Re: [projectvrm] Is Viv VRM?

[Doc Searls < >]

Exactly. This is the rub.

Had a good conference call this morning about Facebook’s “bot” thing on Messenger. Rather than replay some of that, I’ll unpack some of what Zuck himself said in April at Facebook’s F8 conference:

Now that Messenger has scaled, we're starting to develop ecosystems around it. And the first thing we're doing is exploring how you can all communicate with businesses.

You probably interact with dozens of businesses every day. And some of them are probably really meaningful to you. But I've never met anyone who likes calling a business. And no one wants to have to install a new app for every service or business they want to interact with. So we think there's gotta be a better way to do this.

We think you should be able to message a business the same way you message a friend. You should get a quick response, and it shouldn't take your full attention, like a phone call would. And you shouldn't have to install a new app.

Let’s hit the Pause button there.

He’s talking about giving us us a better way to talk to businesses, right? Maybe a new way to issue a call for help, or to send out a request for a plumber or a licensed electrician — something that helps us deal with the typical pains of being a customer of many products and services in the real world. In other words, something VRooMy. 

Now let's hit Play again.

So today we're launching Messenger Platform. So you can build bots for Messenger.

The "you" he's talking about here is not the "you" who wants a better way to talk to businesses. It's developers working for businesses that doesn't want human beings to talk to you, the customer. Listen closely and you can sense a decision, already made, to replace customer service people message bots. (Am I right about this, Dan?)

Zuck again:

And it's a simple platform, powered by artificial intelligence, so you can build natural language services to communicate directly with people. So let's take a look.

Meaning communicate one way: top down. And robotically. Robots wanting you to be robots too.

CNN, for example, is going to be able to send you a daily digest of stories, right into messenger. And the more you use it, the more personalized it will get. 

Back to the original “you”: a user.

And if you want to learn more about a specific topic, say a Supreme Court nomination or the zika virus, you just send a message and it will send you that information.

Personalized for you by constant algorithmic black-box observation.

And thus Zuck obeys all three of Zuboff's Laws.

And he's not the only one misdirecting attention away from surveillance. Nearly every story about Facebook's new bot thing focuses on lost jobs or the threatened app marketplace. Not on the loss of freedom. And not on the much more useful things his opening statement suggests. Hell, having a simple messaging conduit for calling any service office is a helluva lot more useful than having some machine guess at what you might want from CNN — accompanied, of course, by personalized advertising messages for things you don’t want, because you aren’t shopping right now and don’t want to hear that crap anyway.

But buckle up. Bots are coming.

In "Bot" is the wrong name, and why people who think it's silly are wrong, Aaron Batalion says all kinds of functionality now found only in apps will move to Messenger. "In a micro app world, you build one experience on the Facebook platform and reach 1B people.”

“You,” again, is commercial companies, serving up shit on bot shingles.

In The End of the Internet Dream, Jennifer Granick writes,

Twenty years from now,

• You won't necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why.
• The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
• Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for security.
• Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats censorship and control.

Zuboff's Third Law says we will fall into a regime of surveillance and control (where to a large degree we are already) “in the absence of countervailing restrictions and sanctions."

It's our job to correct that absence.

Maybe part of that job is to convince the likes of Viv to sell a service that sets us free. Not one that milks us for data, just so we can be sold more shit.

Doc

On May 10, 2016, at 11:24 AM, Iain Henderson < " class=""> > wrote:

Absolutely, whether VRM or not is all about the specific orientation of the agent - 3rd party or 4th party; they could be either, but not both at the same time. Who is doing what with the data generated will be the best way to get to that.

Iain

On 10 May 2016, at 15:53, john best < " class=""> > wrote:

All ,

So in the last week I had my legal team review the following AI concepts 

Wit.ai

Luis.ai

And Facebook chatbot

As suspected each of these maintains rights to the data that is passed through it . 

So far the only options I see right now are tensorflow and Watson , will be looking at both of these as well . It seems like AI is the next level of privacy invasion. ..

JB 

Sent from my iPhone

On May 10, 2016, at 8:48 AM, Steven Groves < " class=""> > wrote:

Gosh, one can hope so.  

It's this kind of interface that, if tied to a personal and secure datastore, would be / might be able to facilitate even complex relationships - like CHEDDAR.  Might be worth a briefing to the Viv team to see if they might be interested in supporting the idea. 

--

Socially Yours,

Steven Groves

Social Marketing Conversations

602.903.1010

" target="_blank" class="">

    

Steven.Groves - Skype

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 9:39 AM, Doc Searls < " target="_blank" class=""> > wrote:

Viv <http://viv.ai> says it is “radically simplifying the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything.

Buzzfeed calls it “a smart personal assistant that you can really, actually talk to, that understands you, that will become the connective tissue of your entire digital life.” <https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/siris-creators-want-to-take-on-facebook-be-your-everything-a>

Thoughts?