Beyond Words: Will we fall in love with bots in the future?
The 15th European Trend Conference on March 13, 2019 attracted 200 participants to the GDI in Rüschlikon and featured international speakers. No industry focus could be identified among the participants; understanding trends is obviously important for all areas of business and administration.
In his introductory presentation, David Bosshard, Director of the GDI in Rüschlikon, soberly stated that technology can do more and more, but the question is whether we really know what we want with it. Using Amazon's Alexa as an example, he explained that this voice interface, which was actually developed for the efficient ordering process, is still very much a social tool today.
The proportion of orders placed is obviously not yet exhilarating. What is interesting here, however, is the fact that such bots or digital agents have something like a "soul. Bosshard wished the participants a good conference - with the ironic undertone that he assumed the guests would go home confused in the evening. But this at least on a higher level.
The brilliant speaker Tim Wu, professor at New York's Columbia University, argued that attention should be considered a key resource in the future. And yes, that (unfortunately) the US president is almost unbeatable in this discipline. In order to achieve attention for his cause, he needs so-called information filtering.
This focusing process takes place over four stages:
- Platform (be part of a prominent platform)
- Check-in (qualification via a check-in step)
- Addiction (Loyalty)
- Convenience (simplicity of use) must be ensured.
With this approach, he concludes that the three central intangibles are attention, convenience, and data. In the future, successful companies would operate within this triumvirate.
Professor Tim Wu of Columbia University explains his concept on attention hacking.
The MIT researcher from Boston explores the relationship ability and relationship quality between humans and machines. Her observation of children's imperative communication with Amazon's Alexa would also have an impact on the style of communication with peers.
This undesirable social effect - triggered by the use of Alexa - had caused Amazon to make Alexa accept prompts only with a preceding "please"! The speaker then asked the audience almost rhetorically whether the participants could imagine that people could fall in love with a digital assistant. The result of the online voting was astounding, as the graphic below shows.
MIT researcher Aleksandra Przegalinska is anxiously following the results of the voting.
Other exciting topics were pain diagnosis via image recognition or RFID chip implants for access and identification solutions in everyday life. The selection and abundance of relevant topics at this conference was remarkable and stimulating. We look forward to the program of the 16th European Trend Conference in 2020.
*About the author: Christoph Oggenfuss is a front office architect and CE-Owner MarkITing Zurich (Markiting.ch).
