Scout sounds like an excitable little dog that runs headlong into trees when trying to catch a frisbee.
Given Microsoft's long history of failure with personal assistants I'm looking forward to this one! Clippy, Cortana, Copilot! Wasn't an animated dog called rover one of these way back? The best of all was unquestionably Ms. Dewey for Microsoft Windows Live Search who is almost forgotten.
Microsoft can't learn a thing from their own history. Perhaps if they made a product that was useful and not deceiving their users they'd have more success. It seems they aren't capable of that anymore.
I'd really be worried if a competent company was trying to make people addicted. This is absolutely a thing. Social media, mobile games, LLMs, tobacco.
Making a useful product is far more difficult than tapping into our base desires as human beings. Microsoft hasn't been an innovative company in a long time and that's by design.
That’s always been Microsoft in a nutshell though. They constantly stumble around never making anything truly great but still doing a good enough job to keep their existing customers.
Maybe trying to engineer addiction is what should be illegal, and if you want to question "how do you define whether something is addictive" you don't need an objective measure: you determine whether it seems like the people making the product seem to think that's their goal.
I would argue that intent should not even matter. Whatever punishment/consequences are deemed appropriate, they should apply based on the system's actual exploitation of addictive tendencies in humans. Otherwise you're just incentivizing people to get better at covering their tracks.
But do you go out and buy nails and screws just for fun when you’re not working on a hardware project? Do you think Home Depot’s marketing suggests you should be building day in and day out? That the average person should have five projects going at the same time and compulsively start a new project even when they’re not feeling like it?
Addiction is a real thing with a real definition and real consequences and it’s not the same as love or admiration or even fanaticism.
If you look up the medical definition of addiction I think you'll be surprised to see that in order for it to be considered a disorder the key is that is has to be past the point of self-abuse or adverse consequences.
You can say something is "addictive" without implying it's a substance abuse disorder.
When people at Microsoft say the goal of AI is to be addictive, they're clearly implying that they want their product to be habit forming in the same way that video games or food delivery is. And it's silly to imply Microsoft is trying to create physiological dependence.
I guess I worded that poorly; it isn't merely that we don't need an objective measure: we literally don't need a measure at all, as the crime would be attempting to cause it, whether or not it was even possible to do, and so we simply do not care if the activity was addictive. If you are going out of your way to exploit the psychology or physiology of other humans in an attempt to use that to sell your product, maybe that is what should be illegal.
This would then mean that "our expert witness has strong evidence that my client's product area is not 'addictive', so my client could not ever be said to be engineering addiction" would not be a defense any more than "the plan my client came up with to kill their alleged victim could not possibly have worked, so my client can not be charged with attempted murder" is (at least generally, afaik) not a defense.
Ok, fair, so, to try to apply this to my analogous crime: I would agree that attempted murder does need a definition of "murder"; but, the crime does not care whether your specific plan would have led to an act of murder, only whether or not the defendant was trying to murder.
We thereby do not necessarily need a way to know whether reading--either your book or any book--is addictive or not, but only the extent to which you were going out of your way to make it addictive, for which I think it might then be OK to have some specific-yet-contrived definition that is difficult to apply to any specific product but feels like a wrong thing to do (maybe my "exploit human psychology or physiology")?
The above phrasing, an attempt to "exploit the psychology or physiology of others", works fine. It's a form of fraud, or scamming. Is an attempted scam a crime? I guess probably not, oh well.
I don't believe devices are addictive, but that's irrelevant to Satya Nadella believing it and trying to exploit it and thus being a scammer.
It's going to get fuzzy around whether entertaining somebody counts as exploiting their psychology. Obviously it doesn't, but that would rest on reasonably assumed consent.
※ People do get sentenced for attempted fraud, but that's for more blatant things like trying to extract money from an unwitting victim's bank account, rather than just saying "we must figure out how to commit some fraud".
"We forced all the employees into AI, and now apparently, our internal AI usage is high; this means this project will get high usage from general consumers."
When your dogfood is really an opiate, you might have a problem.
It‘s not an opiate, it‘s salvia divinorum or rather something even more awful like diphenhydramin.
Psychonaut wiki:
Notably, it is frequently reported to produce significant nausea and bodily discomfort ("body load"). Most people who try diphenhydramine do not report positive effects and do not wish to repeat the experience.
It is generally considered to have low abuse potential due to its dysphoric effects.
No that’s just the goal of bad companies. I work for a company that does not, in fact, want our product to be addictive. We want our product to help people. Stop normalizing this behavior as ‘just business’ and start calling out bad people for what they are.
Yeah but you’re not supposed to say it out loud. The bigger part of this story is Nadella saying (paraphrased) that he has no clue who wrote the document and that guy should look for a new job.
>Imagine a world where every car company would get money every time someone uses their car.
