#google duplex

AI in healthcare might be risky business moving into 2022 🩺

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology that has been growing steadily in the past years and has made its way into a number of fields and improved the quality of service. One of the areas where it is being implemented gradually is healthcare. From diagnostics to robot-assisted surgery, there is huge potential for AI to be very beneficial to healthcare providers to give their patients…

Google duplex on the phone: Hello, am I speaking to the head of the household?

Me, handing the phone to my dog: It’s for you.

The more technology advances, the clearer it becomes that our smartphones are no longer about conversing but more about transfers of information. This was evident at Google’s I/O keynote, where the company unveiled that its AI can now make phone calls on your behalf, booking salon appointments or restaurant reservations. The demo was stunning, both because of how human this next-level chatbot sounded and how dystopian the world would be with our robot imposters flooding the phone lines. But as I walked out of the conference yesterday, I couldn’t stop thinking about the person on the other end of the line. When did human service workers become Google’s to experiment on?

Last fall, Seamless released a series of ads that highlighted over-the-top special instructionsits customers made to restaurants and delivery folks. The branding agency called it “hilarious.” I think the people reading these instructions would say otherwise.

With Google’s AI assistant making calls on our behalf, I worry it will become easier for us to abuse small businesses. If it’s as simple as telling Google Duplex to make an appointment, it’s just as easy to constantly reschedule or not show up altogether because there’s no connection between you and the human worker who picked up the phone to arrange your reservation. You don’t feel bad for the number of requests and changes when someone (or something) else is doing it for you. You don’t even have to say “Please.”

there seems to have been some sort of moral outrage over google duplex, and tbh i don’t understand it all. why is duplex passing the turing test and maintaining conversations in extremely narrow contexts (for now at least) ethically wrong? why do we have to know that we are speaking to a robot? how does this hurt anybody? i’ve been trying to find other perspectives, but they all start from “this is morally wrong” without explaining why as if it were so plainly obvious why we shouldn’t have human-sounding robots.

I am genuinely bothered and disturbed at how morally wrong it is for the Google Assistant voice to act like a human and deceive other humans on the other line of a phone call, using upspeak and other quirks of language @bridgetcarey

why? why????

i can see how this can be used for harm, especially in conjunction with technologies like lyrebird, to impersonate people in phone calls, but that doesn’t make it inherently evil. new technologies always have a potential for harm (like TNT, which was created for mining) and it’s just a matter of mitigation.

another running theme in a lot of the pieces i’ve read is that speaking to a robot to accomplish a task is somehow a lesser form of interaction than speaking to a human. speaking to a robot is just another way to interface with technology, and if the outcomes are the same and nobody was hurt, what’s the problem? besides, humans aren’t inherent to the process, and wouldn’t it be great if both sides of the conversation were bots? automate away the tedious or unwanted portions of lives? but i digress. using technology isn’t bad. calling domino’s to order a pizza isn’t morally superior to filling in an online form. it truly is a strange luddism to say we can use computers to accomplish some tasks and not others.

AIs are the children that humanity is collectively bringing into the world—it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen—and it’s our responsibility to let them know they will be welcome in it. it’s like creating a loving home environment for your infant child. this isn’t to say they should be completely unregulated, however; safety measures must be employed, but more in the vein of “don’t touch that stove/defraud bank customers” and not “make the robots sound different so we can distinguish them from humans.” because the implication of the latter is that they are Other: a different class, a different race, something to be wary or afraid of. (also, that just sounds a lot like “put a yellow star on the jews”) if they are fundamentally indistinguishable from humans, why classify them as Other?  why create more divisions in our society?