BuzzFeed staffers, a software engineer, and PSFK's Director of Research & Strategy chart Facebook M's accomodating, expanding and troubling capabilities
Some months back, Facebook introduced M, an AI-slash-human-powered virtual assistant to several hundred users in the San Francisco bay area. Mind you, M isn’t just a Siri clone: the human brains behind it allow it to perform much more complicated (and offbeat) tasks, like drawing wacky pictures or sending (live!) parrots to someone’s office, as well as more practical tasks like booking flights or buying movie tickets—hint, hint, Star Wars aficionados.
Though seemingly useful, it begs asking: is Facebook M slated to become indispensable to our lives? Will it become a competitor to Google even? Is it bringing us one step closer to an inevitable dystopian future? We talked to tech writers and a software engineer, who got to test out the virtual assistant, to understand its role in our AI-assisted future.
M has capabilities that exceed most other bots, Alex Kantrowitz, senior technology reporter at BuzzFeed News, told PSFK. “Most bots you speak with are terrible at handling requests. This one seemed to have an answer for every question. Within the first few hours [of using it], I was able to book a flight directly through M,” a surprising transaction for a virtual assistant to complete on its own.
Arik Sosman, software engineer at BitGo, touted as the world’s most secure bitcoin wallet, was also impressed by M’s functionality. He used M to figure out directions to a movie theater with consideration made for traffic and gas use—a pursuit made all of the easier with the newly added ability to hail an Uber from within Facebook Messenger. “That was definitely surprising,” Arik said, speaking to the platform’s ability to weigh a flurry of fluid factors.
Meanwhile, Mat Honan, San Francisco bureau chief for BuzzFeed News, used M to send parrots to his friend’s office (because, why not?). “Basically what I was trying to do was make a complicated request that had some interesting ethical implications,” Honan told PSFK. “I really wanted to see was if M could see all of that.” Impressively, M’s human team parsed Honan’s wordy request and hired a parrot entertainment company to send two majestic birds over to his pal’s workplace. One parrot even opened the friend’s beer bottle, which is a feat in an all-too different but equally exhilarating world of accommodation.
But aside from executing novelty tasks, can M become deeply integrated in our everyday?
Kantrowitz has been using M’s set-it-and-forget-it alerts in the weeks he’s been using the app:
“Every day at 7AM, I have it message me a story about the New York Jets. At 7:30AM, it sends me the weather, and a note on whether it will rain. At 9:30AM, it sends me the top image from Imgur, and later in the afternoon, a forecast for 9PM that evening.”
He is also likely to turn to M when searching for nearby restaurants, researching flights, or booking tickets for a movie.
Sosman also finds M’s functions very convenient, but he attributes M’s powers to the human team behind it:
“I don’t expect that once it scales, it will be be as useful as it is right now.”
Honan identified a similar trend. “I’ve noticed in recent weeks that it seems to be doing less…it’s probably scaled back because the users scaled up. The basic idea is that right now there is a crude AI, and then there are human beings looking over its shoulder all the time. When it comes to anything complicated, human beings take the wheel. But a lot of the tasks you’re asking for are pretty complicated. Long term, it’s probably best at things that require minimal to no human intervention.”
Aside from Facebook M’s scalability, we wanted to know if anything else about the virtual assistant seemed concerning. Should we be worried about crazy-smart AI running our lives with full access to our data and penchants for parrots?
“It’s natural to worry when you give so much personal information to a corporate entity,” Kantrowitz said. “[M] knows my brothers’ names, where I live, when I’m traveling, what sports teams I am a fan of, what food I like to eat…what Facebook does with that data we’ll have to wait and see.”
“I suppose the element of it being largely contractor-driven worries me a little it,” Honan explained, “but that’s because the economy becoming more contractor-driven is worrisome.” He’s less concerned about the AI, or privacy. “As of yet, it’s not a very sophisticated AI. I’m not asking it personal things. It doesn’t seem to be able to access my Facebook information.”
As a type of rebuttal, Sosman remarked, “if there’s anything to worry about, it’s the privacy aspect. I’m not worrying about the growing capabilities of AI. I’m actually quite excited about it.”
Our own President of Research & Strategy, Scott Lachut, centers his concerns on the potential for stunted marketplace competition:
“I think there’s something interesting to think about when you consider algorithmic biases: what happens if M partners with big corporations and only offers me suggestions or recommendations to serve those corporate interests rather than giving me the best suggestion based on my particular needs?
It could stamp out a lot of the competition that exists in the marketplace.”
It begs asking, then, how will Facebook M look in, let’s say, 2018?
The newly launched service has plenty of potential to evolve and expand. Honan and Kantrowitz both believe that M has a huge potential for commerce and retail, and to potentially become big competition to Google.
Kantrowitz forecasts two extremes: “FB could realize [M] is not worth the effort and give up, and maybe it’ll disappear as quickly as it came into people’s consciousness. The second possibility is that it replaces search, and people look to M to handle things that they’d otherwise look to Google to do.”
Anything in between is fair game, too.
“It’s possible M rolls out and it’s decently effective, but not transformative,” Kantrowitz said. “I think the real test for Facebook will be what happens when it’s not just offering M to a few thousand people in the Bay area, but rolling it out to the hundreds of other people that use the messenger app.”
Sosman agreed. He hopes that Facebook M would offer much of the same services, “but [be] able to perform all these tasks without humans powering it. Its current capabilities exceed those of true AI, and if Facebook manages to implement them without human help, that’s going to be great.”
Images:
db Photography | CC | Image cropped and altered
Joe The Goat Farmer | CC | No changes made
Esther Vargas | CC | No changes made