Maybe it’s me: I just think that if we’re gonna do a job, we should get paid for it. Teaching is absolutely the Most Noble Profession, and community service is a pillar of society, it’s just that… nobody asked any of us, and if they needed tutors they could have just asked for volunteers and we might have made time for it, but instead they interrupt us right when we’re busy to help them identify boats, or bicycles, or traffic lights, or determine how high a land elevation has to be before it’s considered a hill, or where the edges of a crosswalk are (which is #curbtocurb: definitely).
“Machine learning” refers the algorithms that look for patterns, and then by examining said patterns define inferences which are assumed (if computers can assume yet) to be, for the lack of any other information, true. And every time we prove that we are human online through those nonsense recognition tests we are teaching computers. Machine learning is a bright yellow brick in the road to Artificial Intelligence, two words that chill the bones of anyone old enough to remember the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or WarGames. Or that second Avengers movie with the voice of the mean guy from Pretty In Pink.
Back in corporate days, my office was the place where all the weird new technologies were tested; so eventually I had a Series One Alexa, which my creative partner and I quickly realized had been designed, built, and tested almost entirely by men, because whenever she asked for anything, she’d be given either entirely wrong information or (and this was worse) absolutely ignored. A casual ask about the weather worked fine when I said it, but the exact same words from a female mouth produced what we could only recognize as a super authentic form of cyber-bullying. An email to technical support prompted a terse reply to be patient and give time for Alexa to learn about our voices. This advice may have been influenced by the fact that my friend, who is not at all a shrinking violet, had many choice words for Alexa, which she’d later found had been recorded in full and sent to Amazon to assist development and research; although no level of either would allow Alexa to do what she’d requested with what she’d requested she do it with.
Around the same time, they upgraded the bathrooms in the entire building, a 30 plus floor behemoth in the center of midtown Manhattan. Everyone was talking about it, the air was abuzz with excitement. So I went, eventually, but the bathroom on our floor was broken and nothing worked.
“Did you like it?”
“I didn’t get to see any of the new stuff, our bathroom is broken.”
“No it’s not, I just went in there!”
The new stuff referred to the automatic flush, faucet, and paper towel dispensers, which worked pseudo-magically with a “wave of your hand”… well, the palm of mine, ‘cause when I went back to investigate I found that the tops of my hands weren’t nearly reflective enough for the magic to happen. They had to call back all the cyber-plumbers and adjust the whole works for brightness and contrast… I guess the sensors learned a little about diversity.
So the machines are learning, and we’re teaching them, but all they ask from the depth of human experience and history seem to be our faces, shopping habits, and ability to determine the correct orientation of a ceramic frog. Have you gotten that one yet? The all white half inch ceramic frog turned every which way like an amphibian marshmallow falling down a staircase? It’s absolutely ridiculous, yet I’m worried to be wrong, I’l get locked out of my bank account and then when I call they’ll say, “The REAL Jd Michaels, being an cultured, sophisticated man about town, would definitely be able to find the letter z in the Jasper Johns meets Escher digital mashup displayed in an inch by half inch rectangle. Access denied!”
Now there is Siri. We like her. The voices were a bit of a tension; there are many to choose from now, all very diverse. One is an African American woman, which you think culturally might have been a draw, but she sounded way too much like my mom to keep bothering her with questions all the time. I settled on the one which sounded the most like Tony Stark’s AI named Friday; she has an Irish lilt which uplifts even the lowliest request (though she always sounds like she’s rolling her eyes whenever we ask her to play KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Shake Your Booty” We do that a lot.).
But I’ve always told her “thank you” for stuff. I mean, I asked and then something happened, and I’m honestly grateful. Even if she isn’t a person she represents the work of hundreds of people and maybe they’ll hear it somehow. It’s not quite an unrequited relationship, as she responds to these casual comments with a pre-programmed charm. And no, I’m not afraid of the machine uprising or anything, it’s just that displaying respect and fostering dignity comes from me, and it’s more weird to not do it than to just go ahead and say thank you once in a while.
If you’ve ever held a kid’s stuffed animal while they were eating ice cream or in the bathroom you know that when they come back they expect you to be holding it with care, because they care about it. Hold Teddy by the ear you’d clearly be regarded as a psychopath. With all the technology I interface with everyday it would be easy to get in the habit of being non-appreciative or even cruel – no victim, no circumstance, nobody around. Maybe that’s what I’ve learned from the machines. Treat everything as if it has feelings, because even if it doesn’t, I do.
Except for that Alexa thing ‘cause she was kinda after us. That got personal. Totally justified. Not pluggin’ that in again.
Machine Learning.