Can We Trust Alexa? Wade Roush Hopes So

Wade Roush is a journalist who writes a column on innovation for the prestigious Scientific American monthly.  In the June issue, he looks at the future of increasingly smart and omni-present artificial-intelligence (AI) agents that you can talk with—Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and so on.  Apple has installed a Siri app in its AirBuds so all you have to do is say, "Hey, Siri" and she's right there in your ear canals.  (Full disclosure:  I don't use any of these apps, except for a dumb talk-only GPS assistant we've named Garmina.) 

True to his column's marching orders, Roush came up with a list of five protections that he says users should "insist on in advance" before we go any farther with these smart electronic assistants.  Don't get me wrong, it's a good list.  But the chances of any of the five taking hold or being realized in any substantial way are, in my view, way smaller than a snowball's chances in you-know-where. 

Take his first item:  privacy.  Inevitably, AI interactions are cloud-based because of the heavy-duty processing required.  Therefore, he calls for end-to-end encryption so even the companies running the AI assistants can't tell what's going on.  This is a contradictory requirement.  Of course they have to know what you're asking, because otherwise how are they going to respond to requests for information?  Maybe Roush is thinking of something like the old firewall idea that used to be maintained between the editorial and advertising divisions of a news organization.  But there are huge holes in those walls now even in the most traditional news outlets, and I don't see how any company could both remain ignorant of what's going on between its AI system and the user, and have the AI system do anything useful.

The next protection he asks for is unprecedented, so I will quote it directly:  "AI providers must be up front about how they are handling our data, how customer behavior feeds back into improvements in the system, and how they are making money, without burying the details in unreadable, 50-page end-user license agreements."  If any of the AI-assistant firms manage to do this, it will be the first time in recorded history.  Especially the part about how they make money.  That's called a firm's business strategy, and it's one of the most closely guarded secrets that most firms have. 

Next, he calls for every link in the communication chain to be "hacker-proof."  Good luck with that.  Hacker-resistant, I can see.  But not hacker-proof.

Next, he says the assistants must draw on "accurate data from trusted sources."  This is a hard one.  If you ask Alexa a question like, "What do you mean, an Elbonian wants my help in transferring millions out of his country?" what's she going to say in response?  The adage "garbage in, garbage out" still applies to AI systems just as it did to IBM System 360s in the 1960s.  And if we're truly talking about artificial intelligence, with no human intervention, I don't see how AI systems will filter out carefully designed phishing attacks or Russian-sponsored political tweets any better than humans do, which is to say, not very well.

And I've saved the best for last.  He calls for autonomy, for AI assistants to give us more agency over our lives:  "It would be a disaster for everyone if they morphed into vehicles for selling us things, stealing our attention or stoking our anxieties." 

Excuse me, but those three actions are how most of the Internet works.  If you took away all the activity that was designed to sell us things, the Internet would dwindle back down to a few academics sending scientific data back and forth, which is how it began in the 1980s.  If you tell designers not to try stealing our attention, and turned off all the apps and sites designed to do so, Facebook, Instagram, all the online games, Twitters, newsfeeds—all that stuff would disappear.  Facebook designers are on public record as having said that their explicit conscious intention in designing the system was to make using it addictive.  And as for stoking our anxieties—well, that's a good capsule description of about 80% of all the news on the Internet.  Take that away, and maybe you'll have some good stories about rainbows, butterflies, and flowers, but only till the sponsoring companies go bankrupt for lack of business.

I have no personal animus against Mr. Roush, and in dealing with a new technology he has to say something about it.  And there's no harm in holding up an ideal for people to approach in the future, even if they don't have much of a chance of approaching it very closely.  But it's strange to see a supposedly savvy technology writer call for future protections on any high-tech innovation that are so ludicrously idealistic, not to say contradictory in some points. 

Perhaps a page from the historians of technology would be helpful here.  They make a distinction between an internalist view of history and an externalist view.  I'm radically simplifying here, but basically, an internalist (I would count Roush in that number) takes the general assumptions of a field for granted and looks at things in a we-can-do-this way.  And in principle, if you take the promises of smart-AI proponents at face value, we could in fact achieve the five goals of protection that Roush outlined.

But an externalist views a situation more broadly, in the context of what has happened before both inside and outside a given field.  In saying that the protections Roush calls for are unlikely to be realized fully, I rely on the history of how high-tech companies and other actors have behaved up to this point, which is to fall far short of every protection that Roush calls for, at one time or another. 

I hope that this time it will be different, and talking with your trusted invisible AI assistant will be just as worry-free as talking with your most trusted actual human friend on the phone.  But after writing that sentence, I'm not even sure that I want that to happen.  And if it does, I think we will have lost something in the process.

