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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There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

I’d like to write a modern version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — a more cynical one — with a realistic ending for today’s audience. In this new version, the little boy points out on social media that the emperor is naked but nobody listens to him. Instead, everybody keeps posting grander and grander praise for the emperor’s non-existent clothes. The cognitive dissonance makes the people unable to hear the child who tells them the truth, because they’re getting social media praise — likes and so forth — for their lies. The confused child eventually feels so defeated that he shuts up and walks away. He’s so hurt and disappointed by this that he withdraws from the world and spends years in therapy, trying to figure out whether the rest of the world is crazy or if he’s the crazy one. Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be that little boy, but few want to hear the truth today. Either I’m crazy or else our culture has gone insane.

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