Every so often, an idea comes along that mesmerizes Silicon Valley and convinces the most powerful people there that this innovation will irrevocably alter the course of humankind. Outsize proclamations are made, lavish events are held and millions of dollars in venture money are funneled into young, unproven companies. Right now, that fixation has landed on chatbots, little artificial-intelligence programs that work like personalized assistants.  In January, Sam Lessin, an entrepreneur and former Facebook employee who is working on his own chatbot called Fin, wrote a blog post breathlessly declaring the trend “a fundamental shift that is going to change the types of applications that get developed and the style of service development in the Valley.” If prominent investors, executives and entrepreneurs like Lessin are to be believed, the arrival of the chatbot heralds an entirely new phase of computing, one with the potential to overwrite the current app-centric model that smartphones rely on.  In late March, Microsoft invited 5,000 developers to San Francisco for an annual conference called Build. A palpable sense of excitement surrounded the event: Microsoft intended to show off its latest achievement, a software tool kit that would allow anyone to use its A.I. platform to create custom chatbots. Though the company is often viewed as a dinosaur, it has introduced some surprisingly sleek products in recent years, and its bot tool kit seemed interesting enough.  Over a live stream, I watched Satya Nadella, the chief executive, pacing triumphantly as he talked about the company’s advances in machine learning and language processing. I nodded along as he described a “personal digital assistant that knows you, knows about your world,” a bot “helping you with your everyday tasks.” A few minutes later, an executive giddily showed off a chatbot that lets people order pizza via text message, Skype or Slack. The demonstration centered on what Microsoft presumably found most dazzling about the bot: It could be programmed to recognize slang. You can send it a message like “sup pizzabot, send a cheese pizza to my crib ASAP,” and a cheese pizza will still arrive at your crib, ASAP.  We’ve long been promised a future augmented by intelligent helpers, of the type depicted in movies like “Her”: benevolent digital beings who remove some of the chaos of modern existence by organizing our lives, all the while offering emotional support through chipper encouragement and cute jokes. Sometimes, these helpers turn on us, as in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Either way, artificial intelligence represents the manifestation of humanity’s biggest hopes and fears for technology. But for now, it can help us order Domino’s in a different window on the same device we would normally use to order Domino’s.  Commerce seems to be the primary preoccupation of the booming chatbot universe. There’s Operator, an all-around assistant bot created by a founder of Uber; Assist, which lets people reserve hotels and concert tickets by text; and x.ai, which books appointments. In April, Facebook announced that it was introducing chatbots to its Messenger app, so that the company’s 900 million users can order food and get the news, simply by “chatting” with the bots on their contact list. Like Facebook’s, most of these bots work right inside messaging apps; it’s like texting with a concierge, or if Siri birthed a litter of smarter, faster and nimbler offspring — ones you can issue orders to silently and who never get tired, or creeped out, by the nature of your requests.  Outsourcing work to bots sounds ideal to me. My attitude toward technology is fueled by a desire for efficiency — and by laziness. In college, while my friends got into D.I.Y. hobbies like woodworking and sewing, I joked that I was ready for the D.I.F.M. — do-it-for-me — revolution. And yet for all the hype, none of these bots seem to work that well yet. Over the last few weeks, I’ve played with a handful and have struggled to make much use of them. I recently needed to make a reservation for a work lunch. I fired up Operator to find me a table, and it quickly sent back a pleasant but unhelpful reply — declining my request, as it didn’t yet have that capability.  I also suspected that many chatbots depend on human workers to complete their requests. Mat Honan, the San Francisco bureau chief for BuzzFeed, was able to uncover the logistics behind M — a chatbot concierge in development by Facebook — by sending, of all things, a rental parrot to another Bay Area tech reporter. It worked; the parrot arrived. But afterward, Honan made some phone calls and discovered that M’s artificial intelligence was largely a front. M processed the question and passed it along to a human counterpart to finish the job.  Similarly, Operator, Magic and Fin all fall back on hybrid bot-human models. Seen this way, chatbots aren’t that different from hiring a worker through a service like TaskRabbit or Handy, but without ever having to acknowledge there’s another human at the other end. As the sheen of A.I. fades, you can see these chatbots for what they really are: a convenient way to hide human labor. It starts to resemble an update on a centuries-old illusion called the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing device that was said to be automated but was, in fact, powered by a person hidden inside the “machinery” itself.
Silicon Valley has fallen in love with A.I. assistants, but so far they’re hardly impressive. Is it the industry’s fault, or is it ours?