“Conversational” AI Is Really Bad At Conversations
5 min readJan 29
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A read-only interlocutor is a robot troll.
In 1977, my father, a computer scientist, brought home a teletype terminal (a keyboard and a printer, no screen) and an acoustic coupler (a box with two suction-cups that matched up with the speaker and mic on the receiver of a standard Bell phone), and he connected it to the DEC PDP minicomputer at the University of Toronto. I was…