via 500 words: on Facebook’s new feature that allows you to type 1 in the birthday box when someone is having a birthday and a bot automatically sends “Happy Birthday!” to them as you.
Which leads to the next question: at what point do bots start talking to bots? You know, why should you have to type “thank you!” when you can reply to a text with “1”? Or better yet, why should you have to type the “1” at all? If Facebook knows you want to say “thank you” to everyone (bots included) who wished you a happy birthday, shouldn’t they just give you the option to let Facebook do that for you on your behalf?
and
Where this gets weird — okay, even more weird — is when you consider others who are looking at the profile page of the birthday boy/gal. They’ll see you leaving the “happy birthday” wish and they’ll see the “thank you” reply, but they won’t realize that what they’re really watching is a sort of bot kabuki theater performance.
I enjoyed this one. Mostly because I’ll link to any blog post about “Her” but because there’s now this very tangible future where we’re all logged in to Facebook on our VR headsets, we see our friends, we socialize with them but we do it all entirely through artificial intelligence. Our bots are interacting with their bots and we’re just watching it like a TV show.
A depressing future but very well visualized in the movie Surrogates but with the AI/Bot angle.