So oil companies? Moreover car companies do get more money with more car use. More driving means more parts required, more servicing needed (from their dealership network), and cars that need to be replaced sooner. It's not as instantaneous as uber charging your card every time you do a ride, but I don't see how that makes a material difference.
I don't think that's actually true. Heck, from my own experience, I can definitively say it's not actually true. I've worked in several organizations where I helped create and sell products whose job was to provide value, then let people get on with their day. I wouldn't have worked at those places otherwise.
Not saying that intended addictiveness is not common, but let's not normalize corporate sociopathy.
No, it was because they weren't supposed to be. They were fulfilling an actual need and creating value in a way that wasn't intended to be addictive. And I was a co-founder of some of those orgs and products, so it wasn't about my employer.
I know it's hard to believe that not every organization is sociopathic, because many are (the larger, the more likely to be). But not every one is.
I think the most disturbing aspect of HN is how so many people seem to believe that anti-social behavior is rational. There is this weird dichotomy that you are either a money hungry behemoth or destitute out on the street. My company is a not-for-profit, we put our revenue back into the local community, our employees make a great living and we still have year over year growth.
If your boss could quadruple sales by making the product addictive and that was easy, I guarantee he would. So would you if you weren't paid a fixed salary.
Nadella is good at messaging. It is difficult to actually believe he wants to do anything but push it as far and wide as possible, and addiction is fine. It's just spin on the wording.
After some time in the industry, once you reach a certain amount of zeros in your revenue, the org mindset almost always changes from something of a survival state into messiah-mode where everything it does and produces must-be and will-be accepted as the next best thing since sliced bread, at no matter the cost.
An ad free, minimal notification, calm design and thus _Pro_ like in (former times) _pro_fessional signature edition OS would be too simple.
Instead we get a marketing platform. Because "growth"... whatever that means until (and after) the next bubble pops.
Plus: that euphemistic /bubble/ is more like a puss and cancer ridden zombie needing constant life support. Keep the numbers high, yeah! Cheer the numbers!
> Anyone who makes products want users of our product to keep coming back as though they are addicted, but not actually addicted.
Can you explain the distinction? I am not seeing it. If I keep refreshing a product page to get another dopamine hit, am I addicted or not addicted but appearing so to your metrics?
Everyone likes a beer analogy (almost as much as CS teachers love car analogies!) so I’ll try and do one that applies in the way I _think_ GP intends:
Brewers want people to want beer, and to perhaps puritans, that desire could appear as “addicted”. However, brewers don’t want addicts - liver failure, destitution, death, are all things I doubt a brewer wants to see in their consumer base because you can’t drink if you don’t have a liver, don’t have money, or don’t have life.
Did I, as a child, think my dad was addicted to alcohol because I saw him drink everyday? I did, that’s the appearance it gave. Was he? Not to the clinical point of addiction, technically - he functioned, maintained relationships and a job, and wasn’t more than occasionally emotionally abusive. He fit the type of customer GP seems to talk about - appearing to be addicted but not wholly, truly addicted.
Are you addicted to your job? You keep going back every single work day. Does that mean you are addicted? Just because you keep repeating an action doesn't mean you're addicted. It just means it is solving a problem for you (such as providing you with a salary to buy food and pay rent) and does it well.
I am not addicted to my job but my employer would like me to be.
I think apps are a different beast. They (generally, with few exceptions) want their users to be addicted. An addicted user is more likely to come back than one that gets a need met. Once that need is fulfilled, they leave.
If companies actually wanted to fill people's needs they wouldn't use dark patterns like having to call to cancel, spamming them without their consent, switching opt-out choices back with updates, etc. Because they use these dirty tricks, it's hard to believe they have the users best interest in mind. They don't. They just want the line to go up.
I've met plenty of people who want to make products that solve problems, even if the product's user only has those problems once in a while. Reaching for a well-liked, well-matched tool whenever a problem arises isn't addicted or quasi-addicted or "as though" addicted behavior.
Once you're thinking about how to keep a user coming back, you're in the mutually adversarial design space, whatever language is used to more pleasantly redecorate that reality.
You can't be a good designer if you aren't thinking about how to get your users to love your product so much that they keep coming back. There are good and bad ways to keep users coming back. The good way is to simply make the product very useful. The bad way is to make the user psychologically dependent on your product in some way.
Yet almost everyone uses dark patterns, which imply they don't think their product is good enough for users to return on their own volition. In fact, I can't think of a single for-profit company that doesn't use at least one dark pattern.
I can think of one such company. Full disclosure: I work for them. It's a successful startup where the entire retention strategy is for our product to be so freaking amazing you'll never want to use anything else. It's been working very well so far. But our product really is freaking amazing.
