Prosthetic
Painting and Story by Lehan Winifred Ramsay
In the newspapers today, word spreads that Siri is listening in to our phone calls, for the purposes of improving customer service.
Of course, we readers always assume that we would be fairly treated, in that if “all” information was being collected, we would, of course, be collected.
But what sense does it make to collect everyone? I’m sure that it’s necessary to collect everything just so that you can make it clear that you are collecting everything, not targeting anything. But what sense would it be to add it all to the mix? It would be very difficult to find narratives and stories through the data if you put everyone in.
Likely “everything” is in the big bin at the back. And then, around the desk, are little shoe boxes with names on them, each containing just one story, with multiple sources. What would the labels on those shoe boxes say? And how narrow would be the parameters for including information in those shoe boxes? If it was a very well-known name, likely the naming of that name would NOT cause some information to be included in that shoe box.
More likely would be that inclusion would be decided by some other factor. It would also be likely that such a collation would NOT be made by a computer. But by a little man sitting at a little desk with a shoebox on it. Hah! The problem with computers is, of course, that they are computers.
They think there is only one answer to a problem of mathematics, are unlikely to consider that the answer might be “Why am I doing this?”
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Can Siri fairly be a target? Does Siri have a human? 🙂
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I’m sure she does. A whole team of personal assistants. Their job is to turn her into a pop idol. It wouldn’t surprise me if the number one use for Siri was to encourage us to form the opinion that Google’s searches are dull and uninteresting, and the kind of search that is “personalized” and “socialized” is more entertaining.
And we’ll form that opinion. Because we get bored with computers, we get bored with reading stuff, and now that they tell us that we’re so important, we want it about us. And we WANT the companies to be listening to us, to be recording us, to be surveying us. We want that. We want it to be about us again. It seems to me that that is why, with all the talk and all the evidence of government surveillance (which company sells the products, to which government, and which company takes part in the surveillance itself) there is so little actual protest or action.
I’m sure that Siri’s Personal Assistants take every “silly” question and create a silly answer for it. We’re pretty limited in imagination, for every new question there are likely to be hundreds of thousands exactly the same. And so, Siri is raising the bar for our comedians. Some day soon, everything that comes out of their mouths will just sound like one of Siri’s faux pas.
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We call the opportunity to have an opinion “personal freedom”. And it is, so long as we still have a variety of forms from which to draw our opinions and forms in which to express it. So good on apple for giving us Siri, having learned from social media that we sometimes just like silly, aimless, shallow things. Sometimes such a thing is called “serendipity”. Something Siri’s Personal Assistants will need to be very skilful not to eradicate.
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Siri is in huge demand. I understand why having seen a vision impaired student translating a rendition of an email Siri read to him. The seductress. I could not understand a word of it, but he could. They have a secret language between themselves I could hear although he said not. When he talks to her it is exclusive as when she does to him. I saw theirs was not a relationship of only convenience like sliced bread or the electric can opener. It was symbiotic. Siri had no reality unless she was motivated to speak by his presence and exclusively his voice identity whereas anybody can open a can who is possessed of will.
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A shoebox for each of us? Generous.
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Generosity is in the eye of the beholder in this instance bound to the willingness of the operator to believe in insight rather than the irrelevance of sight. It’s even better than that (to use a phrase of yours). Change means simply that everything that is collected is emptied out of the shoe box continuously to allow it to accumulate everything.
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A sandshoe box?
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I knew an answer would come. (Why do I think of Monty Python almost every life situation). 🙂
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Siri Hustvedt ? The wife or is it the ex-wife of Paul Auster? Why is she listenibg, getting ideas for a new book?
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…listening…rushing to have my hair cut…
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Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface
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I wonder if Siri slows down the system.
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OH NO! You can’t be sirious.
Let me read the replay of that.
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Yes, it’s fixed now.
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