On the Duplex demo

Disclaimer: I worked for Google long ago, and I may work there again someday. I had nothing to do with Duplex.

The Google Duplex demo has caused some fairly heated & widespread reactions; to paraphrase, "The person on the other end doesn't know or consent to talking to a robot! This is a deceptive violation of their rights!" I think that I understand, a little, why people react this way, but on balance I find it logically ridiculous. I am also convinced that it will seem both logically and emotionally ridiculous to most people within a generation.

As someone in my 40s, I understand the relationship that 20th century people once had with their phones. I am old enough to remember "reach out and touch someone" being a thing that real people felt was the primary purpose of telephonic communication. However, over the course of my adult life, this use case has been utterly swamped by the rise of automated or semi-automated telephonic processes, constructed by immense and remorseless engines of bureaucratic modernity, that use the telephone as an electronic siphon to suck value out of my time: legally protected political robo-calling, flagrantly illegal commercial robo-calling, telemarketing driven by script-reading call center employees (who, in this role, are functionally biological components of a machine, not autonomous individuals), and a constant nagging flood of scam hangup calls.

Conversely, nearly all outbound phone calls that I make, except to close friends and family, now involve navigation through a robotic phone tree. In other words, I am interacting with a succession of artificial voices for many minutes before a usually-brief chat with a human being.

In other words, for any human being less than about 45 years of age, nearly all telephonic interactions in their adult life have been to a large degree robotic. It is hard to get up in arms because the robots are going to be slightly more fluent in the future. They have been getting more fluent all my life (for example, many phone systems can now recognize numbers that are spoken rather than dialed on a touch-tone pad). I don't care. Deep down, you probably don't either.

Search your feelings; you know it to be true. How many times in your life have you picked up the phone to a telemarketing call and thought to yourself, "Oh thank goodness, I am super glad to have been interrupted in this fashion because it's a human being talking to me rather than a robot? My heart brims over with joy!" None. Zero times. You have never thought this.

On the other hand, suppose you received a call that said: "Hey, just wanted to let you know that a recently deceased distant relative left you a one million dollar inheritance; a check and a letter with details will be arriving in your mailbox today. You don't have to do anything else but cash the check, thanks, take it easy!" You would not care whether the voice was a robot or a human being. You would be skeptical, but when you got the check and the letter, which said, "By the way, a robotic call was placed to your phone number earlier today to inform you that this letter would arrive so you wouldn't miss it," you would not think to yourself, "OMG, I feel so unbelievably violated because that voice was a robot! Fuck this stupid million dollar check and fuck the horse that it rode in on!"

The moral valence of a phone call is determined by the value that the participating parties get out of the call, not by whether one or both parties on the call are mediated by machines that are slightly more adept than the machines which existed in 1992.

Lastly, if the above doesn't convince you, here are two more quick reasons that the future will welcome talking bots:

• People under 30 today ("millennials" or whatever you want to call them) hate making voice calls. They will probably welcome any opportunity to delegate this stupid chore.
• People under 15 today will grow up taking bots for granted; for example, textual chatbots, or other types of bots in online games that they play. They will feel no horror at the idea that spoken-word bots can have warm, engaging voices.

Semi-synchronous telephony with call invitations

Consider the relative advantages of text messages and phone calls:

• For activities requiring actual dialogue rather than notification, text messaging is incredibly inefficient: the interface is terrible and an exchange requiring N round trips requires 2N text messages, each of which requires that a human being fiddle with a phone and compose a new message. On the other hand, text messages do not require that the person on the other end be instantly available in order for the message to be received.
• Conversely, phone calls are excellent for negotiation: an exchange requiring N round trips can be conducted within the space of 1 phone call. However, if the person on the other end isn't instantly available, then you are stuck either leaving voice mail (leading to the possibility of phone tag) or calling repeatedly, which is also incredibly annoying.

What's needed is a technology that merges the best of both worlds: the ability to do rapid synchronous dialogue, and the ability to initiate that dialogue without the human having to play phone tag or to call repeatedly.

As it happens, voice mail and calling repeatedly correspond exactly to the two usual mechanisms that computer communication protocols use when one process wants to receive a communication from another process but doesn't know when that communication will be ready. For the nerdy people who care, voice mail is registering a callback, and calling repeatedly is polling. But never mind the jargon: the important observation here is that computers already know how to do this sort of thing, and do it all the time, so it's stupid to make human beings do it.