Since I posted I thought of another one (assuming you don't work for them). But, they really are rare. I see dark patterns everywhere, so I have a visceral reaction to any claims that companies respect users.
There's a race and tug-of-war to frame how interaction with apps works. The addiction word has a strong "think of the children" energy and I would expand any company to want to have their app tagged with the term.
Of course, what exactly "addicted" means in the context of interacting with a program really pretty fuzzy but yeah, "users not in control of themselves" is perhaps the biggest implication (and not necessarily false, mind you). Of course, this is a matter of both degree and social context.
If only we had a social dialog about the real meaning of things labeled addictive, perhaps their terrible impact could be mitigated. But hey, I guess we get policing and moral panics instead.
>Microsoft has been piloting Scout as an internal tool for employees it was calling “ClawPilot,” since March. ClawPilot—and now Scout—are part of “Project Lobster,” which is a Microsoft plan to bring the popular OpenClaw AI tool to its Microsoft 365 suite of products in a way that nontechnical people can use.
There are some good books on how to make products addictive, like Hooked. What's funny is the author, I guess, got backlash or had remorse writing that book so he put out another book called Indistractable but it's plainly obvious that you as a user would not be able to compete against legions of psychiatrists in these companies whose goal, day in and day out, is to addict you.
I'm not sure what the smoking gun is here. Usefulness and dependence are mostly interchangeable. I'm "addicted" to computers, indoor plumbing, headphones, entertainment, etc.
The crime here seems to be that they used a wrong word - would it have been better if they used "snackable", "irresistible", "enthusiast", or "binge-worthy"?
This makes no sense. How are dependence and usefulness interchangable? There is some overlap, sure. But are you seriously claiming that there is no meaningful distinction between using headphones and using slot machines?
Yes, there's obviously a difference between addiction and a substance use disorder. But part of a key definition of a substance use disorder is that it has to cause harm.
Something merely being addicting isn't enough for intervention. It's why nobody is bothered when coffee shops advertise the addictive nature of caffeine.
I'm really worried about what happens when we mix these kind of dependency-oriented business strategies with the sensitivity of a human's personal context. With no "file format" equivalent for personal context, how do I ever switch "assistant" in this provisional future?
Good on Nadella: After expressing his complete disbelief that such a document could have been written, Nadella adds that the elusive and mysterious authors “may want to go work elsewhere.”
edit: VP of a product I had not even heard of; it's no Copilot. I would not assume it was on Nadella's radar.
I'm confused and dissapointed that this isn't called Copilot, the users want more things to be called copilot even if they aren't related to each other, consider renaming Scout to Copilot, or at least Scout Copilot, or even better Copilot* (*Copilot Scout)
They haven't been doing a very good job. Maybe they asked "CoPilot, please make our AI products like a drug", but it misunderstood and instead of making them addictive like cocaine, it made them uncomfortable to use like a laxative.
It is "addictive" in the sense that it works really well, and has some guardrails so the risk of it doing something insane is minimized. I have done some cool stuff with it!
To be fair, the fundamentals that pre-2019 Xbox (and all other consumer gaming) relies on were already slowly going away and have recently been confirmed to have an extremely tiny chance of recovery, if at all. Embracing the pivot to gambling and tobacco-style customer retention philosophies is purely an effort to salvage the sunk costs in an industry whose traditional customer base is being forced to shrink and input costs are being forced to rise by largely macroeconomic headwinds.
In an otherwise pleasant, humanist framing, they jarringly conclude Microsoft's primary AI application will be putting people into parasocial AI relationships for profit.
There are plenty reasons to be critical of Microsoft's AI strategy and tactics (and especially of many other things MS has done), but the linked article seems to be targeted at gamer, rather than at people who care about non-gaming tech industry or public policy.
What seemed a bit more relevant was one of the linked 404 articles, concerning CEO's denial and attempts to dismiss the document, before the document was revealed to be co-authored by the head of the strategic project. But even that article sounds more like social media or political mud-slinging in style, rather than journalism:
> In attempting to distance himself from his own company’s executives and strategy documents, Nadella has revealed that he either does not know how to read or does not know what is happening with some of the company’s highest-profile products.
But what I didn't see what a smoking gun that they were truly looking for addictive (like, say, Facebook/Meta has been caught engineering) rather than something they could've described as essential if they weren't using amped-up business bro language. So rage-baiting over the word "addictive" seems to be missing better questions.
So... that's pretty disgusting. Why are these AI evangelists so gross? It's a useful technology... It's only the Simpsons-Monorail sales pitch that makes it feel icky.
Given Microsoft's long history of failure with personal assistants I'm looking forward to this one! Clippy, Cortana, Copilot! Wasn't an animated dog called rover one of these way back? The best of all was unquestionably Ms. Dewey for Microsoft Windows Live Search who is almost forgotten.