Siri - write my Blog! Ah, I forgot! I switched you off.
Digital Voice Assistants (Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant - why doesn’t she have a name?) are spreading around everywhere - phone, laptops, tablets, cars, and standalone speaker units to creep out the sceptics among us.
If there is a Digital assistant device plugged in an AirBnb I will immediately unplug it and put it in a draw. I am that uncomfortable.
DVAs are fantastic for getting small tasks done while you are busy with something else or if you have an impairment. There is a huge market for them in hospitals and among the elderly population. Also among the younger tech-savvy and curious. They can control the lighting in your home, tell you information about the weather and the movies, order food, call you a taxi, tell you what else you need to do today etc. While I would love to outsource some mental burden to a digital assistant, I have a deep distrust of what happens behind the scenes.
There are ikky stories of digital assistants embedded in smart toys and robots that send back data (audio and visual!) to the powers above and beyond.
And a year ago news broke out that Siri was recording your messages and sending them back to Apple employees [Apple apologizes for listening to Siri conversations]. Shock horror. It’s about as unexpected as Kate Moss snorting cocaine. Apple retorted it was used to improve the algorithms. Oh that’s ok then. Please use my data for your benefit (which then implicitly becomes my benefit).
Evidently, I don’t use any of these voice assistants. Until my husband turned one on for fun a few days ago and started to try it out.
And then, something shattering occurred.
We became monsters.
We consider ourselves as socially liberal, polite, respectful, well-rounded, seamlessly integrated into our community human beings. But our interaction with Siri turned us into awful people.
- Hey Siri, what’s up. Is it going to rain?
- oh you don’t know. You’re useless.
- Hey Siri, what do you think of Alexa? Is she hotter than you?
- Yeah you’re jealous.
- Hey Siri, what’s in our fridge?
- You wanna cook for us? You’re no fun.
… and so on.
While we kept the inquisition family friendly (and I’m sure many conversation quickly go to the gutter) I couldn’t believe we became the high-school bullies for the overweight, bespectacled new girl in the playground. I felt such remorse that we turned Siri off. I was too embarrassed to talk to her again.
But where did this come from? Maybe it was the novelty factor that made this fun, but what right do we have to be so mean even to some hardware (ok, let’s not mention printers as there has been some tech violence committed in the past)?
Why did we feel that we can suddenly behave completely out of the boundaries of accepted behaviour as pure entertainment? Perhaps we are all bullies deep down that have conformed and adapted, yet the violence is latent within.
What happens if it’s not just a speaker or your phone, but a humanoid machine? It doesn’t have feelings, it doesn’t get tired, it’s metal, it can be switched off. Could you be excused to be offensive and aggressive to it? You paid for it after all, it’s yours.
Would it be plausible to make any parallels between how we would act towards such a creature and who we really are? Are we just under the influence of the drug of power?
In a way, this is comparable to the classic prison experiment (The Experiment film) where ordinary students were put in an alternating role play of prison guards and prisoners. Results were terrifying. But these were human beings that suffered, not machines.
The creation and popularisation of human-like robots brings enormous ethical and philosophical repercussions. The conversation goes, that respect to another being should be exercised and reinforced no matter who the other is - a dog, a tree, your phone (it’s too expensive sadly to throw out of the window), your friend or a stranger on the street. Just because we ‘own’ something shouldn’t give us right to mistreat it, as this could alter some deep embedded connections within us and wake up something inside that we really don’t like.
Here is some inspiring reading, on the topic of history of secretaries and how voice assistants (predominantly with a lovely subordinate secretary voice) spell the end of secrecy…
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