Therefore I propose the semi-synchronous phone call, or "call invitation" for short. Here is how it works:

1. Alice wants to talk to Bob. She sends him a call invitation.
2. The invitation goes into both Alice and Bob's invitation inboxes. An invitation has two possible states for each user: "available" and "busy". By default, all invitations are initially available for the caller and busy for the callee.
3. Bob now has three choices:
   • Bob can do nothing, which leaves it in his invitation inbox.
   • Bob can refuse the invitation, which deletes it from the system.
   • Bob can mark himself "available" for that invitation.
4. Alice has the same three choices, except that she's initially available for the invitation. She will have to mark herself "busy" if she starts doing something that would stop her from talking on the phone.
5. At any time, either Alice or Bob can toggle their status (available or busy) for the invitation. Talking on the phone implicitly toggles you busy for the duration of the call.
6. If, at any time, both Alice and Bob have marked the invitation available, they receive a phone call connecting them.

Now, no doubt many similar proposals have been made in the past. I'm specifically aware of proposals in the ubiquitous computing community for communication devices that act differently when you're available than when you're busy. Some of the fancier proposals involve the device or the environment sensing (via sound, motion, or whatever) when you're doing an "interruptible" activity, and automatically marking you available or busy.

However, I am not familiar with any proposal that works exactly the way I propose, and I claim that even small deviations from exactly the above design would result in a system that people would hate.

To begin with, in my proposal, people explicitly mark their availability information. I believe that availability must be volitional. Imagine if your phone decided on its own whether to ring, and whether to vibrate or ring audibly. Or imagine if your front door decided when to open in response to a knock based on your past behavior towards that person. On a deep, primate level, humans do not feel emotionally secure when their social approachability is outside their control. Implicit signals like body language work for controlling approachability in face-to-face interaction only because humans can volitionally and unambiguously broadcast these signals, and because other humans react instinctively with extremely high fidelity.

Furthermore, in my proposal, availability is relative to each message. It is not a universal property of the user: there's no such thing as "your" availability, only your availability reacting to a given message. This is important for several reasons. First, you never have to think about your availability when no invitations are pending in your inbox, which means you're not constantly toggling your phone into "available" or "busy" mode. Second, you're never broadcasting any information about your availability, which preserves your privacy.

Some proposals make a user's availability relative to a priority: you can say you're available for "high priority" calls, but not "regular priority" or "low priority" calls. Other proposals make availability relative to a user and a caller: you can put someone on your whitelist, which means that you always accept calls from them.

Such priority schemes sound like a good idea, but they would fail to solve the problem for two reasons. First, no code-based priority scheme could deal with the complexities of actual human interaction. Second, such priority schemes actually force the recipient to expose more information, with the putative aim of increasing privacy; this gets the problem fundamentally backwards. Consider the problem of setting your availability for calls from your in-laws, or someone you just started dating.

Every successful interpersonal communication technology leaves room for ambiguity in social interactions. Why didn't you answer the phone the other day? Maybe you were busy, or maybe you didn't want to talk to that person, or maybe you wanted to take the call but you're playing hard to get. Why didn't you respond to my text message/email/Facebook note? Maybe you haven't logged on lately, or maybe you can't stand me. Like it or not, human beings prefer the ability to deceive each other socially. My proposal preserves social deception in a way that priority schemes do not.

In fact, if there's any flaw in my proposal, it's this: I seriously think that many people choose media like text messaging, instant messaging, email, and social networking sites precisely because they do not want to talk, even when it would be more efficient. Talking on the phone forces you to interact even more instantly than instant messaging. It also exposes the vast amount of sub-verbal information that carries through your human voice whether you want it to or not, including, first and foremost, your emotional state. In the end, voice communication may be growing rarer precisely because it's not good enough at helping us conceal our true selves from each other.

How to distribute video

D. S. Isenberg notes that R. Cringely is smoking crack when he says that we should try to squeeze high-fidelity video down the wire at 64kbps. But Isenberg doesn't go far enough: the fact is, both the circuit-switched telephone network and the packet-switched Internet are pretty inefficient ways to deliver high-fidelity video to the world.

Demand for video content, like demand for nearly all human content, follows something like a power law ("Zipf's Law") distribution. To a first approximation, this means that, at any given time, (1) the vast majority of people want to watch the same small number of shows, and (2) there is a small minority of people who all want to watch different movies from each other. So you want to send the 100 most popular movies to everyone, and the 1,000,000 least popular movies to one person each. Call these two groups the "head" and the "tail" of the demand distribution respectively.

The telecom network and the Internet are both "point-to-point" networks: for anything to get sent anywhere, the endpoints of the communication have to agree to open up a dedicated connection. This means that the load on the content provider scales roughly in proportion to the number of clients. (OK, well, there's ongoing research on cooperative proxy caching, but these systems are not fully deployed, and even when they were fully deployed it's not clear the proxy caching overlay can overcome the inherent per-client costs associated with the Internet's underlying architecture.)

