I was reading Import AI recently and Jack Clark's notes on AI needing AI designers really resonated with me. The newsletter links to Josh Lovejoy's article on how to design with intentionality and purpose. There are, he argues, different levels of automation driven by AI, and we need to understand each level.

I won't give too much away there, but it reminds me of Don Norman's The Design of Future Things. While he didn't focus on AI specifically, he does discuss how products that "do work" for humans need to be good communicators. In other words, they need to explicitly and clearly outline what they are about to do, how they will do it, and (at least initially) why they are doing it.

For example, suppose you have a self-flying plane and the plane expects turbulence 10km out. Rather than simply changing the altitude or direction of the plane, it first needs to announce its intentions so the pilots aren't surprised.

The above also depends on what Amber Foucault calls the "minimum acceptable performance" of an algorithm. The pilots would only entrust (key word: 'trust') the algorithm if they already had an opinion that it's good enough to delegate to.

AI + design is such a beautiful, embryonic field.

Are chatbots a good case study to this post? There was tons of excitement about chatbots years back. Every co has them. You go on a site and it pops up on the side.

The promise always seemed to be that the chatbot will basically take over your people! No more agents worrying about what to say, just learn from the text and earlier convos. Now we have chatbots that are basically menus in a chat system and they just basically ask you to tell them the keyword youre interested in and nothing more.

So you apply this idea to the post... Chatbots were supposed to be THE thing in AI driven comms. Now they have fallen into disuse... As soon as people realized they were just a bit worse than a human, they became menus. A cliff of disuse and lack of trust.

Dunno how this article wouldve made it better early on tho. Would we explore affordances? Simulate chatbots? 

Of the 9 signifiers in the post I cant think of which wouldve made chatbots successful at a startup or business. Maybe semantic ladders? But maybe thats because that one is the most abstract!!