By Benjamin Lyngdoh
Man is a social animal and chatting is an integral part of life. Chatting is a basic human function without which people would fall outside the continuum of society. The best and purest form of a chat is a face-to-face one. But, the times are shifting drastically now. The degree of chats with robots/machines is ever increasing especially among the youth. Be it education, health, finance, investments, banking, navigation, etc the quantum of solutions being offered by chat-bots is becoming more significant. For instance, people now depend on chat-bots to find a route to a certain location. The era of calling people to find any location is over. Three years back, the chat-bots were only text-based. Now they are text, voice, image and even video-based. They are being developed into more effective and indispensable bots. Are they good or bad? Are they a necessary evil? What is the boon and bane?
Chat-bots everywhere
Chat-bot is a machine/program that resides in the cloud. It can access all information available in the cloud which then basically forms the source for their responses to any query. For example, the website of education, health, financial, etc., organisations feature chat-bots. In fact, chat-bots is the first encounter that the user will have in opening most websites today. It will start with pleasantries like ‘Hi and good morning/afternoon’ and then get down to business on education or health or money. In many cases the user need not scan through the website as the chat-bots will do all the navigation and information-seeking. Well-versed technocrats point to the development of the internet. They explian that the evolution of the internet can be traced to the inception of the telegram. The telegram was a simple mode of information-transfer and presently the internet is a different mode altogether. They say that chat-bots will go through the same scale of transformation. Today they are mostly only text/voice but in future they will evolve into something very intelligent (say bionic humans). This means that the chat-bots will only get smarter. They will be more powerful with the ability to offer solutions to problems which the human mind cannot fathom at present.
Boon
Chat-bots give quick responses. They give specific responses as per the filters set by the user such as length, context, content, etc. For complex subject-matters, chat-bots provide the starting point for having some basic understanding as a beginning. The benefits are many for businesses. While selling their products/services, chat-bots can do the necessary discussion with the prospective consumer and even negotiate the price. Some examples – if a consumer wants to buy a printer; chat-bots can discuss with the consumer the moment he/she enters the website of the shop. The discussion will involve the type and make, price and warranty, discount and delivery, etc of the printer. All the while, the entrepreneur need not worry about the purchase/sales negotiation till the deal is final. The entrepreneur can use this quality time to attend to other tasks of the business. For the consumer, it saves time and money for not having the need to go physically to the shop. In health, the patients can schedule appointments with the doctors of their choice as per their convenience. Chat-bots will inform patients about the nature of a hospital and the ailments for which they provide treatment. These are all efficient time/money solutions to everyday human problems.
Bane
Chat-bots are the antonym of original thinking. Today, academic material is easily available through chat-bots. In the past, a visit to the library or even searching through the internet for documents was a must while preparing notes, assignments, etc. Further, the documents are to be compiled, read, compared, selected/not-selected for inclusion in the notes, etc. Now, chat-bots have made this important academic exercise irrelevant. The learner has become so dependent on chat-bots that in the absence of one the mind does not seem to work. The era of original thinking is declining fast. Even for simple topics the learners are jumping to chat-bots without some minimal effort of original thinking by connecting facts, figures and experiences. For example, take the federal structure of governance in India. Any thinking effort (by combining federal and governance) will conclude that it is about the centre, state and local governments. However, the majority will undertake the easy way out of chat-bots to find the answer. This writer has experimented with a few chat-bots (AI Chat-bot, AI Master, ChatGPT and Google Gemini). It is found that (at least for now) they only scan the surface of the available materials on any topic and deliver very general answers. They don’t encourage deep and analytical thinking.
It’s a machine after all
A prolonged chat with any chat-bot will give us the false impression and feeling of talking to an actual person. The program is written in such a way that the text responses and the voice modulations will give anyone a misconception of a person at the other end. This is the genius of coding. By understanding word, words, words pattern and sentences the chat-bots generate human-like text/voice responses that connect with the emotions of the user. All said and done, a machine is still just a machine and chat-bots are such and nothing else. Since it is a machine and depending upon how much it can access the cloud in which it resides, the chat-bots can sometimes give incomplete, misleading and even wrong responses. This is the reason why it is advisable that when using any chat-bot one should always go for the paid version. Standard pack is good but the best is always the pro/premium pack. These realities remind us that chat-bots are not better than humans; rather it is the other way around. Chat-bots are programmed by humans and not vice versa.
Humans are irreplaceable
Till date, machines/chat-bots have not been able to understand and replicate human emotions. No matter how real and authentic the discussion with chat-bots feel they will never be able to have a human touch (at least in the foreseeable future). Recent studies/observations have found that after continuous exposure to chat-bots and their quick responses, such users expect the same kind of quick response from their friends while chatting on Whatsapp. In the event of a slow response – anxiety, anger, misunderstandings creep in. Further, if the response from the friends on Whatsapp is not detailed like what is experienced in chat-bots, then this too can cause resentment and conflicts. These are red-flags. A machine can be quick and extensive in its response but it is only humans that can give meaning, context, emotion, understanding and empathy to any content. Chat-bots will narrate extensively on the federal structure of governance in India, but it is only the human mind that can give context and meaning to it in a localized sense (say Meghalaya) as to the existence or non-existence of such a structure.
In the end, just as technological advancement is a reality, chat-bots are also a reality. They are to be used but not in a manner that they subsume human intelligence, original thinking, contextualization and a touch of empathy in everything that is experienced. Chatbots are in truth only a supplement to problem-solving!
(The writer teaches at NEHU; email – [email protected])