By Patrick Holmes
When assigned the overwhelming task of predicting the future of communications, I came away with one factor I feel has been overlooked.
Listening.
As a culture, we don’t listen very well. We can talk at one another very well. We can post comments at one another in disparaging ways, extremely well. We can be advertised at in a multitude ways, such as digital, print and broadcast methods.
At this point in history, humans are in a frenzied state of reactionary communication. We are failing at listening skills, to our detriment. Communication is a two way street and it’s future necessitates a health check on listening.
For instance, this recent article in the New York Times, is an open invitation to produce documentary films from the perspective of marginalized voices. Documentarians are coming to the realization of the importance of inviting Americans from red-states to tell stories. It’s appreciated when people of certain cultural groups are empowered enough to have the resources to tell the story of their own experience, in their own words.
A similar sentiment ended a recent article at WWD (of all places) with fashion designer (of all people), Tom Ford, ““I think when you sense that there is a divide in your country and that there are people who perhaps you’re not relating to, and that those of us who are fortunate enough to live in a world of very liberal human rights and privilege, it’s a wake-up call that we’re not addressing a big part of the country that does feel disenfranchised. It made me feel more nationalistic, if anything.”
Another place where the future of communication involves better listening is predictive crime. I’m the first to say, “back off” when it comes to over-reaching authoritarian activity. However, as highlighted in All About Circuits, “Big Data” is having a moment. It involves the use of big data to assist and predict crimes. This would include being able to assess when, where and at what times crime may be committed. The data collected originates from sources such as historical crime data, 911 calls, economic, demographic and geographical information. Software is then used to analyze the data. There is cause for concern that police departments may go too far with their authority. Also, humans tend to get lazy. The risk of police departments letting the machines do all of the work is legitimate. However, there are situations where this predictive practice can be useful. For instances, if big crime data and big medical data could begin a dialogue through the software, perhaps data trends regarding drug abuse or overdoses could be realized. Communities can then take a more proactive approach to safeguarding citizens and getting help for those people with addictions.
One last component to the future of communications falls in the realm of AI and neural network bots. We are soon approaching the Web 3.0 era. According to Wired, AI bots are learning and creating new languages as they figure out tasks and functions within the virtual world they reside. The article follows Igor Mordatch (I love his name, so sci-fi) in his work at OpenAI, a lab started by Tesla founder Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Mordatch demonstrates how the chatbots are learning to navigate and help one another within the virtual world they inhabit. We as humans need to listen to what this artificial intelligence is learning, and gather data from it. We need to listen to how the developers of this technology are programming these cognitive machines and what they are capable of. We must remain vigilant as to not let them over-run us and harm our lively-hoods. But we should also listen in to see how they can be beneficial to people in need, such as people suffering from debilitating disease and advocate best practices for this emerging technology.
Patrick Holmes 