Why lethal? Because of how we evolved to privilege speech over breathing. In most mammals, the larynx is high in the throat, keeping the airway and esophagus reasonably separate. In humans, however, the larynx descended to enlarge the vocal tract. This made for a more resonant cavity, enabling singing and complex speech, but it also created a shared pipe via which even small amounts of wrongly routed food could cause us to choke. But the evolutionary advantage of advanced communication outweighed the survival risk of occasional choking.
That, however, is often an error. People no more want to chat with every device in their life than they want to have dinner with their Kitchenaid dishwasher. They just want those things to do what they were bought to do, and chat, too often, gets in the way. Consumers are increasingly wary of chat interfaces, wondering why they are appearing everywhere.
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Compared to that, human banter—our compulsive, choking-inducing chatter—looks like evolutionary baggage that keeps distracting us. The true impact of LLMs may resemble electricity’s shift from stage-lighting novelties to silent, ubiquitous wiring—boring, invisible, and indispensable. Humans need to stop thinking about AI as chat, an artifact of the original chatbot error still leading things astray.
Overall, I am fully bought in that not everything needs a bolt-on chatbot. I also really like the framing of "tools" not "chatbots" or "agents." That framing alone will help force the conversation (heh) if something needs chat as an interface.
Personally, I still think that this human interaction model actually leads to very interesting opportunities to consumer facing products. The need for humans to communicate is going to be leveraged for engagement - some for good, some for ill.
That initial insight that humans have a compulsion to communicate is the main insight exploited during the social media era and now likely going to continue to be exploited during the AI-consumer product era.
The question remains - hmw ensure that we also do good when leveraging a clear psychological itch that we scratch?
gurupanguji
