My cynical chip is sparking.
On a glance, the article is about a group of guys who've made technological projects in the past that've been bought by big players, and they're trying to repeat that process - make something interesting, then get it at least far enough along that it'll be purchased by someone who doesn't want to end up
competing against it.
And at its core? Viv isn't a "think-for-itself" AI so much as it's
yet another advertising platform.
But won't Priceline pay Viv to get higher in Viv's rankings?
"We'll learn from the way that Google has done it," Cheyer says. "We'll have, um, organic results."
That's a non-answer, which I choose to translate as "We sure
hope so!".
I had difficulty reading past the point where the article started to go off into wonderland:
Why do you need a fancy phone if you can talk to your refrigerator? How much are you going to spend on an expensive computer when your alarm clock can do your shopping?
Because I can't fit my fridge in my pocket, and no alarm clock will be able to run this sort of software without an expensive processor doing the work anyway. Duh.
I suppose what they were trying to get across is the age-old idea that one day, everything will be a terminal device, and all the actual processing will be done by remote servers. Which guys like me are fine with,
so long as we own the servers (and indeed, media centers in the home aren't all that uncommon, these days). Again, this isn't a new concept, we've been moving towards it - slowly - for over a decade now. "Cloud based computer" is the current label being slapped on it. Who knows what we'll call it next year.
Whether it was the Viv team's failure to get across their points to the article writer, or whether it was the article writer's failure to articulate their own thoughts, I dunno; but that sort of rubbish in there makes me question the credibility of the whole article.
You know what
does have the potential to change society, in a big way? 3D printing,
when it gets to the point where it can reproduce microprocessors, and
if that technology makes its way into the general public's hands.
Imagine if, instead of going out and buying a new computer, you fed a packet of silicon and metal into your own personal replicator and it spat out the latest processor. You crack the screen on your phone, and feed the whole thing in and have it printed out anew - perhaps using a design that places the power button somewhere easier to reach this time. A priceless antique gets shattered - no worries, you'd scanned in the design earlier, you just print out the backup, complete with all its original flaws.
Of course, you can imagine a whole lot hinges on
who controls what gets printed. There's a huge difference between "a 3D printer in every house, and people can feed in their own designs" and "a 3D printer in every house, but they'll only print what they download from company A's servers, if the files are signed correctly due to their contents being licensed from companies B, C and D, who each happen to also incorporate advertising from companies E, F, G, H, etc etc etc".
Even the "golden age" that'd come from the first scenario wouldn't lead to "the end of work". Resource acquisition would still be as important as it is today, for example. This leads on to the point that countries which
lack essential materials - who currently function by providing cheap labour to those countries who
are lucky enough to have them - would need to rethink their economies entirely. It's… hard to imagine all the ramifications.
Anyway.
This Viv thing, at its best, will serve to be another way to profit off people while telling them it's in their best interests. More likely we won't ever hear of it again (at least, under this name); it'll likely be swallowed up into Siri / Google Now / Cortana, assuming it ever goes anywhere at all. The most it can hope for is to change how
advertising models work, but let's face it, even
that's not very likely to happen.
