Artificial Intelligence, the good, the bad or the useful?
When I was home in Canada this past Christmas, my father approached me with great excitement, “I have to show you something! She can do anything I tell her to!” “Who?!” I asked with nervous skepticism. Had my father taken a second wife or hired a servant, paranoid thoughts struck me.
“Here, she is!” said my father, pulling a black device out of a cardboard box. It was Amazon’s Echo speaker called Alexa. Alexa is the voice or narrator marketed as an “intelligent virtual assistant” that is able to have voice interaction with human beings.
“For *bleep*’s sake, dad!! You’re bringing all advertisers under the kitchen sink into your home!” I bursted out.
“I told him I didn’t want that THING in my house!”, my mom shouted from the other side of the room.
Ah, the good old holidays.
AI or Artificial intelligence has slowly and steadily made its appearance into our lives. Alexa, Amazon’s darling, was introduced in November, 2014 with virtually no competition.
Google Home wasn’t released until October, 2016 and Smartphone assistants like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana are incomparable as the wider public doesn’t want to be seen screaming at a device in public.
Alexa is more convenient in that sense. There’s no embarrassment. She listens, speaks, turns on your lights, updates you with current news and weather and even does your shopping. All in the comfort of your home and all by just speaking to her.
With the introduction of Alexa in November 2014, Amazon has entered what [Amazon President] Bezos calls AI’s “golden age”. (Clark, 2017)
Alexa has already taken households by storm. Tens of millions have been sold already with more of the technology to come in the future. She’s become part of the household. One executive at Amazon even describes her as part of the family.
Alexa will soon be everywhere. By opening the platform to third-party developers and brands, Amazon wants to introduce Alexa into every area of your life: your home, car, hospital, workplace. (Clark, 2017)
This does raise concerns with invasion of privacy. It’s not only an invasion but of the ownership of pieces and moments of our lives, whether it’s a conversation being recorded as Alexa is on sleep mode or the FitBits strapped to our wrists.
Our fish tanks, smart televisions, internet-enabled home thermostats, Fitbits and smartphones constantly gather information about us and our environment. (Fairfield, 2017)
Joshua A.T. Fairfield (2017) presents an interesting perspective. While we widely praise ourselves as having made such quick technological advances, Fairfield believes that these advances set us up for heavy societal drawbacks. He makes the comparison of our society being set back to the feudal system of medieval Europe where the King owned everything and peasants did not own anything from the land they lived on to the tools they used for their trades.
Presently, a good example he presents would be that Google licenses its operating system to Samsung Galaxy. So if you own that particular phone, you would have to use the Google operating system which is sublicensed to Samsung, who has the right to make deals with various software providers, who now have access to your information. This means that consumers are stripped of the ownership of their information as soon as these devices are used.
“We are just digital peasants, using the things that we have bought and paid for at the whim of our digital lord.” (Fairfield, 2017).
So the things that we own will end up owning us.
It is this very digital ownership of our very selves that “Digital Me” explores. “Digital Me” is an internet-based, interactive experience designed by Sandra Gaudenzi and Mike Robbins in collaboration with Helios Design Labs, in 2015.
“Digital Me” examines the idea of our digital presence versus our social media presence through artificial intelligence.
A chatbot reenacts our social media self to our physical self as users are asked to log into their social media accounts and to turn on their webcams.
Users are then having a chat-conversation with their digital self while the website’s design provides statistics of the information that has been fed into it. If you log in through your Facebook account, the data is then translated into the bot that is chatting with you.
A slightly discomforting conversation starts taking place as the digital you seems to know more about you than you. It’s as if the bot has taken over your life and you are looking in from the outside.
“Digital Me” originated as a project due to Gaudenzi’s interest in the idea of self and the digital world.
I have always been intrigued by the notion of the self and the digital world seemed to offer an extra layer to the complex beings that we are: a layer that we tend to ignore because it is not tangible. (Gaudenzi, 2015)
The project presents an interesting notion. How do we become our digital selves and do we want to be our digital selves?
