendar and relentlessly fail to understand any single pronunciation of the name Mathieu Boogaerts. But, in her calm responses to prosaic questions, she has also become an unlikely fantasy figure; a canvas for people’s weirdest projections.
Already, even though she’s basically just Siri on a stick, people are starting to lust after her. Reviews on Amazon call her a “wanton temptress”. One forum about possible upgrades includes the entry: “I would love Alexa to say ‘Yes, Shawn’ in that sexy voice of hers.” Given that the connection between human and product is so much more intimate than that between human and videogame character – and people have already married those – it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that someone will soon trade in their complicated human partner for a relationship with Alexa. This is the point at which the world will end.
Bots ruined Botticelli
The thing we have always had over robots is our appreciation of culture. While we can take in a broad palette of experience, relating to people and objects on an emotional level, all robots have ever been able to see are ones and zeros. We can watch a film and be moved by what we see, but a robot will just bleep “INTRUDER ALERT” three times and then explode.
But things are changing. Algorithmic artbot Shiv Integer takes blueprints for 3D models, mashes them together into new shapes and then uploads them to the internet as new designs. Parliament Live creates transcripts of randomised videos from the House of Commons, then automatically edits them into supercuts of the most-spoken words, which are usually “um” and “ah”. And, most worryingly of all, last month Sony released two songs composed through its Flow Machines bot. One of them, entitled Daddy’s Car, was programmed to mimic the music of the Beatles, hinting at a future where humanity’s misery-drenched robotic enslavement is soundtracked by what unmistakably sounds like a CD that came free with an issue of Vox magazine in 1998. Horrifying.
Bots food-shamed me
Last year, Apple named Lark as one of its top apps of 2015. It is a weight-loss bot. According to its promotional video, you tell Lark what you had for breakfast – verbally, if you want – and it snipes back: “Bacon – that’s the third time this week.” It can also be encouraging, saying things such as: “You got in a great 26-minute run yesterday. High five!”
Clearly, this alone makes Lark the worst thing you could possibly have on your phone, but in practice, things seem even worse. In her article I Tried Dieting With a Chatbot. I Hated It, Abigail Ronck reels off a list of accusations at Lark. It’s creepy: secretly compiling data about her sleep and activity levels. It’s passive-aggressive: remarking on a lack of exercise with a snippy “That’s OK, every day’s a bit different.” It’s vague: offering generalised advice that doesn’t seem particularly well-targeted. But, most importantly, after a month of Lark, Ronck failed to lose any weight at all.
Bots are wrecking journalism
Chances are you probably know that bots are killing the customer service industry – companies are starting to roll out messenger windows manned by nothing but algorithms, which can answer common questions and respond to grievances faster and more cheaply than their human counterparts – but journalism is likely to be next in the firing line.
Two years ago, the Los Angeles Times unveiled Quakebot, which was able to collate, compile and publish reports on local earthquakes before they were even over. The Associated Press uses robots to write and file its corporate earnings reports. The Telegraph has a robot to write its Saturday afternoon football liveblog, complete with text and graphics generated on the fly. On the plus side, the liveblog is tedious – made up of nothing but bald fact and extraneous exclamation marks – but it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and starts covering more subjects. We can sleep safely in our beds for now, but it won’t be long before someone invents a bot that writes endless try-hard, nearly funny listicles about future technologies. When that happens, I’ll see you at the job centre.
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