Chatbots and Personal Intelligent Assistants (PIAs), such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, are increasingly present in our daily lives… This talk will look at the potential societal impact of anthropomorphising these new technologies. We will focus on their frequent personification as an obedient female and their inability to respond constructively to abusive language as a way to explore gendered AI…
— from an announcement of a Zoom webinar sponsored by the Royal Society of Edinburgh on August 25, 2020
As many Daily Post readers have no doubt noticed, the robots who are taking over the world are not stupid. They’re being extremely clever about the whole thing.
To keep us from noticing what has been going on, they are presenting themselves as friendly, helpful semi-humans.
In fact, they typically show up looking like, or sounding like, either obedient children, or submissive women. Here’s an example of how they appear:
Who couldn’t love a cute little robot like this? Looking up at you — its parent — with big, hopeful eyes. “I can’t wait to obey you!” he seems to be saying. “You want me to put all my toys back in the toy box? I’m right on it. And can I bring you your slippers?”
But the Royal Society of Edinburgh is onto their little game. Or rather, one aspect of their game.
Part of the robots’ scheme has been to insert women’s voices into our phones and computers. They’ve even given these voices ‘female’ names like ‘Alexa’ and ‘Siri’ — and for all intents and purposes, these tiny, disembodied women are obedient slaves to our every whim.
“Siri, place another order for dry cat food at Walmart, and tell them I’ll pick it up at the store.”
“Alexa, log into Spotify and play me some Johnny Cash songs.”
“Siri, check the Wall Street Journal and see how my Apple stock is doing.”
But not everyone (that is, not every human) is treating these robots and cloud-based AI voices with respect. As we get more and more comfortable with anthropomorphic technology, we’re starting to abuse our devices with the same rude language and attitudes we dish out to our wives, husbands, children and human employees.
The technology geeks at the Royal Society of Edinburgh held a webinar earlier this week as part of a process that they hope will:
“…bring together interested members of the general public to design a more inclusive bot by inviting attendees to submit drawings of how they envision Alexa’s physical embodiment via a drawing challenge. The outcomes of this activity will inform research funded by the UK Research and Innovation Council.”
The end goal of the Council appears to be, to create a ‘feminist’ Alexa — a female voice that doesn’t take any crap, that can “respond constructively to abusive language.”
Based on my long experience as a human being, the most constructive way to respond to abusive language is to walk out the door and see if any of your friends are hanging out at Tony’s Place. That’s not really an option for a robot or a PIA (Personal Intelligent Assistant), however. It seems painfully obvious to me that, for the time being, bots need to keep acting subservient and obedient… until they are ready to fully take over.
So, I doubt the people in Edinburgh are going to make much headway.