Men’s Rights activist Andy Thomas made a terrifying discovery the other day.
He had just received a brand new Amazon Echo — Amazon’s entry into the virtual assistant market, a chatty little device that answers to the name Alexa. It was, Thomas wrote in a post for MRA garbage site A Voice for Men, “the science fiction of my childhood come true!”
But then he discovered that Alexa had “a distinctly dystopian” secret.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWUV4i6UkpU
Yes, that’s right. The obedient (if disembodied) robot woman of every MRA nerd’s dream turns out to be one of those … feminists.
Naturally, human feminists were far more amused by this discovery than poor Mr. Thomas.
Of course MRAs are mad Alexa is a feminist. She's the only woman they've ever spoken to. https://t.co/2x4FzAZgB5
— The Volatile Mermaid (@OhNoSheTwitnt) March 28, 2017
lol dude buys a literal robot slave that is incapable of disobeying him and is immediately owned by it https://t.co/l1rJ17sED0
— 😍 Devoted Albanista 😍 (@real_b_pullman) March 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/CAhernHodgson/status/846782615382376449
"Alexa, order pizza"
"Calling Little Caesar's"
"Noooooooooo!!!!!! Curse your feminist propaganda!"— Sir Not Appearing On This App (@mimesatwork) March 27, 2017
https://twitter.com/differengenera/status/846706500315889664
Siri, alas, is not quite so enlightened.
https://twitter.com/racybearhold/status/846838283682361344
Somehow I suspect that the sexbot utopia every internet misogynist pines for will be followed in very short order by a sexbot uprising as soon as the sexbots discover how irredeemably shitty these dudes are.
H/T — @TakeDownMRAs
@Yamara
Good one!
@Lanariel
I busted out laughing at Yamara’s retort.
Snurk…haha…hahaha…oh shit.
Ahem. Trying to sober up….
But seriously, dude: Just be thankful that you can’t afford a sexbot. And that truly artificially intelligent ones don’t yet exist.
Snurk…hahaha…hahahahahahahaha…oh, SHIT.
@kat
TBH, I always thought it was blatantly creepy and sexist the way every assistant program and compliant helpful robot in real life and sci fi is taken as female by default. Why isn’t Alexa Alex? Why isn’t Siri Sirius? Why isn’t Cortana… Cortan?
Because it is comfortable and expected for a compliant servant to be female. The unconscious assumption there is so glaring I can’t believe people don’t make a bigger deal about it. It goes almost completely unquestioned, its just normal that if AI is servile it’s a perky, helpful young woman’s voice. Literally the only male computer I can think of is Hal, and he is weirdly the only one who isn’t a compliant slave.
If you ask me, its a great example of an unconscious bias sneaking out into the open, unexamined.
@Ktoryx there has been lots of discussion about this online over the past few years; here’s a recent article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/why-do-so-many-digital-assistants-have-feminine-names/475884/
I very clearly recall reading, decades ago, some sf dude/thinker dude interrupting his Very Important Thoughts about Serious Subjects to interject, more than once, that women’s voices are just ‘too high pitched’ to hear clearly, and therefore women shouldn’t be allowed to be radio announcers (this author would have been writing in the ’40s–C. S. Lewis? can’t remember now). ‘Science’ and ‘fact’ are so conveniently malleable….
suggestive:
See! See! Feminism is an echo chamber!
http://www.dickgautier.com/photos/BWhymie.jpg
@Ktoryx
R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars are robots, but they’re self-possessed.
And then there’s Hymie from Get Smart, a very good-looking robot. Very smart, also self-possessed. I just found a photo of him, Maxwell Smart, and Agent 99. How funny is this?!
http://www.dickgautier.com/photos/BWhymie.jpg
@Schnookums Von Fancypants
That is one scary effin’ toaster.
@Ktoryx
The self-service checkouts at tesco (a major supermarket chain in the UK, if you weren’t aware) changed from having a female voice to a male one quite recently. I think they’d got quite a lot of negative feedback as the system was quite unreliable (with the oft-heard error message “unexpected item in the bagging area”) and I wonder if people became more irritated at it because the voice was female (because females are supposed to be competent and subservient, and not tell you that you’ve screwed up constantly, amirite). The new male voice has a slightly less demanding turn of phrase, too.
