Expert interview: Dave Moschella, author of Seeing Digital

Talking user interfaces

He adds: “It is the mission of the industry to build systems that learn, talk, recognise and get smarter over time. When Alexa came out, it shocked Google and Apple, and they had to catch up. Now Amazon wants to link Alexa to a hospital.”

What makes these new AI systems compelling for Moschella is that they speak. “Voice is the big change,” he says. “Think something as simple as a washing machine error code.”

For most people, an error code is meaningless. Moschella believes it would be far more useful if the washing machine actually told the user what was wrong.

But people’s experiences of smart speaker devices like Alexa shows that a natural language query has to be spoken in a certain way so that the device can understand the question.

Arguably, this is not that much different from how web searches used to work, says Moschella. “Most people had to learn how to enter a search string on Google, so I expect we will adapt to the voice user interface,” he says.

So if you accept that one day, people will have a conversation with their washing machine, what else is possible? Entering the realms of science fiction, Moschella argues that people’s interaction with machines is shifting. “Look at how people type with their phones,” he says. “The whole man-machine interaction is shifting to the human platform.”

He anticipates technological enhancements being made to the human body, such as high-tech hearing aids, glasses to see at night, 3D-printed body parts, smart pills, and the ability to collect health, wellbeing and medical data from wearables.

Disruption in digital

According to Moschella, in the past, if a business used a mainframe and wanted to convert to a different system, it would cost a lot of money to switch. But today, with platforms such as Facebook and Google, there is no monetary cost to switching, he says. This means that the web giants may find that they, too, get disrupted by something new.

“I’d be shocked if one of the big web companies – Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google or Microsoft – wasn’t significantly disrupted by some change, because it is relatively cheap to come up with scenarios to change things,” he says.

“For instance, if talking to an Echo Dot is how you make purchases, this totally bypasses Google search.”

Asked about the power of data, Moschella says: “Many businesses will be data-driven going forward. The big data drive is absolutely true.”

For Moschella, when people talk about transforming, it is about getting people on the same set of data and responding to that data.

The mass collection of data hit the headlines recently with Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data to target US voters. Commenting on such activity, Moschella says: “The fears are not new. People have predicted and expressed concerns about surveillance and privacy over the history of computing, but the social platforms bring this out more because they touch people more than platforms in the past.”

Moschella argues that a platform such as Facebook uses data to profile its users. “People have been talking about analytics and targeting for ever,” he says. “This is precisely what Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are doing – using data to profile users at a detailed personal level.”

The challenge for the internet – as the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, recently wrote in an open letter – is to shift away from the walled-garden advertising model used by the web giants. In effect, millions and potentially billions of people are contained within a closed environment, and can be profiled and sold to.

Moschella says: “In a sense, walled gardens are not on the internet. Berners Lee regrets this.”

The web giants could not wait for the internet to develop its own commercial model, he says, giving the example of how a £45 Echo Dot could supplant Google’s supremacy in web search.

Moschella believes it is easier than ever for the web’s status quo to be disrupted and for people to switch to alternative providers.