The Smart Wife by Yolande Strengers & Jenny Kennedy

Author:Yolande Strengers & Jenny Kennedy [Strengers, Yolande & Kennedy, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Mind Your Manners, Please

As we have already seen, smart wives are routinely told what to do. The “command-based speech” we are encouraged to direct toward these female voices—such as “find x,” “message x,” “order x,” and “add x”—becomes what sociology professor Safiya Umoja Noble calls “a powerful socialization tool that teaches us about the role of women, girls, and people who are gendered female to respond on demand.”101 Likewise, Google Assistant’s ad campaign, “Make Google Do It,” suggests a bottomless capacity and tolerance for Google’s feminized AI to be told what to do.102 This has left many commentators and users (notably parents) concerned about the abrupt and “rude” way in which people are taught and required to engage with these smart wives.103

This too can be addressed, some smart wife manufacturers claim, with some simple lessons in manners. Google introduced its “Pretty Please” feature in 2018 to encourage children to engage politely with their home assistant.104 It offers positive reinforcement to children that remember their p’s and q’s. Likewise, Amazon’s Echo Dot Kids is a kid-friendly, Alexa-enabled speaker that has a “magic word” feature. When children remember to say “please,” Alexa responds with, “By the way, thanks for asking so nicely.”105 This might be a valuable educational tool for parents of young children, but it doesn’t solve the bigger issue of treating smart wives—and women—with dignity and respect.

It might be tempting to recommend that all smart wives include these polite positive reinforcement features for grown-up kids. But isn’t that just rewarding people for doing something basically decent, like rewarding fathers for “babysitting” their own children? And didn’t most of us learn how to treat people and things with respect in primary school? Maybe not, given the extent of abuse we have revealed in this chapter.

Nonetheless, we are reluctant to recommend a nanny state of smart wives policing our manners—a move that reinforces stereotypes about whose job it is to do that (for instance, moms and wives)—and problematically hands the task over to oligarchic companies. The answer, we argue, doesn’t (just) lie in changing the smart wife’s voice, having her spout support for feminism and gender equity, or teaching people how to ask nicely. It comes from designing a whole different kind of AI.

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