(Hu)Managing Our Messaging

Lift Your Language

I remember a conversation I had with a client some years ago. It was in the early days of AI. I don’t mean tools such as ChatGPT; this was about chat bots on websites, ‘virtual assistants’ and characters like ‘Google’ and ‘Siri’.

We were discussing, in a light-hearted way, how natural it seemed to talk to them as though they were human beings. We’d say, ‘Hey Siri, could you please convert $675 US dollars to Australian dollars?’ or ‘Hey Google, what’s the weather forecast for Perth, please’.

And when we had the answers, we’d sing out ‘Thank you’, without even thinking about it.

We laughed that we were being so polite to machines.

Real human beings should be so lucky!

Some years later, I know that some people (no names and details) go for days without any face-to-face human contact at all. Politeness or rudeness, conversation or enquiry, even intimacy or problem-sharing… all interactions with machines only.

In my (relatively limited) observations, human communication is suffering… badly.