The Lonely Century by Noreena Hertz

Author:Noreena Hertz [Hertz, Noreena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2020-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Is the new Alexa skill ‘unkindness’?

When a drunk 60-year-old man became angry with a human employee at a SoftBank cellphone store he kicked the Pepper robot that was working in the lobby, damaging its computer system and wheels.83 When Samantha, a £3,000 ‘intelligent’ sex doll, was shown off at a trade fair in 2017, she was left filthy and with two broken fingers after being ravaged by men who ‘treated [her] like barbarians’.84 Hardly a measure of reciprocity, kindness or care.

Look also at the way children already interact with the new world of virtual assistants, with Alexas, Siris, Cortanas. How quickly, mimicking their parents, they become au fait with curt commands. The machines tolerate this and still reply, however rude the child, however absent basic politeness. Many parents may relate to the blog post from venture capitalist Hunter Walk that went viral in 2016, expressing his fears that Alexa was ‘turning [his] 2-year-old into a raging asshole’.85

Now some may argue that these are victimless crimes: that verbally abusing Alexa is no worse than cursing at your car when it breaks down, that kicking Pepper is no worse than kicking a door. But there is an important difference. For once we endow an object with human qualities we need to treat it with – at a minimum – decency. If we don’t, the danger is that such behaviour will become normalised and bleed into how we interact with other humans; that men who beat up their sex robots will become violent to women they date; that children who get used to talking as aggressively or rudely as they like to a virtual assistant, without any consequences, will start doing the same to teachers, or shopkeepers, or each other. That the Alexa ‘skill’ they learn will be unkindness.

Abusive behaviour aside, there’s the question of how the explosion in virtual AI assistants will impact male–female interactions given that these supplicant robotic voices are normally programmed to be female, typically of course by male engineers. Will all that bossing Alexa or Siri around open up new fissures between genders, or (just as detrimental) cement old ones? I’m not even going to get into what sex robots risk normalising, especially now that owners are able to program their robots to be insecure, shy and sexual all at once.

It’s hard to know categorically whether such fears will be realised. And to date there are fewer reported cases of people being cruel or misogynistic toward robots than being kind to them. We are too early on the trajectory of digital intimacy to know how this will play out; this is all still very new, still nascent. Already, though, Amazon has fielded concerns from parents whose children’s bad manners, honed by Alexa’s unfazed helpfulness even when she is treated rudely, have followed them outside the home. Meanwhile, the United Nations warned in a 146-page 2019 report that ‘the conflation of feminized digital assistants with real women carries a risk of spreading problematic gender stereotypes’ by ‘regulariz[ing] one-sided, command-based

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