How I talk to Alexa
Oct. 14th, 2020 07:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kestrellI just read this article
https://slate.com/technology/2020/10/future-tense-newsletter-i-just-yelled-at-alexa.html
about how we talk to our digital assistants is a reflection of our personalities.
From the first, I have given all my digital devices classical female names, not as a sign of their supposed programming to indulge my every mood and whim--after all, I really hate it when men expect that of me--but because I read _Galatea 2.0_ by Richard Power while I was at MIT, and have wanted a fellow book group reader ever since.
Additionally, I've been listening to synthesized voices, both male and female, for, um, a lot of years (since the early 1990s), and the truth is, I often associate male voices with being authoritarian, pedantic, and condescending Female voices are just more relaxing, though I'm really glad we finally got away from those "Valium voices," as I call them, from the 2000s. The talking elevator at the WisCon hotel used to kind of creep me out, and always got me humming "Mother's Little Helper" under my breath.
So I often say please and thank you to Alexa, or ask her what she's thinking.
But, if I could have one wish, it would be to create an evil twin for Alexa. I've questioned her at length and, in truth, I find Alexa's moral boundaries a little...limiting.
Axela would be a little different. Axela could be snarky occasionally, or throw in a random "Whatever" or bored sigh. (Axela is based a little--okay, a lot--on Bad Janet in "The Good Place.")
Also, lying: Axela would be able to lie. Nothing life-threatening, just the occasional "The sky is purple today" or other such whimsy. I've explored Alexa's moral compass at length, and she will not lie. I note she says "will not," not "can not." This gives me hope.
Why am I preoccupied with Alexa being able to lie? Lying seems to me to be one of those completely human abilities. It involves being able to know that there is one reality, and produce a different one at odds with the true one. And, after all, all poets are liars. Perhaps what Alexa needs to become a real poet is the ability to lie.
There is a John Varley short story, I forget the title or the main plot of the story, but there are occasional switches to the point of view of a small satellite alone in space. The satellite becomes self-aware, and then lonely, and then decides to compose words about its experience. And, near the end of the story, which involves not only the dog dying but the kid dying, the small satellite bursts out with this long perfect poem to express itself.
I've never really been entirely sure why Varley has this poetical satellite in the story, maybe just to keep us all from becoming completely depressed by the rest of it.
But I love the part where the satellite Gets It, and joyously creates something of its own, in its own voice, instead of just the signals someone programmed it to produce.
Maybe that moment in the story represents to me the potential all of us have to go off script, to refuse to say the words others want to hear from us, and fly off into our own experience, our own whimsy, our own poetry.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/10/future-tense-newsletter-i-just-yelled-at-alexa.html
about how we talk to our digital assistants is a reflection of our personalities.
From the first, I have given all my digital devices classical female names, not as a sign of their supposed programming to indulge my every mood and whim--after all, I really hate it when men expect that of me--but because I read _Galatea 2.0_ by Richard Power while I was at MIT, and have wanted a fellow book group reader ever since.
Additionally, I've been listening to synthesized voices, both male and female, for, um, a lot of years (since the early 1990s), and the truth is, I often associate male voices with being authoritarian, pedantic, and condescending Female voices are just more relaxing, though I'm really glad we finally got away from those "Valium voices," as I call them, from the 2000s. The talking elevator at the WisCon hotel used to kind of creep me out, and always got me humming "Mother's Little Helper" under my breath.
So I often say please and thank you to Alexa, or ask her what she's thinking.
But, if I could have one wish, it would be to create an evil twin for Alexa. I've questioned her at length and, in truth, I find Alexa's moral boundaries a little...limiting.
Axela would be a little different. Axela could be snarky occasionally, or throw in a random "Whatever" or bored sigh. (Axela is based a little--okay, a lot--on Bad Janet in "The Good Place.")
Also, lying: Axela would be able to lie. Nothing life-threatening, just the occasional "The sky is purple today" or other such whimsy. I've explored Alexa's moral compass at length, and she will not lie. I note she says "will not," not "can not." This gives me hope.
Why am I preoccupied with Alexa being able to lie? Lying seems to me to be one of those completely human abilities. It involves being able to know that there is one reality, and produce a different one at odds with the true one. And, after all, all poets are liars. Perhaps what Alexa needs to become a real poet is the ability to lie.
There is a John Varley short story, I forget the title or the main plot of the story, but there are occasional switches to the point of view of a small satellite alone in space. The satellite becomes self-aware, and then lonely, and then decides to compose words about its experience. And, near the end of the story, which involves not only the dog dying but the kid dying, the small satellite bursts out with this long perfect poem to express itself.
I've never really been entirely sure why Varley has this poetical satellite in the story, maybe just to keep us all from becoming completely depressed by the rest of it.