Upon trying out the experience, I found the user’s agency slightly restricted as “Digital Me” can only be experienced if fed personal data. This may be quite limiting as some users wouldn’t want to input their personal information. But as the project is personalized, it would only work if information is provided.
The design of the interface is quite interesting. While the user chats with the AI bot, an actual digital image of the user is drawn while sounds of rain drops are falling in the background. The music is at the same time relaxing as it is discomforting as it is mysterious.
The graphics and colour scheme of the interface were quite beautiful and fitting with the music. The interface is also designed to move and information is branched off as the chat continues, like a vector with side branches. Each branch provides a point of entry where statistics about social media are provided.
The whole experience is daunting but has made me aware of my strong online presence. The digital dialogue with my digital self is interesting but limited as only a couple of choices are provided as answers. The interactive structure is fairly linear as the dialogue is central to the experience. Although there are social media statistics provided that can be opened while having the chat conversation.
Overall the experience has made me uneasy and I just wanted to get it over with. I didn’t want to interact with my digital self. It made me realize my growing online presence. It made me uncomfortable to interact with an AI bot and made me think about the growing Artificial Intelligence in our lives. Goal accomplished, “Digital Me”.
But the whole idea of Artificial Intelligence in our lives is not as bleak as it looks. While AI does pose questions of our invasion of privacy, our lack of control of our own information and interactions, and our growing digital self, it can also be used in a good way.
A new project called “New Dimensions in Testimony” has recently been developed by Heather Maio with the University of Southern California’s Institute of Technology and the Shoah Foundation.
It entails the idea of documenting the testimonies of holocaust survivors. The project allows users to have a conversation with a virtual holocaust survivor. The holocaust survivor appears in the form of a hologram.
The prototype involves Pinchas Gutter, a living holocaust survivor and his account of the horrific events of the holocaust. The project was created by filming Gutter with various cameras and special lighting.
The team at ICT then used natural language processing software to help create an interactive version of the video footage, with vocal cues triggering responses from the pool of recorded speech. (McMullan, 2017)
The experience is quite fascinating as it feels like a real person is sitting in front of you. Users sit across from Gutter as if he is actually there and can ask questions about his account of the past events. Gutter also provides answers. It transform AI into a completely different purpose. Its purpose being documentation.
Both want to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive through interaction, imparting a sense of tangibility on to events rapidly passing from eyewitness testimony. (McMullan, 2017)
Twelve other survivors have been interviewed so far, while the current prototype Gutter will be showcased in museums, classrooms and lecture halls.
So maybe Artificial Reality is not as bad as we think?
What I found very interesting about the project “New Dimensions in Testimony” is that the focus here is not the technology and how it’s being used, but the content of it. The technology is not central to the content. It is the content that is central to the technology.
So maybe AI can serve us in a good way. We just have to figure out how to make use of it, instead of it making use of us.
Sources:
Clark, L. (2017), The Everywhere Store: Amazon’s AI-powered master plan to be the world’s biggest company. Wired. Available from http://www.wired.co.uk/article/amazon-alexa-jeff-bezos-worlds-biggest-company [Accessed 16 February 2018];
Fairfield, J.A.T. (2017), The ‘internet of things’ is sending us back to the Middle Ages. The Conversation. Available from https://theconversation.com/the-internet-of-things-is-sending-us-back-to-the-middle-ages-81435 [Accessed 16 February 2018];
McMullan, T. (2016). The virtual Holocaust survivor: how history gained new dimensions. The Guardian, 18 June. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/18/holocaust-survivor-hologram-pinchas-gutter-new-dimensions-history [Accessed 16 February 2018];
BBC (2015), Digital Me. Meet your Digital Me, created from your social media posts. BBC Taster. Available from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/taster/pilots/digital-me [Accessed 16 February 2018];
Digital Me (2015). Digital Me. Helios Design Labs. Available from: https://digitalme.heliosdesignlabs.com/#!/intro [Accessed 16 February 2018];
