Rise of the machines

In the classic sci-fi movie, “The Terminator”, humans have created a super intelligent computer, which ultimately takes control over the army. The computer, Skynet, which is equipped with artificial intelligence, concludes that humans are a threat to its existence and decides to wipe out the entire human race.

This dark and dystopian view is luckily science fiction. That said, there is a digital revolution going on. Digitalization, internet of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, among other things, are shaping our future. Looking at how the digital world around us evolving – are robots taking over?

The bots are coming

There has been much discussion lately about artificial intelligence (AI), especially in the context of so called bots. Bots are basically digital servants equipped with artificial intelligent, speech recognition and machine learning capabilities. Thanks to technology bots can interact with us, learn from us and help us in our everyday life. It’s not just about booking a table at a restaurant or having a personal digital assistant, it’s about how things are organized and carried out around us.

Bots can have a big effect on our content consumption, customer service, productivity, and transactional engagements. Bots will enable you to talk (some would prefer to call it interact) with your car or your house. The same goes for interacting with your customer base or the machine in your factory. The potential is tremendous and the scale is enormous, both from a personal and business perspective.

Big boys’ game

The strongest players in this new industry are Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, as well as Google and Apple who have recently joined the game. All of the above have the resources, users and ecosystems to release the bots onto the world. Facebook has 1.7 billion monthly active users and more than 900 million monthly active users on their Messenger. Google’s Gmail has 1 billion monthly active users, and Apple has a devoted fan base which is enormous.

Last spring at its annual F8 developer’s conference Facebook launched its open source beta version of a bot engine. Facebook is relying on the world’s developers to grow their bots; to feed them text and train them. According to Facebook, since the launch in April, more than 11,000 bots have been added to Messenger and tens of thousands of developers are now working on Messenger bots.

In a response to competition and especially fear of losing their position in information search, Google recently debuted their chatbot Allo and virtual helper Google Assistant. Earlier this year Google’s AI won a professional human player at Go, an ancient Chinese board game that is considered much more complex than chess. Apple’s response to staying in the race has been to open up its Siri voice recognition to developers. It’s no secret that Siri will be a focus point of the iPhone and other future Apple devices for your home.

Work in progress

This new industry is still in its early stage and the AI which bots use is still in a development phase. Microsoft’s AI chatbot, called Tay, caused a PR scandal in the tech world last spring, when the bot tweeted with the world. Tay was built to mimic and converse with other Twitter-users in real time. Many people took advantage of Tay’s machine learning capabilities and tricked the bot into saying racist and sexist things. After more than 96,000 tweets, Microsoft had to pull the plug and apologize for the bots misbehavior.

There are still a lot of glitches that need to be fixed, but the good news is that the machines are fast learners. For those who think all this sounds too much like science fiction, rest assured, bots will not make human-to-human interaction obsolete, but it can change many things. Just remember that not too long ago, a majority of people would have said that shopping for clothes or shoes is too much of a physical experience for it to go online.

Some argue that bots will be revolutionary, much like the emerging of email, e-commerce or social media. That remains to be seen, but the fact is that an army of bots is marching toward us.