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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Lucy just made possible friends with two little girls, but the girls are more enthusiastic so far than she is. Joy, 5, and Hope, 6, just moved in with their grandmother on my street. I didn’t know this, but while Lucy and I were walking, I heard a tiny voice from the darkness cry out, “Hi, doggie!” It took me a minute to figure out where the voice was coming from, but once I did, their grandmother, Rose, came out onto the porch and gave the girls permission to pet Lucy, which delighted the girls. Joy said she wasn’t allowed off her porch since she had socks and no shoes. Lucy was shy, but allowed them to pet her a bit, while the girls marveled about how soft she is. I hope Lucy will let them be her friends. It’s a joy to see how far Lucy has come since she came to live with me. She’s nothing like the “special needs dog” who I was told would never get close to anybody.

I’ve never taken YouTube very seriously as a publishing platform — not enough to do anything more than post the occasional random video — but I’ve started laying a foundation for doing more with it in the future. I created and uploaded some simple branding to my longstanding YouTube channel this weekend and I’ll be doing more in the future. The channel has only about 300 subscribers, so if you feel so inclined, I would appreciate it if you’d subscribe. As with all things on social media, subscriber counts and views help me to get future content seen more easily by others. Click here to visit the channel.

Don‘t appeal to any piece of paper or any tradition as the source of your freedom. You don’t have “constitutional rights.” You have natural human rights. If you appeal to a document as the source of your rights, you are admitting that politicians can come along and amend your rights at any time. A right is yours because you are a human being, but it means nothing if you don’t have the means and the willingness to defend it. The sad truth today is that almost all of us are at the mercy of politicians who ignore our natural rights — and they get away with it only because they have educated our fellow humans to believe we have no legitimate choice other than obedience. Rebellion without the ability to win is insane — so don’t make this argument to police, politicians or judges — but it costs you nothing to come to a clear-eyed understanding today of what your rights really mean and where they come from.

Spring always reminds me how glorious blue skies and green leaves can be. When I was in the second grade, Mrs. Arnold chastised me for using those colors together. She said they didn’t match. Mrs. Arnold had very specific rules about which colors could be used together. We couldn’t deviate from her rules. When I used green and blue together in one of my class drawings, she forced me to do it over, since she said those colors shouldn’t be used together. I was a polite and obedient child, but I asked her why they didn’t match — since God used them together in nature. She was exasperated and told me to follow her rules. So when I see glorious beauty which mixes green and blue — such as this photo I took just outside my office Friday afternoon — it always reminds me of Mrs. Arnold. It reminds me that she was wrong. And it’s a good reminder for us all. There are established rules about a lot of things. Many of those are good rules. But if an expert tells you something and you know he’s wrong, you might need to take a chance. He might be just as mistaken as Mrs. Arnold was.

In the coming months and years, we’re going to need inventive and productive people pursuing things that matter. We’re going to need smart and self-directed men and women who will find ideas and create enterprises that will help bypass the political class and build a new and better society. But everything I see in media right now seems geared toward telling people how to entertain and amuse themselves. The stories are full of advice about what to binge on Netflix and what games you should be playing while you’re stuck at home. We desperately need to ignore this advice and be looking toward building new futures instead. Being passive consumers got us where we are today. It’s time that we reclaim our former role — the one that made this country wealthy — as productive and free people who build far more than we consume. This could be a great opportunity for those who will take it. Turn off Netflix. Put down the video game controller. We need new ideas, new achievements, new goals — not more coach potatoes. This is the time to be thinking and creating and planning for the future that you and I both want.

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