My friend the fridge - Page 2

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Rosaleen Love

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SOME EXAMPLES OF SYNTHETIC VOICES AND PERSONALITIES ARE FOUND on the Cepstral website, Cepstral being a company that promised to bring "the power of speaking, reading and learning to life" with "natural, human-sounding voices". The voices are a lot of fun. Once voice, Millie, introduces herself: "Hello, my name is Millie. Some people say I look like Elizabeth Hurley, but I think it's just my voice." Yes, she does sound like Elizabeth Hurley. This could be the voice on my fridge. Another voice is Duchess, billed as "one of Cepstral's more sensitive voices". I was surprised to hear a man's voice. Was the Duchess in drag? The voices may be given additional effects, ranging from PVC pipe, dizzy droid, liquid love, to space-time echo. I suspect a humorist programmer enjoyed his work. These synthetic voices speak with smooth, natural-sounding phrases, with gaps between the phrases that make up the sentence. The listener knows it is a synthetic voice.

It could be that talking to my fridge may be a lot of fun. If the technology works as promised, that is.

The smart environment depends on programs monitoring other programs, programs learning as they go, programs that communicate with each other: all things that can go wrong. With first-generation telecare, most problems are attributed to the user, who is forgetful or who doesn't want authorities to know she has fallen, sometimes for good reason. Falls are one reason people have to move out of home. With second-generation telecare, the systems might be less easy to fool, and that's a worry. Sometimes systems are installed more for the peace of mind of members of a distributed family and I might prefer to keep my falls to myself, as long as I can manage to pick myself up again. What happens when things go wrong with the systems themselves – if, for example, the synthetic voices degrade and become unintelligible? Or worse. I definitely do not want a fridge with a demonic mind of its own, like in the movie Ghostbusters.

Nance spent much of her time remembering the dead. Her thoughts went way back to communities few of us knew. Her connections were not just with members of the distributed family as in geographically distributed, but those distributed in time, and many gone forever. As more film and audio records are taken by families, there will be more of this kind of evidence left of lives, and a picture-frame device that plays these sounds and images of the lives of past family and community would be something I'd like to have as an item in my future assistive technology.

How about system maintenance? Even if the systems will learn for themselves, getting the systems online and maintaining them will require skilled people. If the demographic trend is towards a decline in the number of working-age people, not only will there be fewer nursing assistants, there will be similar labour problems in system maintenance.

If there is to be a shortage of nursing help it will also be felt in retirement villages and nursing homes, and that's one rationale behind the development of Nursebot, a robot nursing assistant. Nursebot takes on the task of guiding residents round a retirement village. It can locate a specified person who has an appointment, remind him or her of it, ask if the person wants assistance, adjust its pace to less than five centimetres a minute if necessary. The researchers acknowledge that part of the function of a human nursing assistant is for conversation and Nursebot has some powers of communication, limited at present to commenting on the weather and what's on television. Perhaps some future Robonurse might be able to be programmed to listen empathically and to respond with a few noncommittal phrases, like, "Uh huh", or "Tell me more about it", or "I see", or "I'd like to hear more about that".

I STARTED WRITING ABOUT AN UNSATISFACTORY CONVERSATION WITH A PRERECORDED VOICE that got me nowhere in a commercial transaction. I've moved on to the problem that these voices, whether prerecorded human voices or synthetic voices, can only understand a few words because language, being social and cultural, is difficult to compute. I had dealings with a Voice that was, in my case I suspect, computed to be unhelpful, computed not to respond to my problem, interpreted as it was from non-US standard credit-card numbers, and asked a question to which I could not give a standard reply.

In the design of specific synthetic-voice devices intended as aids for the elderly, there will be instances in which they are going to be computed to be unhelpful. I can see an inhabitant of a retirement home telling Robonurse, "Take me home!" Everyone who still has some memory has a memory of "home", that wonderful place that was once theirs. "I want to go home" is a human statement. But Robonurse will be programmed not to take residents past the front door, that magical place where so many want to go. For Robonurse, home is somewhere outside its jurisdiction. For the person who wants to go home, it was once everything. Robonurse could be programmed to respond: "Home. Tell me more about it." And that, for that moment, may prove helpful.

Research for future products comes at a cost and it is assumed the user will pay. Some will be able to; many will not. Products envisaged for older people are also relevant for younger people with disabilities, but they are not a wealthy clientele. Researchers in robotics work at a far remove from the messiness of everyday life in a nursing home. Reporting from the International Symposium on Roboethics held in Italy in 2004, Bruce Sterling presented the worst-case scenario for robotic aids for the elderly: "The peripherals may be dizzingly clever gizmos from the likes of Sony and Honda, but the CPU is a human being: old, weak, vulnerable, pitifully limited, possibly senile." Sterling is being his usual flippant self. I wouldn't see us all as pitiable and senile, not just yet.

