AI Specs, Monk Mode & Chatbots
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #174 ❤️
This week, Mark Zuckerberg brings us one good idea and somehow the worst idea we’ve ever heard.
Plus, are we entering the age of subscription, what is Monk Mode, and will chatbots be replacing tedious work, or simply replacing junior staff?
Let's get into it.
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#1 - Wear Your AI…
Let us begin by asking WHY the tech powers that be are so obsessed with making us wear technology, and why they now believe that AI is THE answer to getting us into wearable tech, despite years, maybe even decades, of evidence that nobody wants to.
Then, let’s consider that apparently, this time, the wearables aren’t too bad.
The Verge reported on Meta’s new smart glasses, the successor to their 2021 Ray-Ban Stories, and they think that the tech is finally starting to make sense in a world ruled by content.
Maybe that’s why they’ve actually put their name on it this time. Or maybe that has something to do with the fact that they’ve described the glasses as featuring lenses which are integrated with “Meta AI”.
Getting to the glasses themselves, they seem to be an antithesis of the Apple headset – as lo-fi as wearable tech can possibly be. They look just like normal sunglasses, and their only focus is taking photos and videos.
However, the photos and videos are in great quality this time around, they can be uploaded to your desired platform by voice command, and the glasses integrate seamlessly with your apps.
Not bad, but will they actually get us to wear these ones?
The Verge posits that they may be a promising tool for contact creators, especially those who specialise in POV videos (cooking, driving, playing with cats). But again, so were all the rest, so forgive us if we’re not jumping to buy shares.
The AI wearables trend doesn’t stop with Meta, either. Humane, a company led by two ex-Apple employees, launched a wearable called the AI Pin at Paris fashion week, of all places. Pinned onto Naomi Campbell. As you do. The device can apparently tell you if you’re allergic to something, translate speech, turn into a camera, a speaker, a screen etc.
And another start-up has launched an AI necklace which records everything you do and makes it searchable. Imagine how many arguments you could win (or lose) with your spouse if everything you did was recorded…
#2 - Chatbots With Personality?
The eye-popping faces we made when we read through this announcement for the first time cannot accurately be portrayed via words, but when we add a sarcastic “wow” at the end of a sentence, please imagine a raised eyebrow, an exaggerated eye roll, or a slow blink.
Mark Zuckerberg, famously the man with the least personality in the world, wants to introduce a range of AI-powered chatbots on Meta with “personality”. He says that these chatbots won’t just be about answering queries , “this is about entertainment”. Wow.
He notes that their main chatbot, which will be called “Meta AI” (something only a guy with a lot of personality could come up with) can be used in messaging with friends. You can ask the chatbot, for example, to settle an argument or a debate. Wow…
They will also be pumping out a range of chat bots with different personas, and celebrities such as Kendall Jenner will be lending their voices to the project. Can we put our finger on what kind of personality Kendal Jenner has? Oh yes, none.
The characters that have been announced so far include a character called “Bru”, a “wisecracking sports debater” played by Tom Brady – a man who has never cracked wise in the entirety of his time on this earth – and a big brother who “will roast you” played by YouTube star MrBeast. Just, wow.
Look, like we said above, we’re not mad at him about this glasses thing but this does truly have us wondering if he’s had a stroke.
#3 - The Age Of Subscription
The subscription age seems to be upon us, with pretty much all of the top social networks threatening to offer subscription-based ad-free versions of their services. But why now?
Well, remember the old adage, if it’s free, then the product is you? As regulatory bodies begin to crack down on third party cookies advertising, companies like Meta are scrambling to find new ways to make money.
A spokesperson for the company said that Meta believes in “free services which are supported by personalized ads”. Well, we bet they do, considering it is literally their major revenue source.
Offering users the choice between an ad-supported plan and a subscription may simply be a way to push them towards explicitly accepting ads.
Surely even Mark-Delusions-of-Grandeur-Zuckerberg can’t possibly imagine that European users will want to pay ten euros a week to barely use Facebook. While ad revenue from European users makes up a quarter of Meta’s overall takings, they only make up 15% of their daily active users.
TikTok is also apparently looking into a subscription service, and unlike Facebook, people are actually still addicted enough to TikTok to pay to use it without ads. Plus, the TikTok subscription will reportedly be half the price…
#4 - What Is Monk Mode?
An approach to productivity called Monk Mode has, ironically, gone viral on TikTok.
Monk Mode entails dedicating yourself to one single task, with no tech or other distractions, and has gained popularity along with apps which can silence the social media or email pop-ups on your phone.
There are various apps which exist, with names like Freedom, ColdTurkey, Focus Me and Forest. The Freedom app, for example, can block specific apps, or cut off internet entirely, for the duration of time that you set. You can always change your mind and turn it off, unless you’ve chosen the lock function, which will leave you unable to override the block until the original time chosen.
The Freedom app has been cited by author and human rights lawyer Susie Alegre as helping her focus enough to write her book, Freedom to Think, which discusses the challenge of focus in the digital age, and how tech is literally designed to engage with our minds and interfere with our thought process.
Productivity coach and author Grace Marshall describes the addiction to looking at our notifications as a loop. Getting a notification creates an open loop and our brain so desperately wants to look at that notification to release the dopamine that we get from closing an open loop.
Whether it’s an instagram like or a work email coming through, the loop remains as addictive - just maybe with an extra side of stress for the latter.
Hard to fight against dopamine, right? So maybe getting rid of notifications through focus apps might be the only way to help us to switch off…
#5 - Chatbots Replace Junior Work
The UK government has put AI chatbot technology to use in a legal trial ran by the Department for Education, by giving them the laborious task of analysing reports. The grunt work, if you will…
And it seemed to work. The civil service could also be putting chatbots to use not only in the reading of information but also in the creation stages. For example, writing drafts, or what has been described by Ruper McNeil, the former head of the civil service as the “first, boring stage” of drafting new legislation.
While he underlined the fact that actual human civil servants would be needed to make decisions, and people with “technical discernment” (us neither) would be required to identify when AI was getting it wrong, the use of AI assistants in general for this kind of work raises other questions. Namely – what about the people who were doing it before?
While noting that it would “take away a lot of tedium” from the work, McNeil did admit that automation was likely to eliminate the need for some of the more “junior jobs”. Are skilled juniors the new factory workers, replaced by technology that can carry out “menial” thinking work?
We wonder, will that allow juniors access into more interesting work straight off the bat, or save organisations money by reducing the need for juniors entirely, leading to less people being able to get their foot in the door at all?
The PCS union – the union representing civil servants below the senior ranks – is working with other unions to draw up proposals on using AI within the civil service, which will be shared with the government soon.
Because, sure, less tedium for the bosses is great, but what will they do with the juniors if they need them even less than before?
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Steve Jobs… The Musical
Yes, really, a Steve Jobs musical has hit Broadway, or San Francisco’s version at least.
The scenery was mostly garages or offices, how lovely, and the songs went through his life, albeit only briefly touching on the bits where he was not a cool guy.
The show concluded with Lauren Powell Jobs character signing that he would want us to be less glued to our phones and look up at the sky more often, which does NOT seem likely, and, if anything, kind of blasphemous to the name of Steve Jobs…
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