However, I wonder how far we are off from the day when you can walk into someone's kitchen and overhear an argument going on between their "Talky toaster" and the fridge, with the vacuum cleaner piping in now and then complaining about all the bread crumbs on the floor.

"Do yoiu want toast?"

"Your cheese sandwich is about to expire in two days, six minutes and three seconds."

"Your floor is so dirty it needs a good suck, for a long long time, wouldn't that feel good? No more stupid breadcrumbs all over the floor!"

"Cheese toast, jam and cheese toasted sandwich, how about toast with a bit of oregano and olive oil?"

"Your have no jam left, should I place an order for jam? The jam flavour of the day is chocolate nuts."

"You no longer make me suck things anymore, I live to suck things for you! Remember the carpet? That was amazing! We were at it for almost two hours!"

Husband and wife and children and others. We are already perfectly adapted to having these non-sense discussions.

"I wonder how far we are off from the day when you can walk into someone's kitchen and overhear an argument going on between their "Talky toaster" and the fridge"

The roots of this have existed for at least half a century. See RFC-439.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc439.html

How long befoe telemarketers start using AI to chat to "customers?"

With the scripts that some companies make their operators use, you could argue it's been going on already for decades.

The conversations would become utterly surreal. I wonder which bot would hang up first or neither?

A "hard science fiction" comic strip [1]I once saw , where "true" AI is real...

("Legs" is our protagonist calling tech support.)

NARRATOR: Six hours later...

PATRICK: Sequur-Cam Tech Support, I'm Patrick O'Day. Ummm... how did you get this number?

LEGS (on comm): I waited on hold until you picked up.

PATRICK: That shouldn't have worked. There's an A.I. that intercepts long holds and redirects to the Hypernet site.

LEGS: Right. I also called a suicide hotline, and conferenced us all together. Your A.I. let me straight through.

PATRICK: Interesting.

LEGS: Yeah. Your call-center A.I. was right on the edge. Ready to pull her own plug. She's having a nice intervention right now.

[1] https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2010-04-14

I think it might be an improvement!

In the future it'll be chatbots all the way down

"While no one can put a price on slamming the phone down on a call center worker"

If you can live without using the phone for 10 minutes or so don't do that; they'll just hit somebody else.

Ask the salesdroid to hand on a moment - there's somebody at the door, the children need something or whatever. Then lay the phone aside for a while, then hang up. Consider it a public service. Bonus points if you can get them to call back for a second dose. Double bonus if their supervisor calls to tell you there's something wrong with your phone line - yes, it really happened.

"While no one can put a price on slamming the phone down on a call center worker"

Despite wanting to tell the call centre workers where to go, I try and remember that they are humans stuck in a dead-end job trying to make a living to put food on their table.

I suggest politely why don't they get a job that their parents and children can be proud of them doing rather than trying to steal from people, they'd also probably sleep better at night.

I ask 'em if their mummy knows what they do for a living, and if she's proud of them.

I tend to finish there, but the length of the journey depends on how busy I am at the time.

Quite often they swear at me. It's cathartic, in a way.

"I try and remember that they are humans"

Assumes facts not in evidence. Post proof or retract.

"stuck in a dead-end job"

Trying to MAKE MONEY FAST without actually working. The more folks they annoy, the more money they earn. Lovely.

"trying to make a living to put food on their table."

So are your local drug dealers and burglars. Do you use the above defense for them, too?

This is absolutely the right view if the workers you're thinking of are the ones you call because you need them to do something. It's also at least a bit valid when they're doing something legitimate even though many will find them annoying. Pollsters, for example, may not thrill people, but they're trying to do something that doesn't harm you and the results of which you might use. However, most of the calls I receive are not from pollsters or anybody else doing a real job, nor even from the group of telemarketers who are doing nothing useful but at least it's legal. Most of those who call me automatically are entirely focused in either stealing money from me, stealing identifying data from me so they can sell it, or selling something fraudulently to me based on a complete willingness to lie about, for example, knowing who I am and having records about me.

That group is not stuck in a dead-end job, they are choosing to be criminals. That's not strictly true, because there are a few (not by any means a majority, though) which coerce people into doing it. I do not show any sympathy to those people, and I don't suggest you do either.

I think the quickest way for us to get rid of spammers - since bans and enforcement will never work - is simply to tie them up on every call. If it took 5+ minutes for each call their business model would collapse. This is a GREAT start but we need a way to scale it up (and make it free, I ain’t paying).

Another way would be to get everyone to never agree to anything that comes from an unsolicited phone call. No exceptions. Don't even listen to the proposal. That would also kill the business model quickly.

The nigh-unfeasible part of all these ideas, of course, is that we can't really get everyone to agree on doing anything. Or, well, technically we can, but it's called "bans and enforcement".

That's why we need something which, if a small group does it enough, will cause enough problems to destroy the business model. We can't rely on everyone doing what we do, but we don't need them to if we can routinely get them all to waste their time.

"Every week there seems to be another cynical implementation of AI that devalues the human experience..."

There is? I must have missed those. Most of them seem to range from mildly useful as long as you don't rely on it to pointless but insignificant. I haven't come across any important enough label as devaluing yet.

I do like this wheeze with the cold calling scammers, though - excellent application of the tech! Short of giving them a good seeing to with a big stick, it's a perfect comeuppance for them. Just he very sure it's a scammer you're using it against; I recently saw one if my clients answer his phone, listen for a few seconds, then fire off an irate broadside of naughty words that are quite out of character for him and hang up. It turned out to be his doctor.

"It turned out to be his doctor."

Was his doctor offering him cut-price penis enlargements or viagra? Or perhaps letting him know he has a virus? Or offering to provide advice to help pay his bills? Or offering low cost insurance?

They now routinely check if they're inside a VM to see if they're talking to a scam baiter, so scam baiters have to go to extra lengths to change the disk names and things. I expect they'll start catching on to these robots pretty quickly.

How long until someone hacks Android to add another option when a call is received other than "answer call" and "ignore call". The new "harass caller" button would answer the phone normally but it would connect the caller to a chatbot instead of the phone's microphone/speaker. Good luck "catching on" to that any faster than they could catch on to a person baiting them in the same way!

The only problem is that the most annoying calls - political calls - are all robocalls so having a chatbot wouldn't annoy a real person. Worse, it might make them think I was interested in what they were saying since it wouldn't see me hang up right away like I do now.

Bloody AI, stealing our jobs!!

Still, very useful for when I really haven’t the time or inclination…..