I Dream of Siri: Magic and Female Voice Assistants

Abstract

Recent advances in science and engineering have facilitated the development of artificial intelligence voice assistants. While this is true from a technical aspect, smart speakers and voice assistants did not develop in isolation from the rest of human society. The devices may be new, but the practices and patterns in their development and use are not. Using Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, I map homologous practices of smart speaker interaction onto historical conceptions of supernatural magic use. This structural comparison suggests that practices and patterns that were essential to magic use have re-emerged in smart speaker utilization in similar forms. Some of these practices are noteworthy for their homology alone. However, other homologous behaviors revive patterns of inequity that, in Western magical traditions, had privileged the traditionally educated man. The goal of this paper is to elucidate the ghost in the machine: the prejudiced social practices of supernatural magic that were asserted to be eradicated yet which are now, nevertheless, newly instantiated within our most cutting-edge devices.

Scripting Consenting Fictions in Sex Techology Imaginaries

“…This design imaginary reinforced existing cultural attitudes regarding gender and its relation to work, which inform the scripts that shape use of the technology (Robertson 2018, 98-102). For instance, the default feminized gendering of digital conversational assistants-interactive computing technologies programmed to assist users via presenting themselves as sentientby their engineers and marketers rehearses existing associations that subservient labor is the domain of women and feminized subjects (Rhee 2018;Lingel and Crawford 2020;Toncic 2021). Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), and Cortana (Microsoft), as examples of digital conversational assistants, present as feminized subjects through coded software scripts that script user interactions with the technology as if commanding and receiving assistance or care from a woman.…”