Look At This AI Dystopia: The Tech Exec Who Doesn't Want To Human

It is rare that one single article can capture so much astonishing boneheaded inhuman technobaloney, but Alexandra Alter has done it with her profile of Marissa Mayer in the New York Times. I can't remember the last time my jaw hit the floor so many times in succession. And before we get into this, I want you to remember all the times you thought, "Surely, they can't expect AI to take over the very human parts of teaching students." Because the answer is these people think outsourcing your humanity is a desirable thing.

The headline is a tip-off that we're headed No Place Good-- "Maybe We All Need an A.I. Wife" was likely chosen by an editor, but still. The piece kicks off with this story--

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

How sad for her daughter. And how sad for a grown woman to be unable to complete a simple parenting task-- and then to be impressed by a bot that pulls off the very low-bar-iest of answers. But it just gets worse and worse.

Mayer has a start-up that is pushing an AI personal assistant, an AI tool "that can handle everyday hassles, like buying a pair of pants you took a photo of, or finding a birthday present for your picky spouse." Because God knows you don't want to be trying to pick out a present for your spouse on your own. The special twist for Dazzle (that's the product's name) is that it will root through your camera rolls to manage tasks that a barely conscious human should already be able to do.

What's the plus? Besides offloading all that pesky humanning? Mayer is excited that something that used to take hours or minutes can now get done in seconds. Perhaps you could use the newly freed-up time to go introduce yourself to your spouse and children.

Mayer thinks this will especially appeal to women, who she imagines are more visual. So the bot will look at all the pictures and then “It essentially understands your personality, your likes, your dislikes, because it knows what you think looks good.”

And maybe what overextended professional women need is an A.I. wife, an emotional labor bot that can plan a birthday party and knows when it’s Crazy Socks Day or Crazy Hat Day at the kids’ school, because it has photos of the fliers that came home crumpled in a backpack.

Yes, parenting is hard. So very hard. Mayer has noticed that AI (like every other aspect of modern tech) is mostly guy stuff, and she's not wrong to call out the ambient baked-in sexism. But is the solution really to draw women in with a chance to offload human behavior? 

This start-up has ten engineers presently, which suggests that, despite Mayer's history as a successful tech overlord, this piece might be a bit premature. 

But Dazzle's mission statement-- “To close the gap between what people want and what people can do with A.I.”-- is this stuff really what people want? Mayer rattles off her uses in what Alter calls her "be-Dazzled life." 

She’s used it to find a family activity during a vacation in Venice (Dazzle proposed a Venetian mask-making workshop that the whole family loved); to plan a play date for one of her twin daughters (Dazzle knows Marielle is into magic, and suggested visiting a magic shop in San Francisco); and to choose a theme for her son Macallister’s 14th birthday party (Dazzle recommended a glow-in-the-dark pool party, and found glowing pool toys and corn hole).

“He was like, ‘Mom, I don’t want to hit the theme that hard,’” she said. “I just can’t help myself.”

Well, yes. It appears that she literally cannot help herself and must instead get a bot to help her do exceptionally ordinary parent things. She has also asked it for advice on what to wear and Halloween costume ideas. It suggested dressing up like a cake, because it "knows" she loves baking and art. 

Mayer considers outsourcing mental load to machines an okay thing, though I'm wondering how she feels about outsourcing emotional and interact-with-human loads. Alter reports that Mayer at one point "mused enthusiastically about the potential efficiency gains of having her A.I. assistant talk directly to her husband’s A.I. assistant." Yes, by all means. It would be most efficient to have your bot talk to everyone else's bot and while the bots are simulating human life, the humans could go lie down in the basement and start decomposing early. Efficiency!!

And Alter, God bless her, asks the right question and captures the telling answer:

When I asked Mayer if it’s somewhat depressing to imagine a frictionless future when birthday celebrations, holiday gifts and family vacations are planned by A.I., she seemed caught off guard.

“I haven’t really thought that through,” she said.

Clearly she has not.

Well, Mayer is rich and has had plenty of success. She is also relatively sanguine about sexism in the industry, even though she took a lot of unearned grief for taking only a two week maternity leave. She agrees that women are underrepresented, but doesn't agree that gender is a barrier to success in techworld.

Her hopes for Dazzle lean in part on developing an app that doesn't require technical skill to use. And she cites promising early feedback, noting that some power users are "interacting more with Dazzle than their spouse." Good God, if that's success, then may we all be happy failures. I will note that Alter sits in on a meeting of Dazzle staff and developers, who do in fact meet in person and not by having their bots exchange data with each other.

So remember-- the next time you're arguing that surely nobody thinks that bots could be used to replace live human beings in the classroom, there are people out there who think it's possible-- and desirable-- to have a bot manage your relationships with every human you come in contact with. There is nothing remotely appealing about this vision, and I wish our rich tech overlords would knock it off right now.