The text is about an aspect of design fiction, which can make it so appealing. Good design fiction doesn’t lose itself in the description of technology and laser action, but ties into the ordinary and weaves the fiction into it. As an example, a scene from Westworld is used, in which an AI calls the protagonist to tell him, that they didn’t find a job for him.
I need to take into account, that the design of voice assistant also has implications if you don’t have such a device at home; the difference between personal and non-personal voice assistants.
I am also deeply impressed by this ability to analyse pop-culture… These thoughts about the scene seem relevant to my research on voice assistants:
- The empathy the HR AI is able to evoke in Caleb — it feels like Caleb doesn’t want the AI to feel bad for rejecting his application.
- That Caleb is able to notice that he may in fact be talking to an non-human. He broaches that point with a bit of awkwardness as if he is also empathetic and doesn’t want to embarass the AI.
- That Sean the AI seems to not get the subtle humor of Caleb’s “is there a different shape I can fit myself into” line and so just stops responding. Which I can imagine as either a subtle way of handling an error state — as if the algorithm can’t find a ‘next state’ or whatever. Or it’s actually how a somewhat humorless human might respond — doing the audio equivalent of a couple of blinks and a blank stare.
- That Caleb politely ends the call, almost apologizing rather than just hanging up.
He then goes on to extract important points for design fiction.
The first point is diegesis, in which one gets to know details about the fictional world through narrative. In this case here it’s that we know that an AI was involved in the job application, but not to what extend and a lot is left to our imagination.
The second point is the second order read in which design fiction moves beyond the narrative to issues of scale and implications. What was needed to make this phone call between human and AI possible? In terms of tech, but also bureacratic infrastructure, business wise, etc.
we’re using the unfolding of this moment of drama to prototype, in a cinematic context, through visual storytelling, a world with AI agents doing such things as rejecting job applicants. But there is all of this other material that gets cooked out of our breakdown and analysis — all of which was generated by allowing my Design Fiction mind to imagine the contingent circumstances that would make this moment come to pass in some fictional near future world.
There are three reasons to go to these extends of imagining what that world looks and feels like.
- It’s a kind of crossfit for the imagination. It’s over the top, but it’s really good practice. And it’s also hard to actually do.
- It’s mental prototyping.
- Design fiction helps practice imagining the future, which we humans are realy bad with.
The diegetic prototype is explained better (just after I had to look it up again…). It’s a thing in the storry that hints at the world at large. We can imagine how the world is, just by this one thing.