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Valeria Graziano 2022-09-29 04:12:50 -07:00
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**Social Reproduction and Hyperemployment**
>The histories of machines, femininity, and waged labour have long been understood as deeply entangled and mutually constitutive. This merging of woman, machine, and work is taken in a new direction in the twenty-first century, with the advent of the “digital assistant”. These applications are knowledge navigators, available as part of various operating systems, which recognise natural speech, and use this ability to help answer users queries and to aid in organizational tasks, such as scheduling meetings or setting reminders. Perhaps the most famous of these is Apples Siri now widely recognised as the voice of the iPhone but there are several others, including GoogleNow and Microsofts Cortana, all of which perform similar functions with varying degrees of efficiency. The connections between these digital assistants and the conventions of low-status clerical work are obvious; Microsoft even went so far as to interview human PAs whilst developing Cortana, and a reviewer from Wired magazine declared that using Siri is: kind of like having the unpaid intern of my dreams at my beck and call, organizing my life for me (Chen, 2011: n.p.). These apps represent, in many respects, the automation of what has been traditionally deemed to be womens labour. [...] This brings us to the topic of hyperemployment. What do we mean by this term? Hyperemployment is an idea, advanced by Ian Bogost, which links contemporary technological developments with a qualitative and quantitative change in personal workloads. His argument is that technology far from acting in a labour-saving capacity is in fact generative of ever more tasks and responsibilities.
from: Helen Hester, [Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment](https://salvage.zone/technically-female-women-machines-and-hyperemployment/), Salvage magazine, 2016.
**Make-up for the voice**
>Accents are a constant hurdle for millions of call center workers, especially in countries like the Philippines and India, where an entire “accent neutralization” industry tries to train workers to sound more like the western customers theyre calling often unsuccessfully. As reported in SFGate this week, Sanas hopes its technology can provide a shortcut. Using data about the sounds of different accents and how they correspond to each other, Sanass AI engine can transform a speakers accent into what passes for another one and right now, the focus is on making non-Americans sound like white Americans. >Accents are a constant hurdle for millions of call center workers, especially in countries like the Philippines and India, where an entire “accent neutralization” industry tries to train workers to sound more like the western customers theyre calling often unsuccessfully. As reported in SFGate this week, Sanas hopes its technology can provide a shortcut. Using data about the sounds of different accents and how they correspond to each other, Sanass AI engine can transform a speakers accent into what passes for another one and right now, the focus is on making non-Americans sound like white Americans.
[...] [...]
Narayana said he had heard the criticism, but he argued that Sanas approaches the world as it is. “Yes, this is wrong, and we should not have existed at all. But a lot of things exist in the world like why does makeup exist? Why cant people accept the way they are? Is it wrong, the way the world is? Absolutely. But do we then let agents suffer? I built this technology for the agents, because I dont want him or her to go through what I went through.” The comparison to makeup is unsettling. If society or say, an employer pressures certain people to wear makeup, is it a real choice? And though Sanas frames its technology as opt-in, its not hard to envision a future in which this kind of algorithmic “makeup” becomes more widely available and even mandatory. Narayana said he had heard the criticism, but he argued that Sanas approaches the world as it is. “Yes, this is wrong, and we should not have existed at all. But a lot of things exist in the world like why does makeup exist? Why cant people accept the way they are? Is it wrong, the way the world is? Absolutely. But do we then let agents suffer? I built this technology for the agents, because I dont want him or her to go through what I went through.” The comparison to makeup is unsettling. If society or say, an employer pressures certain people to wear makeup, is it a real choice? And though Sanas frames its technology as opt-in, its not hard to envision a future in which this kind of algorithmic “makeup” becomes more widely available and even mandatory.