4/16/16 By: Jennifer Van Grove  The San Diego Union-Tribune (Excerpt) 

“Chatbots are to you and me and today’s culture, what call centers are to our parents’ culture,” said Brian Solis, the principal analyst at Altimeter and an expert on trends in social media.

Maybe so, but that assumes people will simply accept bots as their new besties. Pause to think about that. Siri may be handy when you need her, but she doesn’t insert herself smack-dab in the middle of your personal life. And she doesn’t constantly remind you of her presence, as some of Messenger’s bots do. The CNN robot, for example, sends a daily message with the top headlines, which is great when you’re in the mood for news, but also potentially annoying when you’re not.

Still, it stands to reason that youngsters, in particular, who are already glued to their phones and do prefer to communicate via texts and mobile messages, will latch on to these bot-enabled friendships with benefits.

“Mobile pervasiveness is a fact of life,” Solis said. He asserts, with statistics, that we’re all being reprogrammed to make our phones the center of our universes. “Smartphone users look at their phones 1,500 times a week. That adds up to 177 minutes every day.”

And, good or bad, kids are simply enamored with artificial intelligence. Just observe a child converse with a voice-operated digital assistant. The interactions are oddly intuitive, and, more importantly, fun.