Machine Learning Meets Economics, Part 2

With Facebook Bots and everyone's ongoing addiction to Slack, Chatbots are all the hype in the world of AI these days. This article goes against that current and questions whether they really are all that. "Personified user interfaces, like chat bots or agents, are the new thing once again. But despite advances in artificial intelligence, they still have many issues and drawbacks compared to direct-manipulation interfaces. There was a debate around these interfaces in the 1990s, and it seems to be bound to repeat itself. In the last few weeks, Facebook unveiled a new push to use chat bots on Messenger, and Microsoft has a new platform for building bots. These bots are supposed to be the new way of doing everything, from delivering news (like Quartz' recent iPhone app) to letting you order pizza, flowers, and everything else. These bots act like people, in that they talk to you via text chat and try to understand free-form text. They don't attempt to pass theTuring Test, but they promise to be smarter (and more attentive) than an overworked call center worker tending to a dozen people at the same time."