05-01-2016, 04:47 PM
Abstract
This paper explores cultural conceptions of human-machine communication through a discourse analysis of U.S. news media accounts of Apple’s launch of Siri - a voice-activated, personal assistant application. Through this analysis of online reports regarding Siri’s initial reception from The New York Times, CNN, and ABC News several themes emerge regarding the nature of Siri and communication with it. These themes portray Siri as the future made real; as part friendly female; as a futuristic servant at the users’ beck and call. In totality these portrayals establish Siri as the antithesis of malicious AI machines and position her as a non-threatening, technological slave firmly under the control of the user. Siri is “safe” for humans. Or, is it? This paper concludes by questioning whether the control we have over Siri is real or an illusion that reinforces what Carey and Quirk (1989) called the “rhetoric of the electronic sublime.”
Introduction
When Turing argued that machines one day would be able to think and engage in competent conversation with humans, he anticipated the backlash against his idea that threatened the sanctity of the human mind (Turing, 1992). By the time Turing published his seminal work in 1950, the debate over the impact of technology on society was already an old one. Extending back to the Phaedrus and up through the industrial revolution into the computer age, philosophers had long weighed the promise and peril of emerging technologies. As is evident in Leo Marx’s (2000) The Machine in the Garden, the impact of machines also has occupied a space within the greater cultural consciousness. More than 60 years after Turing proposed the idea of talking with intelligent computers, we now have the capability to do so. In 2011, Apple launched the iPhone 4s with a new feature - Siri, a voicecontrolled, artificial intelligence application that functions as a personal assistant. The goal of this paper is to continue this exploration of our cultural reactions to machines, this time by focusing on how we conceive of a program that can talk back to us.
Siri is the focus of this study for several reasons: Although people have communicated vocally and haptically with machines before Siri, the program, which began as a $110 million defense project (SRI, 2012), was unique when introduced because it used natural language, instead of computer commands, to communicate (Aron, 2011; Rousch, 2010). Siri speaks with a female voice in the U.S. and gives the illusion of having a personality. As an AI program, Siri learns from and adapts to both individual users and all of its users collectively (Apple, 2012; Aron, 2011). Siri also is more accessible to the public than most AI technology. The application’s introduction with the iPhone 4s created a buzz in the U.S. media that caught the attention of both technophiles and average users. And so, Siri can help scholars better understand how people made sense of and reacted to voice-controlled, AI technology when it was introduced on a large scale.