Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Blake Hudelson

An Interview with Joe Toscano, Author/Speaker/Designer.

In this series I talk to leaders at the forefront of design and technology, getting an inside look from the minds creating the next big thing.

Joe is an author/speaker/designer, previously working for R/GA at Google. He is the author of, Designing Intelligence, a book set to be released early 2018.

Joe, can you give us a quick intro into your new book?

My book is called Designing Intelligence and it’s about designing for the age of ambient computing.

The book looks at how the world is moving towards artificially intelligent products and ecosystems that are monitoring the world around us (think Nest, Tesla, GE self-serving appliances, Google Home, Siri) and proactively working to improve our lives. In the future, these intelligent machines will do a lot of our work for us without us needing to explicitly tell them what to do by using screen based tools. The only time we’ll have to interact with technology is when we absolutely need to in order to help it make a decision, like when defining baseline settings or confirming actions. One particular paradigm that I’m especially excited about is conversational interactions. Over the years I’ve gotten really excited about the technical capabilities of conversational interactions and in my book I talk a lot about how these will be integral to how we interact with technology in the future.

For those who are unfamiliar with conversational interactions, can you give a few examples?

I think mainstream examples that most people have heard of are digital assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa. I might be biased, but my favorite is definitely Google Assistant.

I like Google Assistant the most because it’s no doubt the most capable in the industry and Google is constantly working to set the standard for voice services. Google is also the most helpful when it comes to providing resources on how to create voice services. Actions on Google is one of the best resources.

We also see voice being used as an interface in technologies like Tesla vehicles, GoPro Hero5, and Soul Machines, as well as many others that want to lead the way in this industry.

What drove your decision to write Designing Intelligence?

When I was a consultant at Google I saw the power of many new AI-powered products — both the good and the bad. I felt like the world would benefit from having a book that outlines best practices at a level that everyone can understand. The goal of this book is to have information that will allow technical experts to grow professionally, but also write it in a way that people who are new to the field can enjoy and understand.

How do you talk about AI to a non-technical crowd?

I’ve actually had to do this a lot, especially when I go back home to Nebraska. I use robots — physical manifestations of intelligent systems — to frame my explanation because it is what is most familiar to people. However, the most difficult thing about explaining these systems is that they don’t necessarily have to be tangible — they can be lines of code running in a computer program — which can be difficult for people to understand. There’s something about describing AI through the lens of a tangible form that makes it easier to grasp.

I think the example that really helped my parents see what’s happening is when I used their business as a metaphor. They run an auto body shop and I said, “Imagine if instead of 12 employees that work up to 8 hours a day, you had one employee that could do the same work of all 12 employees and would be able to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.” That, I told them, is what we’re beginning to do with artificial intelligence.

However, this is nothing new. We’ve seen artificial intelligence around for years. Some examples of products that utilize AI today include the Nest thermostat, Apple’s Siri, and Netflix’s recommendation engine.

At the core of these systems we see that they consume information (in the form of settings or commands) and use that information to accomplish a predefined task. These machines are considered specialized forms of artificial intelligence — ask them to do anything outside of their pre-programmed capabilities and they will have a tough time delivering. While many AI systems today are still specialized (and they will be for years), they’re capable of much more complex tasks and execute at speeds we’ve never seen before.

How do you think these technologies will change our everyday lives?

We will eventually reach a state of amplified human intelligence. Artificial intelligence will amplify human intelligence the way the steam engine amplified human mechanical abilities – helping humans travel farther, travel faster, and lift heavier things. The future I envision is a space where we’re capable of intaking and processing more information in order to make better, more informed, and more thoughtful decisions.

I also think that these technologies will enable us to get back to a more traditional form of human-to-human interaction where we actually look each other in the eyes when we talk, and aren’t connected to our phones 24/7 anymore. The way we’re stuck to screens nowadays is terrible for us and a world of ambient computing will change that dramatically. I’m incredibly optimistic about this future and I do my best to promote that vision throughout my book.

However, with all paradigm-shifting technologies, there are also downsides that we all need to consider. Fortunately, there are definitely ways to avoid a dystopic future. One is that these technologies have the potential to take the complexities of human life and reduce them into binary equations.

If we use these technologies to remove the things that make us human — emotions, creativity, empathy— this will be very dangerous.

I work to outline some of these scenarios in the book because in order to create systems that are helpful to humans, we must also understand how they could go bad.

What are some example uses of AI technologies that excite you most?

Some of my favorites include “simple” products like Nest to complex products like Tesla. But I think these are just the beginning.

In 15 years Tesla has 3000x more collective driving experience than the average human being will have in their lifetime.

In the future I imagine a world that is meaningfully connected in order to make human life more enjoyable and accessible, at an immense scale. For example, imagine if all our cars had sensors that recognized each time we hit a pothole, then sent that information to a database that tracked where potholes in the road were located. An intelligent system could figure out which ones get hit the most and determine the priority of fixing each one. Then automated bots that work 24/7 could be sent to repair our infrastructure without harming the flow of life.

What’s been the most difficult part about writing Designing Intelligence?

Making sure I fact check everything to ensure I’m not writing an opinion piece. I obviously have a lot of thoughts about this space, but I’ve worked hard to make sure it’s not a book full of my opinions. I’ve read stacks of books, talked to a wide array of experts, and done everything possible to pressure test the content. What I believe I’ve created from doing this is a very savvy book that presents knowledge people will be able to use not only for now, but for years down the road.

What’s been the most rewarding part of writing the book?

I’m not sure that the most rewarding part has come yet. It’s been extremely rewarding to meet and talk with experts in the field as well as give me the opportunity to speak at conferences around the world. I don’t think there’s anything that is more rewarding than having a great conversation with another human being. I hope that feeling scales with the book as I connect with people who have read it, but I also look forward to more human-to-human interactions as I travel around the world talking to people.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to continue the conversation, leave a comment or message me @blakehudelson or Joe @realjoet on Twitter.

Designing Intelligence was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Designing Intelligence

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