So you’re running late for a meeting. Traffic is bad or you were slow getting out the door or, heck, maybe you’re just feeling a little pokey this morning. Happens. This is when you send everyone at the meeting a little email or text saying “Running 5 minutes late! Sorry!” or “I don’t value your time enough to plan ahead! Sorry!” Now you don’t have to even do that. You can use an app called Twist where you enter the contact information for the people involved and the location of the meeting and then the app will estimate whether you’ll make it on time and send updates accordingly. So the robot will apologize FOR you, avoiding all the hassle that goes along with sincerity.
TechCrunch asks the app’s developers about a somewhat delicate scenario:
What about those times when, as Belshe puts it, we tell “little white lies” about where we are and when we’re likely to arrive? (Like when you say “I left on time, but the bus was late!”) Well, he says Twist’s goal isn’t to “change human nature”. Most of the time, people probably want to be upfront about their lateness, and if you really don’t, you can always disable some of the alerts within Twist. Belshe also says he’s that as we “all have GPS in our pockets every day” and share much of that data socially, it’s going to become increasingly difficult to maintain those kinds of deceptions.
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