Prediction certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Markoff: Consumers will eventually prefer talking to machines over humans for efficiency

John Markoff · a16z Podcast | Talking Humans and Machines with NYT’s John Markoff · Jan 2, 2019 · at 30:44

John Markoff, veteran technology writer, compares consumer adoption of automated voice and software interfaces to the historical adoption of ATMs over human bank tellers.

0:00 / 0:10exact quote · 10.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“First people will hate talking to machines, and then just like ATMs and bank tellers, they'll realize that it's a more efficient way to get the information you want. And we will spend much of our time talking to machines.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from John Markoff

Assertion Contradicted
Markoff: US productivity growth has been zero or negative since 2008
“Since 2008, you know, where you, The modern theory is capital's replacing labor. You should see that kind of productivity growth. We've seen no productivity growth. We've even seen negative productivity.”
John Markoff Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:32 a16z Podcast | Talking Humans and Machines with NYT’s John Markoff
Assertion Supported
Markoff: Transistor costs have stopped falling for non-Intel semiconductor companies
“For most of the industry the cost of transistors has stopped falling. And so as you scale, this is everybody but Intel in the industry says this. You, if you talk to Broadcom, if you talk to Qualcomm, all of the customers of the foundries say, you know, going …”
John Markoff Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 18:58 a16z Podcast | Talking Humans and Machines with NYT’s John Markoff
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Markoff predicts semiconductor scaling will permanently stop at 5 nanometers
“I believe, you know, based on talking to all the wise men I've been able to talk to in Silicon Valley, that there are three more turns of the crank. We go from 14 to 10 to seven to five. The industry can see its way to five.”
John Markoff Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:12 a16z Podcast | Talking Humans and Machines with NYT’s John Markoff
Assertion Contradicted
Markoff: Offshore call center jobs are returning to US data centers as software
“Because of falling cost of telecommunication, many of those jobs were outsourced to the Philippines and India. And now you have this Freakonomics reverse thing happening where those jobs are coming back to run in U.S. Data centers as software, not as U.S. Work…”
John Markoff Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 30:18 a16z Podcast | Talking Humans and Machines with NYT’s John Markoff
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Markoff: AI historically overpromises and underperforms repeatedly
“AI as a field has failed many times. Really quite remarkable how it over promises and underperforms over a long time”
John Markoff Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:37 a16z Podcast | Talking Humans and Machines with NYT’s John Markoff
Insight
Markoff: The AI community prioritizes replicating human capabilities to eliminate labor
“I think that the AI community has a set of values that, that are about building systems that basically replicate human capabilities. That's their value set. And oftentimes, you know, in a, in an economic system where you can take labor out of the equation, tha…”
John Markoff Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:04 a16z Podcast | Talking Humans and Machines with NYT’s John Markoff
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.