Alac2020b
| Alac2020b | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Alac2020b |
| Author(s) | Morana Alač, Yelena Gluzman, Tiffany Aflatoun, Adil Bari, Buhang Jing, German Mozqueda |
| Title | Talking to a Toaster: How Everyday Interactions with Digital Voice Assistants Resist a Return to the Individual |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Social robots, Digital voice assistants, Distributed cognition, Situated interaction, Openness, AI Reference List |
| Publisher | |
| Year | 2020 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | Evental Aesthetics |
| Volume | 9 |
| Number | 1 |
| Pages | 3-53 |
| URL | Link |
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Abstract
Discussions of the problematic relationship between AI and society have recently only heightened. These discussions, nevertheless, remain partial until they take into account how we live with AI technologies in the unremarkable circumstances of our everyday affairs. In arguing for the importance of such a “noticing,” this article centers on the internet of things and associated digital voice assistants (DVAs). These commercial social robots, designed as conversation-oriented devices, manifest their incompleteness in their need for other voices. Paying attention to that relationality at an embodied scale of analysis brings up our involvement in situated interactional production, while also manifesting its reciprocal character. This not only puts into question the conviction of DVA designers that these gadgets will generate effects of presence in relation to an intentional mind, but also gives us the resources to resist a parallel return to the individual that more often transpires in the discussions of the problematic relationship between AI and society. We practice this resistance by evoking efforts in distributed cognition and the extended mind hypothesis, but we also go beyond the instrumentalist reasoning that primarily recognizes the world as carved into convenient tools that can extend our cognition. To do so we focus on the achieved quality of bodies and environments—two constitutive elements of DVA technology—thereby pointing out how the self in the context of the voiced AI importantly derives from the openness between humans and machines in the interactional scenes of which they are a part.
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