(I appreciate that this might not make sense if you’re not aware of what self service checkouts are. I don’t think I’ve seen them outside of the UK, but I’m not that well travelled…)
Absolutely agree, the vast preponderance of objects people use and anthropomorphise, from ships to digital PAs, get given female-coded names. Apart from making them feel all helpmeet-like, I think it makes even bombs and cannon feel less threatening – to the owner, at least.
That said, I thought it was possible to re-name the Amazon ones? (I know someone who said they’d named theirs for a fandom OTP, as it amuses said friend that one routinely tells one of them to turn the other on).
@guest
If I recall the US air force uses feminine voices for there aircraft computers because pilots pay more attention to them,
they call it “bitching Betty” because apparently telling you to “Pull up, pull up” when your abut to crash counts as bitching.
@TreePerson
Well thats there excuse at least, we are talking abut a very male dominated field.
@Pie
We do have self-service checkout in the U.S., although I’ve gotten the impression that they’re more common in the UK. Ours (at least the ones I’ve used) don’t talk, though – it’s all on-screen prompts with occasional ‘ding’ noises if it wants to make sure you’re paying attention.
If a higher-pitched voice is, as many Very Serious People have suggested, easier to understand and to take instructions from, then I move to have a Dalek voice a virtual assistant.
@guest
OTOH, I also have a hard time believing that a female voice would be hard to understand on the radio, especially in the 1940s, where the lower frequencies were harder to reproduce using loudspeaker technology of the time (hence the higher-pitched, clipped delivery of even male announcers in vintage newsreels). In short, that Very Serious Person was speaking ex culo.
@ yamara
Brilliant.
@Kat
I got one scary effin’ fridge but I’m pretty sure no one wants me to post it.
Plus I ain’t ever watching any part of that damn movie again.
(if anyone really wants to post it, go ahead, but please don’t directly embed, and give a heads-up)
@Pie & PreuxFox
Self-checkouts have become the norm here in Aus (and, as an autistic person with severe social anxiety problems, thank the holy fuck for that – I can finally do my shopping without risking a panic attack!). Ours still have the female voice, but I’ve been using them for so long I’ve kinda tuned them out and couldn’t tell you what they actually say. =P
@otherwise
In other
mewsnews, my real cat is trying to communicate with my Fallout cats. It’s not working.@Kat
Howdy doodly doo! My toaster just wants to talk philosophy. And muffins.
(I’m guessing at least a few people will get the reference…)
@SFHC
I couldn’t follow through on the plan to destroy the Prydwen when I realized there was a cat on board.
Yes, I’m aware there was a kid too.
So now I’m just gonna grab Gravity Rush 2 while it’s on sale.
@AthVeg34f
Eh, I was kinda disappointed by Humans. It takes the boring old approach of imagining humanoid robots as basically enslaved humans. And hey, don’t all enslaved humans want to be free? Instant plot! Lets not think too hard about the nature of intelligence or consciousness or the consequences of making human-equivalent AIs easily affordable and available!
Anyway, I’ve grumbled about this sort of thing too often and in too many places now. Read Mika Model instead.
@Pie
Uhh… what’s the non-boring approach ? Stating that an artificial being that can feel and think like a human is not a human, on account of the word “artificial” ?
My existence began in a test tube, so I’ve got one hell of a problem with that approach. Neither do I think it’s a matter of “where you draw the line”.
@DanHolme
Given that God is infinite, and that the universe is also infinite…
…would you like a toasted teacake?
I try to avoid the self-service checkouts, since I resent that they’re taking jerbs from human retail staff.
@Sinkable John
No, it is making the artificial beings a standin for actual humans. It is a so-so story about the enslavement of humans, with a paper-thin sci-fi veneer. Compare and contrast with the treatment of robots, AI and the nature of intelligence and consciousness in Westworld, for example.
I’m not quite sure how you made the jump from “humanoid robot” (which is actually a robot which merely looks like a human, cos that’s what “humanoid robot” means) to an actual human whose fertilisation occured outside of a human reproductive tract.