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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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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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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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