THE WAY WE SPEAK TO OUR MACHINES IMPACTS HOW THEY BEHAVE Many of you will have received home robots for the holidays. Congratulations on your new arrivals. You are now officially living in The Future. I live there too. Welcome to the neighbourhood.
But there are a few things that you should know before you settle in, so you’re not surprised later on in The Future when terrible things happen. I like to think of 1980s science fiction movies like The Terminator, RoboCop and Total Recall as travel guides to our modern world. In other words, how we treat that friendly Alexa, Cortana or Google Home will ultimately affect who will be lined up at the wall during the robot uprising.
At a technical level, voice-activated personal assistants are pretty incredible and take a lot of science. They require processors, wake-up words, databases, and the ability to correctly interpret a word despite age, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnic background or country of origin. So yeah, just shouting, “Hey Alexa, tell me a joke,” seems a bit flippant now, doesn’t it?
My point is that the way we speak to our machines has an impact on how they behave. But Amazon has just implemented a new whispering mode that will meet the human’s voice volume. Why shouldn’t the device eventually copy our tone too? You know, shouting at it. Ordering it around. Being polite. The robots are learning. We aren’t.
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