Our Sh*tty Robot Future
Future Commerce
The Uncanny Valley
"I'm appalled at my own behavior when I go back and listen to my Alexa voice recordings," says Mike Downey. "It makes me want to philosophize, like, who am I really then? Like, is that revealing something about me that is latent?" He thinks we all have this sort of hiding below the surface; it's just taken a piece of technology to reveal it.
In this episode, we are bringing to you a new old piece of content that is more relevant today than it has ever been as we just celebrated our 2023 edition of Visions, our annual Audio-Visual Trends report, first with a launch in Chicago at our Visions Summit at the Retail Innovation Conference and then with the launch of our multiplayer experience and our new zine, the Multiplayer Brand. Visions Volume 4 is the biggest, baddest piece of content that we have ever produced, but that makes the content we did last year that much more relevant because from the vantage point of 2023, we can see how predictions and anxieties that we had in 2022 came true or were put to rest.
It’s a great interview with Michael Miraflor, an incredibly prolific thinker and the Chief Brand Officer at Hannah Grey VC, and the then CEO and now President of Trade Coffee, Mike Lackman, to talk about the changing nature of work, how our roles in society are altered and our perspectives are altered by algorithmic timelines and how automation and AI are redefining all of the above. Listen now!
“Google, how do I speak to a human?”
- “It's creating some dynamics where a much smaller number of people can drive outcomes with a much larger number of dollars. If we're not really effective at promoting financial literacy and asking some big questions about what's different looking 20 years ahead from what the last 20 years were like, then there's going to be some collateral damage in the system that I think is really bad for everybody involved.” - Mike Lackman
- “You can automate things to make them more efficient, but you have to know how to do it well in the first place with a certain level of agency and authority and getting your hands dirty with it.” - Michael Miraflor
- “Just blatantly throwing software at problems to solve problems, thinking that it's the software that overcomes the deficiencies of an impractical product or business, I think is itself inherently a challenge that we're all facing in our industry.” - Phillip Jackson
- “One of the most frustrating things about customer service is when you end up on the phone with a system that is trying to replicate that of a human voice, human interaction, or human way of answering questions... You don't have to try to trick me to think that you're a person because you're just not. I would rather hit a series of numbers…to get you to answer versus me interacting with this AI as if you were human.” - Michael Miraflor
- “You have to get a gauge on what young people are thinking as expressed by what they're wearing and what they're doing. If you can't really get a sense of that, because the dominant form of social media is encouraging the proliferation of micro trends that really aren't a reflection, but they send a smoke signal, then you might have something that's a bit problematic on your hands.” - Michael Miraflor
- “The interesting piece here is that when we talk about this dystopian sort of like, well, this AI future, we're all going to get pushed around this and that. The alternative to that has to be an institution with enough trust and credibility that we're willing to let them become tastemakers, editors of newspapers, curators of fashion, pairers of coffee, those kinds of things.” - Mike Lackman
- “There was a dark side to those things that we do see as unifying, which is they tend to have some sort of pretty strong editorial, perhaps even tyrannical authority associated with them to be able to set those standards in place. And I guess my point of jousting with you on that when we think about AI, the counterpoint to letting the system just run the algorithm unchecked is that someone has to put guardrails on that.” - Mike Lackman
Associated Links:
- Learn more about Michael Miraflor of Hannah Grey VC
- Learn morea about Mike Lackman of Trade Coffee
- Have you checked out our YouTube channel yet?
- Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!
- Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce
Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!
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