Evolutionary Communication

Communication is the fundamental foundation upon which modern society was built. Without words, pictures or symbols we wouldn’t have been mentally capable of developing the process of being able to formulate complex thoughts or ideas or even to express the most basic of our primal needs.

- Scott Haines

However by some random chance, we took the right evolutionary steps that would lead us to where we have today both as a society but also technologically. If you consider the past twenty or so years alone, it is quite literally astonishing what we’ve been able to accomplish. In essence we are now at very fundamental cross-roads in which we are now fully capable of building systems that have the ability to communicate with us and interact alongside us or for us. But where does that leave us?

Rise of the Bots

The concept of bot base communication isn’t new. The origin story takes us back to 1964 with ELIZA from MIT’s Artificial Intelligence lab and their pioneering journey to create an intelligence that could potentially pass the Touring Test this means a system that could trick a person into believing it was indeed human. While this pioneering work led to many advancements in the study of text based processing and early natural language processing “NLP”. There were other technologies that were also fundamental to establishing the base upon which all modern conversational systems have evolved: The internet, email and text messaging.