Amsterdam June 1, 2024– It won’t be long and we really won’t know anymore whether we are talking to a human or a computer. The machine watches and listens to us, and predicts what we want to hear. In the meantime, we think we are dealing with a new friend, a reliable seller or sympathetic service employee. Science fiction has become reality. Of course, beyond all doubt, people do indeed bond with their chatbot. ( Levy, Sex and Robots ) Maybe even harbor romantic feelings.
That is possible and is a reality. But not all chatbots always have your best interests at heart. Not that they all want to scam you or want something from you, but there are also sellers who want to sell you something. The first artificial influencers are already on the market.How do you know you can trust your chatbot? If we have a human in front of us, we are at least helped by some human knowledge.We are evolutionarily prepared to recognize intentions, and to interpret facial expressions, the pitch of a voice or even the scent someone emits.These factors can also be misleading, but at least we have a point of reference to judge whether we want to do business with someone or not: our intuition, based on our own experiences with others of our kind and the experiences of ancestors that are locked up in our genetics. material.We navigate partly on our gut, which relies on the experience with the gut of others. But the computer has no underbelly. So nothing ‘personal’ can be recognized when we come into contact with, for example, a commercial chatbot. He deftly reproduces signals, to which we respond.He won’t be caught.
Like a table tennis player mechanically returning the ball. He is becoming increasingly advanced in this regard, because he will soon know everything about us and will be nourished by the learning experiences with communication patterns of fellow chatbots. He is not guided by emotions or intentions that could be an unconscious clue to his real intentions. He reflects our reactions effectively. Our evolutionary knowledge of human nature is of no use to us to judge whether we would do well to respond to his advances.We will have to acquire a new kind of computer knowledge. Now we mainly talk about our ability to ask
a bot the right questions (prompting) so that we can get the most out of it. But we will also have to learn to understand our chatbots. That means: sharpening a new kind of intuition. So he can’t get everything out of us.
Roland van der Vorst is head of innovation Rabobank and CEO of Rabo Carbon Bank.
