Bothered By Bots? Think Augmented Intelligence

The robots are here and I, for one, can’t wait to meet them. I’m fascinated by tech that has taken over what was the “stuff of humans”, whether that’s a painting by an AI “old master” (JWT Amsterdam’s The Next Rembrandt) or a restaurant review (AI trained with Yelp data), both of which were almost indistinguishable from the real deal.

To consider these real-life sci-fi moments as threats to our creativity, or even our jobs, is madness. And more importantly, it’s missing the bigger point – technology fuels human creativity. It doesn’t replace it. It forces us to think “people first”, to truly, deeply understand human context. It inspires us with the unimaginable. It elevates what is possible beyond anything we’ve seen before and augments intelligence by teaching us to solve problems differently.

The Canadian Down Syndrome Society campaign Down Syndrome Answers [above] is a case in point. Inspired by people’s search behaviour, it answers Google’s top 40 questions on the subject with videos featuring people actually living with Down Syndrome. The excellence of the campaign comes from its deep understanding of context; when prospective parents learn their unborn child has Down Syndrome, they have 10 days to decide whether to proceed with the pregnancy or not – and usually they’re making up their minds by reading WebMD threads. Naturally, receiving a video message answering their query from a child with Down Syndrome is an unforgettable, emotional, highly effective heartbreaker.

Tech-inspired thinking becomes even more effective when we start measuring it properly. In his TED talk on “How better tech could protect us from distraction”, designer Tristan Harris talks about the importance of tech with human goals. One of his favourite examples, Couchsurfing, a website that matches people seeking a place to stay with a free couch – measures success not on time spent on site, but on something they call “net orchestrated conviviality”. This looks at how many net hours of good times the service has enabled for both users.

New tech such as VR and AI is allowing for even more creativity in interactive applications. For financial services brand TD Ameritrade, our US teams used IBM Watson to power Alvi, a bot that chooses investing education materials for a user based on their investing personality. Instead of having to complete a dry, technical survey, Alvi will ask if you’d rather be a vampire, zombie, or werewolf, among other, non-financially related questions. Your answers would then guide your investment profile and the content that’s best for you.

A gold Lion winner at Cannes’ Cyber awards this year, Ford’s MAX Motor Dreams [below] lets you record your baby’s favourite sleepytime car ride and simulate it – complete with sound design replicating engine and traffic noises and LED lights mimicking street lighting – in a specially designed cot – so you can get your baby to sleep without having to take a drive. And then there’s mind-blowing tech like Google’s Tilt Brush, which lets you paint and create artworks in 3D space with VR.

Back on planet Earth, there’s lots of chat these days about chatbots. Rest assured – this isn’t a fad. Ovum, a market research consultancy specialising in the digital economy, has predicted that by 2021 there will be more digital assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, on the planet than humans. Management consultancy Accenture predicts that in five years, customers will select a business’s services based on their AI capability.

As a result, it’s thought that the value of the writer will increase as voice becomes more dominant than image. There will be renewed importance placed on character development skills – a digital assistant for Domino’s delivery will need to sound very different to one for a medical diagnostic service. So, as a creative industry, the tech-enabled world is our oyster. But we need to lean into it. If we keep worrying about how to make our creative ideas more effective at interrupting people, we’re going to miss the boat.

There is no doubt that technology and data use is giving control back to the people; allowing individuals to choose what kind of experiences and relationships they want to have with a brand. If we, as a creative industry, want to influence their choices, we need to learn how technology can actively influence the creative process. Be curious about the advances developing around us. Embrace new ways of working and people with different skills to yours. Be open to different definitions of what makes an idea, and perhaps even a new definition of creativity itself.