I recently made a bet with my brother that by the year 2036 we will have more meaningful relationships with software than with humans. And frankly it will probably happen a lot sooner than that.
PART ONE | Talking to Computers
Within 20 years we will speak more with software than we do with people. Nothing against people, communicating with software is just going to be more efficient. Think about this:
How do we order Pizza?
Michelle is hungry. She decides to Google local pizza shops. She finds a menu she likes online and calls the number from their website to place an order on the phone. Rachel, the employee who answers the call, takes Michelle’s order and puts it into their computerized order management system, which then directs the cook what to make. 30 minutes later Michelle has her pizza. 🍕
Abstracting this scenario a little, a woman asked software to give her options for dinner. She picked one and related her choice to another person who in turn told a different piece of software the specific choice, which then gave cooking directions to a final person.
The route the pizza information takes is:
person 1 > machine 1 > person 1 > person 2 > machine 2 > person 3
This is very inefficient, so innovation in food delivery has sought to shorten this route. Think of it as a game of telephone, the more transitions involved, the more convoluted the message can get. Our goal is to shorten the game of telephone.
Talking to Computers 1.0
So, how to shorten the game of telephone? The most efficient way would be to eliminate the interpersonal communication and just have the software communicate. And we already have this to an extent.
UberEATS, Grubhub, DoorDash, Postmates — these are leaders in app-enabled food delivery. Instead of calling a restaurant, we can just order food in app. The app software sends this information directly to the software at the restaurants.
This game of telephone is now:
person 1 > machine 1 > person 1 > machine 1 > machine 2 > person 2
Great we have gotten ridden of the third person, but it’s still the same number of steps. How can we eliminate steps?
Talking to Computers 2.0
To shorten the game further, we need smart software. When we communicate to our phone that we want Thai food, it needs to order this on its own without our final signoff on the exact restaurant it chooses. Algorithms can go through online reviews, demographic information, social media sentiment analysis, and — with an increase in personalization — know our unique tastes as well as. Sufficiently advanced software will weigh all these factors and make a dinner choice that we are happy with.
This sounds odd now, but in the future software ordering what it wants for dinner will be as normal as a parent or spouse deciding what is for dinner today.
So now we have shortened the game of telephone down to:
person 1 > machine 1 > machine 2 > person 2
And until we have fully automated pizza shops, this is as good as it’s going to get.
Just like that, our game of telephone is in its optimum state! The number of players and flow of information tell us a lot about the future of communication. Think of machine 1 & 2 as the personal assistants that company executives currently have. And like personal assistants, these algorithms may not be us, but they know us better than pretty much anyone.
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