To explore the concept of figuration presented in Lucy Suchman’s chapter from “Human-Machine Reconfigurations”, I looked at Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. Alexa, a machine, figures existing dynamics between genders and races. I returned to the essay “Why Alexa is Racist and Sexist” by Andrew Prescott, which interrogates why digital voice assistants tend to emulate white women. Alexa is an assistant to humans; we order it to do things for our convenience and pleasure.
Alexa lacks agency. It only does what humans instruct it to do. It wholly supports human agency by performing tasks to make its owners’ lives more convenient. Suchman writes, “In the case of the human, the prevailing figuration in Euro-American imaginaries is one of autonomous, rational agency, and projects of artificial intelligence reiterate that culturally specific imaginary.”
In its representation as a white woman, Alexa reinforces human social relationships. Prescott writes, “Alexa is a woman because it suggests subservience. She is white because that is taken to signify intelligence and efficiency.” Suchman writes that “specifically located individuals conceive technologies made in their own image, while figuring the latter as universal.” The tech industry is predominantly white men. Do they feel comfortable ordering a white woman around? In this case, creators are not conceiving technologies in their own image, but adding characteristics (femininity) based on societal gender dynamics.
Furthermore, Alexa is not embodied. It is a voice, both human and machine-like, inside a device. This always foregrounds that it is a machine, one we should not feel bad about ordering around. Prescott also writes of “a continuing machine-like quality for her voice that seems reassuring to human users. Again, it is about distances and what she [sic] feel to be appropriate social relationships. We want to know that Alexa is a machine.” Suchman presents the idea that “embodiment, rather than being coincidental, is a fundamental condition for intelligence.” Using this framework, Alexa can never be an intelligent agent.
In Suchman’s description of her encounter with Stelarc’s Prosthetic Head, I realized that some of the slippages were due to its older, deficient technology. The Prosthetic Heads of Suchman’s time have morphed into the Alexas of today. Suchman’s experience with the Prosthetic Head reminded me of my brief experience unboxing an Amazon Echo for my parents one Christmas. I remember talking to it. Its machine learning had not yet adapted to the contours of any of our voices. We repeatedly yelled the same command to it until it got it. I thought, this is the dystopian device that will take over our lives? The voice interface meant that I had to feel around and discover Alexa’s limitations – it wasn’t immediately apparent in the user interface. Its machineness was evident. As AI gets more advanced, will the gap between human and machine narrow? Will we always need to figure robots as subservient machines, to reinforce our human agency and superiority?
References
Prescott, Andrew. “Why Alexa is Racist and Sexist.” Artificially Intelligent. Eds. Papadimitriou, Irini, Andrew Prescott, and Jon Rogers. 2018. pp. 56-57.
Suchman, Lucy. Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.