Sources:  Wade Roush's column "Safe Words for Our AI Friends" appeared on p. 22 of the June 2019 print issue of Scientific American.

Californians Talk To Their Cars

The citizens of the U. S.'s most populous state have long had a love affair with the automobile.  Life in Los Angeles is well-nigh impossible without wheels of some kind, and many commuters spend almost as much time in their cars as they do on the job.  As of Jan. 1, it is illegal in the state of California to use your mobile phone while driving unless you use hands-free technology.  Fortunately for the millions who will now have to find some other way to communicate from their cars, the automakers are rushing to integrate voice-recognition systems such as Amazon's Alexa into their products so that you can simply ask for directions or ask to talk to a friend, and the system will do the rest.

As reported in a recent  New York Times article, Ford announced that Alexa will soon be a feature of its newest hybrid models later this year.  A mobile Internet connection is vital to the new service, which counts on using cloud computing for the often computationally-intensive task of voice recognition.  The same Internet connection will be used for many of the services accessed by the software:  online purchases, remote control of "Internet-of-Things" devices, and many other uses besides the obvious ones of telephone service and GPS guidance. 

The new law is a step forward in the struggle to reduce traffic accidents caused by distracted driving.  But we have yet to see what the effects of a well-functioning voice-recognition system in a car may be in terms of safety. 

Studies have shown that visual distractions can be deadly to drivers, while sounds are much less so.  Most people can carry on an animated conversation with a passenger without being too distracted from driving, and it's reasonable to assume that conversations with voice-recognition software will not be much more distracting than having a live passenger beside you.  Still, depending on the usefulness and accuracy of the system and the number and complexity of features, things could get complicated.

Your scribe here lives such a sheltered life that the closest I've come to an Alexa is seeing the ad for it every time I click onto Amazon.com.  So I am not in a position to pass judgment personally on how well they work.  Apparently they work well enough to have made Amazon a lot richer in the past year or so, and the quality trend as more artificial-intelligence resources are applied to these things will only be upward.  Like many other new technologies, the real challenge in growing the market won't be so much technical as it will be changing peoples' habits.  And the California law is a powerful incentive to do so.

Consumers lie on a spectrum with regard to the adoption of new technologies.  Some folks—often younger ones—are early adopters who are the ones who wait in line all night long to be the first to buy a new iPhone or what have you.  The bulk of us don't rush out right away to get every latest thing, but when friends or acquaintances tell us about the item and how pleased they are with it, we go ahead and buy one when our old one wears out or when some business or personal need makes it better to buy than not.  And then, bringing up the rear of the bell curve, there are late adopters such as myself, who cling to old technologies with a grip that often takes legal force to loosen. 

There's no need to spend much marketing effort on early adopters—they often turn out to be a product's best informal salespeople as they show off their new purchases to others.  The major challenge is getting the average person to change their ways in the face of a new technology.  And California has done the automakers and the voice-recognition people a big favor in passing their hands-off-the-phone law.

Casual observation shows that a large fraction, if not a majority, of people who drive also like to talk on the phone at the same time.  If they haven't already adopted hands-free technology, as of this month, in California at least, they'll have to do something in order to avoid the threat of getting a ticket.  Enforcement is going to be lax at first, but the understanding is that this is just a grace period to give people time to adopt a new way of phoning while driving, and eventually you'll have to be using some kind of voice-recognition system, whether it's in your phone or installed in your vehicle. 

For people such as real-estate agents, maintenance providers, and others who drive around all day and have to be in touch with customers, the new law is just part of having to do business, and they will either buy a car with a built-in system or achieve their goal some other way, if they haven't already. 

For others who have not made a habit of talking on the phone while driving, the law will mean either pulling off the road when their hands-on phone goes off, or ignoring it until reaching one's destination.

Eventually, though, such actions will seem as quaint as hunting around for a pay phone to make a phone call.  The last time I saw a working pay phone was last summer on a drive through a small Nebraska town.  If I recall correctly, the same town also had a small operating movie theater in the middle of town, and a factory near the edge of town that made lawnmowers.  I didn't see any signs saying "Caution — Entering the Twilight Zone" but it gave me that feeling. 

The California law, and the automotive voice-recognition systems that will allow people to abide by it, are all part of the push to make us constantly connected whether we're at home, at work, or in between.  It's what people seem to want, or at least think they want.  Why they think they want it is another question, but one best left for another time.

Sources:  The New York Times article "Coming From Automakers: Voice Control That Understands You Better" by Neal F. Boudette and Nick Wingfield appeared on Jan. 5, 2017 at http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/automobiles/automakers-voice-control-amazon-alexa.html.