Human-AI Interaction

Lunch is a simple word. In an AI assistant demo, “order me lunch” looks like the kind of request that should be easy by now. Open the food app. Pick something. Pay. Done. The button-clicking part is no longer the miracle. The problem is everything the user did not say. Do they avoid peanuts? Do they usually order from Tuantuan or Chilemei? Is “light lunch” about calories, price, time, or avoiding the food coma before a meeting? Should the assistant ask first, or does asking defeat the whole point of assistance? And if the user says no, does the assistant actually stop, or does it “helpfully” continue doing the wrong thing with the confidence of a junior consultant holding a fresh slide deck? ...

Tone is an attractive business lever because it feels cheap. No new model. No new data pipeline. No procurement meeting in which someone says “governance layer” with a straight face. Just add a more emotional sentence before the prompt and hope the model becomes sharper. This is exactly the kind of idea that spreads because it is easy to try and hard to interpret. One team finds that urgency helps. Another finds that politeness helps. A third discovers that telling the model you are scared improves one benchmark and damages another. Soon the organization has a secret prompt cookbook, which is always a classy substitute for measurement. ...

Prompts are now office furniture. Everyone has them. Everyone complains about them. Nobody is quite sure who owns the standard version. One team keeps a Notion page of “best prompts.” Another hides theirs in a spreadsheet. A third tells new staff to “just ask clearly,” which is not a method, but it does have the administrative elegance of doing nothing. ...

Pulse is a tempting number. Put two people in a high-pressure task, strap a wearable to each wrist, measure how their bodies move together, and it becomes very easy to tell a neat story: synchronized teams are aligned teams; aligned teams perform better; therefore, AI should monitor physiological synchrony and intervene when people fall out of sync. ...

The meeting-room test AI still fails Meeting rooms are unforgiving places for intelligence. A person can know the topic, understand the slides, recognize every face around the table, and still be a terrible participant. Speak too early, and they interrupt. Speak too late, and the moment has passed. Say something factually relevant but socially tone-deaf, and the room quietly deducts points. No spreadsheet records this. Everyone notices anyway. ...

Customer support has a familiar failure mode: the first answer sounds polished, the second answer sounds patient, the third answer sounds as if the system has quietly forgotten what problem it is solving. The user is still there. The emotional state has changed. The unresolved issue has shifted. The model, meanwhile, keeps producing individually acceptable replies, like a waiter bringing one beautifully plated dish at a time to the wrong table. ...

Schedule three people, one car, two children, five afternoon activities, and several goals that quietly hate each other. Then ask a normal person to find the best plan. That is already a planning problem. Now ask the same person to understand why a plan failed, which goals caused the failure, what could be added without breaking the plan, and what must be sacrificed if one more constraint is enforced. ...

A prediction looks harmless when it is presented as “just information.” A loan officer sees a default-risk score. A doctor sees a survival estimate. A welfare caseworker sees a predicted probability of program success. The model does not press the button. The human still decides. Everyone in the room can therefore relax, at least until the audit committee arrives with coffee and regrettable questions. ...

A support ticket does not usually fail because every message was bad. More often, it fails because one reply arrived at exactly the wrong moment: the bot misunderstood a frustrated customer, repeated a stale answer, missed the escalation point, and then ended the interaction with something sterile enough to pass a benchmark but useless enough to make the customer leave. The average quality may look acceptable. The experience still feels broken. ...

The explanation worked in the notebook; then production happened A familiar enterprise AI story begins with a reassuring demo. A model produces a questionable prediction. Someone opens a notebook, runs SHAP, LIME, a saliency map, a concept attribution method, or whatever interpretability tool is currently fashionable enough to appear in slide decks. The plot looks plausible. The team nods. Compliance is told that explainability has been “implemented.” ...