For The Baffler, Tamara Kneese considers the good, bad, and downright creepy uses of Artificial Intelligence and the multitude of philosophies at odds around its use. Can humans overcome their flawed selves to create AI to for the betterment of humanity? Only the bots know for sure.
IN JUNE 2022, Amazon advertised a new feature of the virtual assistant Alexa with a demo designed to prove that the device could resurrect the voices of dead relatives. At the re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, Rohit Prasad, head scientist for Alexa, showcased a video of a dead grandmother’s disembodied voice reading The Wizard of Oz to her grandchild. Noting the immense loss of life during the pandemic before launching into the demo, Prasad stressed that what the audience was seeing was merely a prototype. He framed the project as “a voice-conversion task and not a speech-generation task.” But Prasad was suggesting that grandma’s voice, filtered through Alexa’s speakers, was a sufficient proxy for grandma herself.
Intergenerational communication with dead family members is a canny selling point for a smart device, provided you’re not concerned with the mass manipulation of a grieving public. It is also a fantasy that barely covers for Amazon’s real goal: harnessing and selling data produced in intimate home settings and maintaining customers and their data by whatever means necessary.
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