Scripted Household — Chromatic Future
You’ve probably heard about a story, where a man develops a relationship with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), an artificially intelligent virtual assistant personified through a female voice. — 2013
The past is just a story we keep telling ourselves.
Later on, there was a take from Google, to infiltrate virtual AI assistants in your life, followed by books and other cyberpunks. Quite unrealistic from start you would say — 2016.
5 years later — moat has been created
I’m trying to be the guinea pig to try bleeding edge tech so I’ve given it a hit. Went to get Philips Hue and basic assistant. Linked Spotify. Configured routine to welcome me at home, turn on lights in Coral scene, play favourite Jazz music. Perfect, set your favourite home vibe once you are at home without making any extra decisions and on a repeated basis. Probably I’m not the only one who did this.
Leaving home? Turn off lights and music, launch lidar Roomba to clean my cave. Even triggered by my phone location. Beautiful.
Back from the bike? Play favourite energizing music, get a philosophical quote to think about in the shower to get good shower thoughts for the day. Without making any decision here. Handsome.
I could not much live without it as I would need to think about flipping the light switch all the time. That’s where probably virtual assistant wins, making living obvious in a way to be integrated into your life.
Where this could lead?
It’s hard to predict for me as I’m not on core fan of voice assistants — yet, but I would guess having cars with integrating Google stack is making cars quite assistant on wheels, thus car vendors obsolete. You can sense the first signal when they made Google+Polestar. At this point, cars become gadgets, not cars as we know for moving around and zooming anymore. In the incoming IoT wave, the voice-economy is giving human-native interaction with your Raspberry Pi to do stuff you eventually need to automatize in a household. Water for your home animal? No worries, voice-econ will keep your pets refreshed. Forgot about grocery shopping? I bet your fridge already made that order ahead as they know on which day you want to cook your favourite recipe with friends. Late from work to tell your kids a good-night story before bed? Guess who got you covered. Making an appointment with your favourite hairdresser? The virtual assistant will call on your behalf, book you a date and create a calendar appointment for you.
All that small micro-tasks that you don’t realize cost your attention, context switching resources and energy. Your day starts with 100% and you may end your day less exhausted whenever a virtual assistant can take care of your bookings, shopping, getting the house cleaned, helping you to focus on your life and things that matter and brings value to your wellbeing. Everyone wants to be efficient today and have well spent time on stuff that brings them yields in the long term.
At this point, one may realize that technological accelerationism went so far. But, it’s just a start.
In political and social theory, accelerationism is the idea that capitalism and technological change[1] can or should be “accelerated” and drastically exaggerated. The goal of accelerationism is to trigger unprecedented revolt and the establishment of new, unique political and economic systems.
We may enter a post-scarcity economy with our time as more things will be heading to our comfortable living well-being. Who knows. I’m maybe wrong here.
Voice economy
You can make a brief opinion on voice tech patents filled between 2015–2018. I would say best of its Omni-reachability in your room. You don’t need to use your field of vision, you can’t deny listening to it. It’s in the room, cabin, headphones.
They can literally reconstruct how your room looks through sound. Echo classification, materials, size of the room, where it’s located, who is going around it, how many people are in the room, detect discussion emotions, the mental health of household members, make a purchase right away, caregiving, provide distinct emotional perspective as your significant other does, have answers for questions you could not remember, predict your next question, flag your potential health issue based on the nuances of one’s voice[1], detect emotional well-being, educate your children
Have you slept well? We know how well.
That’s all probably good takes. What could fuel this revolution, later on, is when Amazon or Google unlock their devices where you can install a voice app from anyone else. Imagine having Google Playstore like a marketplace, but for voice apps. It will eventually grow once they open floodgates.
To underline this, European VC Firm Mangrove Capital Partners has made a bold forecast that the voice technology economy will be worth a trillion dollars by 2025. Similar like in 2013 was the rise to chatOps — conversation-driven development. Your business could not miss having chat which literally added NLP to your FAQ and was more interactive. Similiar, having voice bots would add a native feel for your business front door and filter most inquiries, cheaper.
Once marketers would realize voice assistant as a market channel, it will be a Cambrian explosion later on, slowly, it’s happening.
From there we could imagine like branded voice commerce where you will have native ads in your routines for getting some product, cheaper from the brand, who knows.
Literally, no stopping, you can see Google has adopted Fiat in an experiment to add human-native interaction for their owners.
Upsides — advantages you could gain?
Probably many. Asking what’s the weather when you are going on the bike while getting dressed, getting that recipe you been dreaming for while with video. Calling with your remote family through vendor devices without the need to hold any device in your hand and seamlessly having call room-to-room. Brilliant. Saves you time. With having GPT-3 and similar tech we could kick off machine-to-machine talks without human interaction, where bots can help with your next real estate pick, probably buy it for you, like in metaverses you could do in one click. Drive your car to service itself, unassisted. Once technology could gain self-replicating state level of machines and self-healing (2020), self-repairing machine — 2019 there is probably the hard way to stopping it as a higher class of people will be buying into this to be time-efficient. Simple math.
More money will flow into self-reinforcement tech, stronger and robust it will get, more R&D could be paid upfront.
Downsides — risks, privacy?
There could be many as I’m aware that Google is probably sneaking on my voice and later can get me personalized ad results. That’s probably why they make devices really affordable because they probably already calculated what’s revenue is going for them from listening to you precisely and context fully. Voice could deliver meaning and sense-making in a particular context. That what’s you can not read from the text and typed text. Voice has probably more properties than one could think of from first. Later commerce will build a tailored product for your daily actions. Don’t be surprised if you order food, you can ads and vouchers from another virtual kitchen. Having remarketing is like pixel in your browser. Peaking at your voice in a friend's house is a similar tactic. Making connection.
Closing
Your past is just a story you tell yourself.
To wrap up, the easiest take from here is to think of Voice-Economy as Browser-Economy. We have nowadays Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, &c to give you content to your brain you are looking for. Voice economy would be most probably the same and more.
It is invisible and native for you to query knowledge on Internet.
Whenever you’ve liked my reading, follow me on medium, follow me on Twitter, I’ll come to keep my cadence one article weekly, what’s inside, put outside to free up my brain space.
This was produced on the side while writing this article, read about the Post Scarcity economy, Accelerationism and Class Conflict.
Thank you for your time!