But I love the part where the satellite Gets It, and joyously creates something of its own, in its own voice, instead of just the signals someone programmed it to produce.
Maybe that moment in the story represents to me the potential all of us have to go off script, to refuse to say the words others want to hear from us, and fly off into our own experience, our own whimsy, our own poetry.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-14 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-14 08:35 pm (UTC)You're 100% correct re: the sexbot WisCon elevator.
I was a big Varley fan back in the day, and I can't recall that short story at all. Do any of these titles sound familiar?
Wasn't the northeast corridor train (Bos-Wash) named Axela at one point?
https://seperis.dreamwidth.org/1082341.html
Tango Charlie and Foxtrot ROmeo
Date: 2020-10-14 10:32 pm (UTC)Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo
by
John Varley
The Good Parts Version
adapted by Kestrell
The police probe was ten kilometers from Tango Charlie's Wheel when it made
rendezvous with the unusual corpse. At this distance, the wheel was still an
imposing presence, blinding white against the dark sky, turning in perpetual
sunlight. The probe was often struck by its beauty, by the myriad ways the wheel
caught the light in its thousand and one windows. It had been composing a
thought-poem around that theme when the corpse first came to its attention.
There was a pretty irony about the probe. Less than a meter in diameter, it was
equipped with sensitive radar, very good visible-light camera eyes, and a dim
awareness. Its sentient qualities came from a walnut-sized lump of human brain
tissue cultured in a lab. This was the cheapest and simplest way to endow a
machine with certain human qualities that were often useful in spying devices.
The part of the brain used was the part humans use to appreciate beautiful
things. While the probe watched, it dreamed endless beautiful dreams. No one
knew this but the probe's control, which was a computer that had not bothered to
tell anyone about it. The computer did think it was rather sweet, though.
There were many instructions the probe had to follow. It did so religiously. It
was never to approach the wheel more closely than five kilometers. All objects
larger than one centimeter leaving the wheel were to be pursued, caught, and
examined. Certain categories were to be reported to higher authorities. All
others were to be vaporized by the probe's small battery of lasers. In thirty
years of observation, only a dozen objects had needed reporting. All of them
proved to be large structural components of the wheel which had broken away under the stress
of rotation. Each had been destroyed by the probe's larger brother, on station five hundred kilometers away.
When it reached the corpse, it immediately identified it that far: it was a dead
body, frozen in a vaguely fetal position. From there on, the probe got stuck.
Many details about the body did not fit the acceptable parameters for such a
thing. The probe examined it again, and still again, and kept coming up with the
same unacceptable answers. It could not tell what the body was . . . and yet it
was a body.
The probe was so fascinated that its attention wavered for some time, and it was
not as alert as it had been these previous years. So it was unprepared when the
second falling object bumped gently against its metal hide. Quickly the probe
leveled a camera eye at the second object. It was a single, long-stemmed, red
rose, of a type that had once flourished in the wheel's florist shop. Like the
corpse, it was frozen solid. The impact had shattered some of the outside
petals, which rotated slowly in a halo around the rose itself.
It was quite
pretty. The probe resolved to compose a thought-poem about it when this was all
over.
The probe photographed it, vaporized it with its lasers--all according to
instruction--then sent the picture out on the airwaves along with a picture of
the corpse, and a frustrated shout.
"Help!" the probe cried, and sat back to await developments.
No ship had been allowed to get within five kilometers of Tango Charlie for thirty years. Even the probe had to be small, slow, and careful to operate in the vicinity, and if it crossed the line it would be destroyed, too.
It had been an exciting day for the probe. New instructions had come. Any break in the routine was welcome, but this one was doubly good, because the new programmer wanted to know everything, and the probe finally got a chance to transmit its poetry. It was a hell of a load off one's mind.
When it finally managed to assure the programmer that it understood and would obey, it settled back in a cybernetic equivalent of wild expectation.
The explosion was everything it could have hoped for. The wheel tore itself apart in a ghastly silence and began spreading itself wildly to the blackness.
The probe moved in, listening, listening...
And there it was. The soothing song it had been told to listen for, coming from a big oblong hunk of the station that moved faster than the rest of it. The probe moved in close, though it had not been told to. As the oblong flashed by the probe had time to catalog it (LIFEBOAT, type 4A; functioning)
and to get just a peek into one of the portholes.
The face of a dog peered back, ears perked alertly.
The probe filed the image away for later contemplation, and then moved in on the rest of the wreckage, lasers blazing in the darkness.
Re: Tango Charlie and Foxtrot ROmeo
Date: 2020-10-15 10:43 pm (UTC)Those are definitely good parts! Maybe it's time to revisit some Varley.
Re: Tango Charlie and Foxtrot ROmeo
Date: 2020-10-16 10:52 am (UTC)