If Google Assistant calls, think about hanging up

Do we really say “um,” “mmhmm” and “gotcha” all the time?

Yes, we do, if by “we” we mean American human beings c. 2018.

Does that mean our robots should say the same words as they do tasks for us and try to act all homo sapien?

That’s the somewhat profound question raised last week when Google CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled the tech giant’s Google Assistant device, set to provide competition for the already-automatons of Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

“What you’re going to hear is the Google Assistant actually calling a real salon to schedule an appointment for you,” Pichai told the audience. “Let’s listen.”

When we do, we hear, in a mellifluous all-American assistant’s happy voice: “Hi, I am calling to book a woman’s haircut for a client — umm, I’m looking for something on May 3.” “Sure, give me one second,” says the (presumably flesh-andblood) scheduler on the line.

And then, the first big laugh line for the live audience gathered for the droid-vocal unveiling: “Mm-hmm,” the bot says, with seemingly slavish contentment at the pleasure of being allowed to wait. It’s a drag, but she’s going to remain perky.

A time for the clip job is worked out, to much applause.

But isn’t there something about this interaction that should give us pause? (The first thing is that there are already signs the interaction was rigged, or at least edited. Google won’t comment on that.) The voice of the GA is pretty convincingly human, much more so than what’s been heard from Siri and Alexa. If this was a partially cooked call, the technology is apparently real.

But the assistant making the call is not. She is artificial intelligence. Just as how, in the online-graphics world, new hyper-Photoshopping techniques can convincingly place one person’s face on another’s body in video, so that many pieces of photographic “evidence” will automatically become suspect, we now have aural impersonations that are very convincing indeed.

While Google says it intends to place a warning up-front so that it’s clear one is being called by a machine, it certainly didn’t during the demonstration.

The late Stephen Hawking once said that artificial general intelligence “could spell the end of the human race.”

Is that a good trade for not having to telephone for your next haircut?

— Los Angeles Daily News,

Digital First Media