For the head of the video demand distribution, point-to-point networks are fantastically inefficient, because the server can't send out the content that everyone wants at once --- it must send out the content to each client individually. And the tail of the video demand distribution is so long that it's basically futile to try to cram all those unique bytes of video down existing pipes. Even if you got a fiber optic line leading all the way from the ISP to your wall socket, the Internet's center would not hold --- there is not enough backbone bandwidth to carry all the video content people would want. We can upgrade the Internet, but it would be costly.

So what should we do? Well, as it happens, our department had a reading seminar last year on this very problem, and some bright people in the systems group have been devising solutions...

For the head, use TiVo on steroids: digitally broadcast all the most popular video over the air; put a big hard drive in everyone's house; cache all the video on the hard drive until the user wants to watch it. We have terabytes of data raining down on our houses every day, and nearly all of it goes completely unused.

For the tail of the distribution, use Netflix/Greencine on steroids: "sneakernet", a.k.a. physical media distribution. Physical media has high latency, but also high throughput and low cost. In a few years, an iPod-sized hard disk-based device will be able to hold dozens of DVD movies. You could mail one of these to your customers. Barring that (maybe hard drives remain too expensive to mail), optical disks improve more slowly, but the next generation of DVD will have higher capacity, and better video codecs will reduce the size of DVD-quality movies considerably. It should be possible to mail a dozen movies or more per disc by the end of the decade. Or, you could require that customers bring their iPods to the video store; the store, in turn, could use terascale sneakernet [note: 200K MS Word file] (Google HTML translation) to get each week's videos from central distribution.

Together, broadcast + caching + sneakernet are much more efficient than point-to-point networks. With the combination of these systems, you do give up the ability to get any video, in high quality, on demand at any time without leaving your living room --- but that wasn't going to scale at reasonable cost anyway.

p.s. Astute observers may ask: Well, web page demand follows a power law distribution too, so why shouldn't we use broadcast + caching + sneakernet for the web? The answer is that unlike movies, web pages (1) are relatively small, (2) change over time, (3) number in the billions, not the thousands; these three facts change the arithmetic, and make the point-to-point Internet more attractive. Nevertheless, these are mere engineering concerns; at the rate that hard drives are growing, it may soon be feasible to broadcast and cache a nontrivial fraction of the web in individual households.

A novel approach to gun control

Boy wonder hacker extraordinaire Aaron Swartz writes, in Lawrence Lessig's blog comments:

On a different note, I’ve never understood the reasoning that causes libertarians to think that restrictions on personal freedom, when called “property” (or something similar), not only become OK but something to be championed. I can see why a principled libertarian might conclude that “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours” is the best way to protect personal freedom, but it seems awfully bizarre to attack something like “increasing fair use”, since I can’t think of any reason such increases could hurt the freedom of authors.

To get away from the First Amendment, try this hypothetical: The Federal Weapons Commission was established to propertize the bullet-spectrum. They’re holding an auction to sell off the right to control certain bullet sizes. The winner gets to say how, where, and when bullets of that size may be used. (All other sizes, of course, are prohibited.) Oh, isn’t that funny — the gun control activists are buying up lots of the bullet sizes.

But hey! It’s property rights, not gun control, so it’s good. I’m sure glad those crazy Marxists didn’t convince us to adopt their “bullet commons” approach where you could sell guns that used whatever size bullet you wanted. It’s obvious that the auction system is much better for freedom.

For the record, I don't have terribly strong feelings either way about gun control. Washington has right-to-carry laws, and I may get a gun someday (for self-defense, and just to learn how to shoot). The point Schwartz is making is about the propertization of the electromagnetic broadcast spectrum, and the weird inconsistency of many libertarians on this subject (and many others involving various forms of "commons", including commons of intellectual property).

"Content" may go a progress through the guts of a worm...

...but otherwise it is none-too-kinglike. A couple of years ago it was fashionable in "new media" circles to proclaim that "Content is King" --- i.e., that the Internet would be dominated by big media companies that owned the music, movies, and other stuff that people wanted to download.

More recently, people like Jack Valenti are going up in front of Congress and making noise about how piracy is stifling the growth of broadband. The argument goes like this: broadband can only grow if there's demand; only Big Media (music, movies) can produce that demand; Big Media won't provide Content unless they can be sure it won't be pirated. Valenti and his cohort would therefore have us all hand control of our computers and networks over to Big Media. Or, in other words: "Kill the Internet to save broadband!"

The lynchpin of this whole argument is, again, that Content is King.

Well, let AT&T Labs researcher A. Odlyzko disabuse you of these notions. Interpersonal communication, not broadcast, has always been the primary bandwidth consumer of communication networks, even before the Internet. When given networks that are capable of point-to-point communication, people want to communicate with other people, far more than they want to passively consume content. AT&T's old ad campaign had it right: what people really want is to "reach out and touch someone."