Six years and one AI revolution later, Manual Work is a Bug is back. Mav founder + CEO Matthew Black and Head of Brand Hillary Black pick up where they left off in 2020, back when GPT-3 was developer-only, ChatGPT didn't exist, and we were still teaching out chatbots how to fail (and hoping they didn’t with every message). We trace how we went from scripted, single-goal chatbots to always-on LLMs, and what got lost on the way: curation, personality, and the art of failing gracefully.

Along the way they get into Mav's origin story (Facebook Messenger and an F8 keynote shout-out, to being called Chatbot Rockstar Agency in 2016 and one dog that texted a customer 10,000 times in a minute), why AI models increasingly mirror you back to yourself, and where we think AI will go from here. Plus a genuinely optimistic, and a little contrarian, take on what happens to insurance itself when self-driving cars and bundled coverage rewrite the whole product.

If you build with AI, brand for it, run your business with it, or sell insurance in a market that's changing under your feet, this one's for you.

Hosts

• Matthew Black — Founder + CEO, Mav
• Hillary Black — Head of Brand and Conversation Design, Mav

Links and Resources

• SmarterChild, the 2001 chatbot both hosts grew up with
• Hillary's talk, Failure Is an Option: How to Help Your Chatbot Fail Without Frustration
• We Are As Gods by Peter Diamandis
• The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil
• Neuralink, brain computer interfaces

Follow the show

Manual Work is a Bug is a podcast hosted by Hillary and Matthew Black, now on video. Watch on YouTube (youtube.com/@manualworkisabug) and follow wherever you listen, so you don't wait another six years for the next episode. Mav helps insurance agencies democratize growth with AI: hiremav.com.