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Amizoney announced that its Web Services (AWS) division is developing an army of AI avatars to serve as "Synthetic Consumers" (SCs) for the global giant's goods and services. In an exclusive interview with Electronic Design, Dr. Werner Von Brown, Amizoney CTO, explained that the new initiative had been undertaken to offset the drop in demand anticipated to occur as millions of knowledge workers are replaced by advanced AI applications, such as ChatGPT.
Branded as "Amizoney Prime Cuts" service, the avatars will purchase products from the company's website, have them loaded onto trucks, and delivered to another Amizoney warehouse for restocking. Von Brown declined to provide details on where funds for the purchases will come from, but he hinted that a portion of the payments will be transacted in "Bezos Bucks,” a proprietary cryptocurrency created in a joint venture between Amizoney and Silicon Valley Bank.
Amizoney was more forthright about the technology used to create its SC entities. The company explained that the platform was based on a highly customized version of its LEX chatbot platform, enhanced with an Artificial Stupidity Service (ASS) engine it’s been developing for several years in partnership with AI giant, NOVIDIA.
Von Brown explained that ASS uses biomimicry algorithms to model the illogical and sometimes unpredictable behavior of humans and some higher primates to make the purchasing behavior of the Synthetic Consumers almost indistinguishable from their organic counterparts. For more details on NOVIDIA, and its ASS technology, see "NOVIDIA Announces Artificial Stupidity Tech—CEO Claims it Will Make AI Apps Smarter,” published in Electronic Design, April 1, 2020.
"We've leveraged our vast resources and industry-leading ASS technologies to create the first corporate circular economy," said Von Brown. "In doing so, we expect to make up for the sales we would have otherwise lost in the next few years as accountants, analysts, journalists, and other knowledge-sector professionals are laid off or demoted to lower-paying jobs as AI apps replace them."
Virtual Agents
Von Brown added that the inspiration for creating their virtual consumers was in part sparked by Amizoney's research on the economic impact of so-called "Virtual Agents", i.e., life-size AI-driven holographic personalities that are expected to replace many flesh-and-blood hotel clerks, in-store greeters, and restaurant servers in the near future.
"We wanted to know how severely this technology would erode the blue-collar segment of our customer base," said Von Brown, "but it quickly became apparent that ChatGPT and related technologies would have an equally, if not more devastating impact on the middle-income professionals that are the foundation of our business. Rather than allow ourselves to be victimized by some of the technology's unintended consequences, we chose to innovate our way out of the problem by using AI to fight AI."
During the interview, Lee Goldberg, a flesh-and-blood editor at Electronic Design, asked Von Brown how he felt about the irony that Amizoney has been a leader in AI adoption, aggressively using the technology to streamline their own operations and reduce their labor costs, for over a decade. "It's not ironic," said Von Brown, "it's just another innovative business practice."
Mark Iceberg, founder and CEO of Facialbook, hailed Amizoney Prime Cuts as the "beginning of a new era of prosperity" and hinted that his company would unveil its own AI program before the end of the year. Meanwhile, noted economist Robert Reich and several other critics have described it as "the first wave of an economy that can get along perfectly well without most humans."
Larry Milow, financial program director at Foxey News, was more skeptical about the economist's concerns. "I wish all these alarmist snowflakes would quit bashing corporations for simply being good at what they do. If they were smart, they'd be buying Amizoney stock instead of wringing their hands." Kudlow even suggested that there would be an upside to the growing adoption of SCs. "Sure, there will be some employment losses, but many of them will be offset by a growing demand for human therapists, specially trained to provide counselling for overworked AI entities."
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