When I think more about the Voice, I start to wonder whether it really assists community or whether it may prove antagonistic. Assistive-living devices are designed to keep people "in the community" – meaning where they want to be, in their own homes in suburbs that they know. A community is something to which people feel, for whatever reason, a sense of belonging. Once it used to mean people who lived close to each other. Now it may mean people who may not live in geographical proximity but are defined by what they have in common – ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation. Another thing people have in common, if they live long enough, is simply age. And that may be all they have in common. The nursing home is the object of horror, not only because ageing itself is an object of horror but because of the horror of being alone and helpless with strangers with whom all one may have in common is longevity.

In Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 1990), Iris Marion Young writes: "City life is composed of clusters of people with affinities - families, social-group networks, voluntary associations, neighbourhood networks, a vast array of small communities." What Young finds definitive in city living is also the notion of "being together with strangers". "City dwelling situates one's own identity and activity in relation to a horizon of a vast variety of other activity, and the awareness that this unknown, unfamiliar activity affects the conditions of one's own." When Nance could get up and about, she was an active part of her communities. Becoming more and more confined to home doesn't lessen the sense of belonging. It lessens the opportunity to contribute in previous ways and increases the sense of loneliness and isolation from community.

Ageing brings up the question of the loss of community, the loss of family, the loss of friends, the loss of the power to cope with everyday life. Assisted-communication devices address only some aspects of these losses, but may be enough to help for a while with the loss of mobility that affects social life. Enter technologies of the future. I want them to contribute to the many good things in life that endure, despite increasing frailty. Older people may interpret assistance differently from the young. In an article on justice and the ageing, Martha Holstein makes the point that elderly people can experience some forms of dependence and interdependence as "a positive source of renewed freedom and sustenance of the self". The Voice should be working to enhance the sustenance of the self.

We are at a point where worlds are colliding: the worlds of corporation and client; the worlds of human and artificial intelligence; the divide between the service the customer needs and the service the corporation intends to provide. It seems strange to talk about my future life as one that will be lived largely in the company of programmed devices with synthetic voices, but if these devices serve to reconnect me to family and community, then I'll be happy to embrace them.

What I don't want are irritating voice loops that take me where I don't want to go, or the infuriating loops within loops of mobile-phone voice-mail. I don't want to get stuck in auto-format mode, as I do from time to time, unintentionally, with Word. I don't want ads on my communication devices. I don't want mobile-phone ring tones on everything I own, reminding me to take my medicine or restock the fridge.

What I want may not be what I get.

WHAT I MAY GET WILL BE A COMMUNITY OF PROGRAMMED DEVICES that will watch over me. They will talk to each other, and to me. That may be friendly. They may be programmed not to respond to certain of my wishes, if my wishes are deemed not to be in my best interests.

I want my smart environment to have colour, lights and action. I want it to amuse me. I want to be delighted with its antics. I want it to play music I can choose. I want lights that soothe or stimulate as required. I want to live with flocks of robo-birds, birds that move around me, never colliding. I want translucent robo-jellyfish that scuttle round on all eight tentacles, picking up the crumbs as I eat. I want bots to pick up my clothes for me when I throw them down, and dinner plates to scrape themselves and set off on tiny motorised wings into the dishwasher, through the cycle and out at the other end to the cupboard. I want shoes to shuffle themselves silently in pairs across the floor, self-polishing as they go. I want bots that have a solution for incontinence. For these I'll tolerate an intelligent toilet collecting my medical data and a fridge that gives me handy nutritional tips. No ads though. I want bots that skitter, bots that ripple, bots that love me, bots that respond to me.

I could get to like it, I reckon. But I want it all to work. ♦

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References

Martha Holstein, "Opening New Spaces: Aging and the Millenium", Journal of Aging and Social Policy,
Vol 10 (1) 1998.

Cepstral: we build voices. Text to speech synthesis.
www.cepstral.com

Compsim LLC: For devices that think.
http://www.compsim.com/

Nursebot project: Robotic assistants for the elderly.
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~nursebot/

House of Lords. Minutes of Evidence taken before Science and Technology Committee. Scientific Aspects of Aging. November 24, 2004. Uncorrected transcript.
http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/lords_s_t_select/oral_evidence.cfm

Bruce Sterling, "Robots and the rest of us", Wired,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/view.html?pg=4?tw=wn_tophead_7