Google’s geeks offer future vision that leads toward inhuman world

By David McElroy · May 9, 2018

The capabilities of Google’s next-generation Assistant are technically stunning, at least in the stage demo shown to the public Tuesday. The people behind this are brilliant and they’ve apparently solved some very difficult software problems. The result is software that can make a call for you and pretend to be human, as well as write your emails based on what it thinks you were going to say.

But as technically impressive as the demonstrations were, I’m left very uncomfortable with the vision that Google wants to sell to us. In a world that already seems colder and more sterile every day, the last thing I want is software that suggests what I ought to write and misleads people into believing it’s a human calling.

What Google is offering is creepy and disturbing. It’s technically impressive, but I absolutely, positively do not want this technology.

Google is a very smart company, but I’ve been increasingly disturbed over the last decade with the disconnect between their people’s technical smarts and their lack of human understanding of how real people need to interact with technology. Their executives have been disdainful of privacy — and that’s no wonder since their very existence and profitability are based on selling information about us.

These very smart geeks are selling a vision of a future where I don’t want to live.

Take the new feature called Google Duplex. You tell your Google Assistant that you want an appointment or a reservation and the software makes the call, pretending to be a human assistant doing the chore for you. Listen to the demo which I’ve embedded below. You can tell the engineers have gone to great lengths to insert “human-sounding” breaks and “hmmms” to fake the person on the other end into believing it’s a real human.

It sounds real and the demoes work well. (I question whether the software will be able to successfully navigate many real-world calls, when humans will throw unpredictable things at it.) But even if it works perfectly, do you really think it’s ethical to fool people into thinking they’re talking to humans when it’s really software?

When a recorded voice calls us today, it’s obvious that the message is canned. Even if it’s a real recorded human voice, it becomes obvious fairly quickly that you’re not talking with a real human. Have you ever gotten one of those calls and first thought it was a real person? I have. How did it make you feel if you were fooled — even just for a moment — into thinking it was a live person?

When it’s happened to me, I’ve felt annoyed and outraged. I’ve felt tricked. I’ve felt as though someone didn’t value my time.

With the new Google Duplex feature, you are being recorded as soon as you answer the phone. There’s no warning. Your voice is simply recorded and the software decides what to say in response. To me, this presents serious ethical and legal issues.

Then there’s the new feature in Gmail that offers to write your email to someone. (Here’s a brief video demo.) The software looks at the subject of your new email and things you’ve written in the past — and things that have been written by millions of other people — and then chooses what seems like the most obvious thing to say.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get software-written emails. The subtext and writing style of emails communicate just as much to me about what I’m getting as the actual text. This software rips the soul and personality out of communicating.

I want to know that I’m dealing with a human being — and I want to be able to judge his or her personality, intelligence and more by the tone and style of what I get. This new feature makes that impossible. Instead, it creates the most bland and impersonal text mush possible.

This gets at the heart of what the geeks at Google don’t understand. Communication is about more than just the text or informational content of an email or phone call. Human contact is about far more. It’s about emotions and unconscious judgments we make of each other.

The brilliant geeks who write this software haven’t stopped to ask themselves whether this is something that real people want or need.

Google’s CEO says this is all about helping you get more done, but if he believes that, he’s fooling himself. This is actually all about Google inserting itself more and more deeply into our lives. It’s about Google knowing more about us — so it can sell more and better targeted advertising. It’s about very smart people who think new technology is cool, but who don’t understand the needs of the humans who will be using it.

I used to think really highly of Google, but the company’s attitudes about privacy and its visions of a future I don’t want have led me to cut it out of my life as much as possible. (I even use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, because the company doesn’t track me or sell my information.)

A lot of the work that Google is doing in artificial intelligence seems like brilliant work. I’m very impressed with what their people have been able to achieve.

But I don’t want the sterile, machine-driven communication that the geeks at Google are selling. Their world is one where I don’t want to live.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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