Poker Face

just want to an Academy award. And the filmmakers were at my company doing a screening and had we had captured carbon dioxide of the audience with her approval, of course, and I wasn't actually at the screening. I just saw the Ceoto capture and I knew exactly where the climbs were,

where he abandoned his climbs. As the audience watched Annlex Honald attempted to climb El Capitan, their bodies responded to the suspense, their breathing change, and thanks to the carbon dioxide sensors in her theater, Poppy had a map of the audiences emotionally experience. It's this power of the audiences on that journey and experiencing it with the filmmakers, and it's pretty exciting to see that engagement in the theater

and have that history. But our breath isn't our only tell There's an increasing number of ways machines are becoming able to read us, even how hard we're thinking. In thermal cameras, you can track, you can look at dynamics of blood flow to know stress levels and engagement. Just in the infrared signatures, you can understand cognitive load. You can then look at micro expressions of facial recognition to get past not just if I'm feigning emotion, but really

the authenticity of what I'm experiencing. That gives us a lot of insight about how hard my brain is working and how engaged I am. We haven't changed this humans. What's changed this ubiquity of sensors and the capacity of sensors. The the cost just Fitteen years ago, the cost of a typical device would be about maybe. Now you're looking at those devices not even having to be close up for pennies dollars integrated into every pair of smart glasses.

Going forward, we're on the cusp of two explosions. The power of machine learning to find patterns and make predictions, and simultaneously the miniaturization and affordability of cameras and other senses. Last episode we talked about facial recognition and surveillance by governments. But when machines contract how we're feeling, our most private selves become readable, and while that may sound frightening, it

also holds enormous promise for many parts of life. From beginning to end this episode, we look at what's changing and what's possible. I'm as Veloshen. This is Sleepwalkers, my Ma Mama. So there are quite a lot of situations where personally, I don't actually want to be read. I'm not sure about you, like I want to hold them like they do in Texas play, Like when I'm playing Texas, hold them on people to know what I'm thinking, right,

and not just at the poker table. In fact, our society kind of relies on the idea that we can look one way but feel another. Obviously, in plays like Hamlet, interiority is dramatized, but but more broadly, society is where people have no privacy tend to be a bit scary. It is scary because the last thing we have on

earth is our privacy. You know, it's like people have this impulse to share everything on Instagram and give away their name to a company that wants to sell them jewelry, and it's just like, truly, our deep our secrets are the last thing we have, well the last thing we had. Right probably did a full ted talk on this, and the thing that I took away from it is will we live in a near future where a slasher film

will be edited with people's biometric data in mind? Poppy suddenly sees that on the horizon, and she has a term for technology that starts to understand us. Empathetic technology is the idea that you know, it's it's not technology that empathizes with me or technology that is trying to emulate human empathy. It's technology that makes use of my internal experience to be able to integrate that as part

of its interface. Today, it's impressive that Poppy can understand an audience's emotional journey watching Free Solo by tracking the levels of CEO two in their breath. But tomorrow it could lead to new kinds of art and entertainment that responds to us. Really great hip hop producer I was talking to wants to create music that is personalized, almost like a tailored suit for individuals. So you start to think about a very dynamic integration of the human experience.

That experience becomes something that our technology can be aware of and optimized for. I want my technology to make the right di visions so that the experience I have with it is seamless. Seamless such a seductive word they named a food delivery service after it, but a dangerous word too, because for technology to read and respond to us in real time, it needs to make decisions about

us on its own. You may remember last episode we spoke with Lisa talia Moretti about some of the risks of facial recognition technology, but that's not her only area of research, something that I was looking into really recently,

as our relationship with technology is completely shifting. So we're moving from a relationship with technology where we are asking it to do something, you know, it's a pure sort of input output, And what now we're moving towards is a relationship with technology where we are trusting technology to make decisions on our behalf. Lisa teaches at Goldsmiths in London and Cardiff University. She told us about how her students have encountered chnology making its own decisions about their

future prospects. One of the things that the students are starting to do is to game the algorithms that are being used to mind through candidates cvs. And so what they figured out is if they put right in white text anywhere on their CV UM Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, they're more likely to get through to the interview process. Does students know that recruiting algorithms prioritize applications from certain schools, so they pepper their applications with words they know the

algorithm will like, but written in white. So the human recruiters are not the wiser. They're marketing themselves straight to the AHI. They're gaming the algorithm system, which I think is pretty genius. There's also certain things where students or candidates who are having to conduct their first interview in some companies purely online and there's no person on the

other side. You're essentially talking into your webcam, and there's algorithmic technology that is recording your voice, that's listening for intonation, that's listening for the types of words that you're saying, like if you use smart words or your language isn't perhaps at a level that they would think is appropriate for business. But do we want computers to deny opportunities to job applicants that may be qualified but not fully

polished without human review. And the algorithms weren't only analyzing the student's words. They're also looking at your facial features, and so they can say if you're nervous or shy. And some of my students have said that if they very quickly use like hand gestures, they confuse the camera and the camera councy if they were nervous or shy for those particular moments. There's something quite hopeful about these

students averting the algorithms designed to read them. It's not quite the Summer of six y eight, Cara, but the youth have still got something. Well, it's true that you and I both look very good in black leather and are considered cyberpunks. That's how we met that cyberpunk rally. I was reading about this Kickstarter campaign called reflectacles like specticles, but reflective, that's right, And that's because they reflect invisible

and infrared light. When you look back into a camera that's watching you, which is like an ultimate that's like a techy middle finger, like I'm gonna look right back in this camera. It's just gonna like buzz light back at it completely. So you know, there are methods obviously for resistance, But what I'm worried about is that algorithms are very smart and they will wise up and be

harder to trick. Right, and showing up for your job interview and reflecticles probably carried his own burden as well. It is how I got this job, though, But we should also ask ourselves why these companies are using AI to filter candidates and conduct interviews, And of course it's really about saving money and saving resources, which brings out the big question of the series. Who benefits from this

new technology Amazon and Facebook and Google. When we come back, we look at the economics of giving up our data and what we get in return. Sensors and AI to analyze our response to movies or decide if we're a good fit for a job. May sound like the stuff of dystopian science fiction, and that's because it is set up a progner and Tilmon Rope. I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder, Sarah Marks, you have a

man his head. Yeah, oh, gosh, Well, it's interesting you mentioned Minority Report because, um to this day, so many years later, decades later, I'll be in some meeting in Silicon Valley and We'll be looking at some gadget and so I say, Wow, this gadget is great. It's like from Minority Report. It's so cool, And I'm like, that was supposed to be cautionary. That was a description of the bad world. That was what we want to avo wide. Oh,

for God's sake, that's Jaron Lania. He's a research scientist at Microsoft and in the eighties he coined the term virtual reality after helping invent the field. Jaren's thought a lot about what our relationships with technology mean for us, So when Steven Spielberg was making Minority Report, he called

on Jarren to act as a technology consultant. Mostly, what I've taken from Minority Report is that just trying to do cautionary portrayals of technology actually backfires, because there's some way that it's a little bit like when you show the Life of Billionaires, people don't get angry about like why do those people monopol or where they own whole islands or something. Instead they say, oh, I identify with that person. Maybe I could own a whole island someday.

And despite our fascination with dystopian fiction, we also have a tendency to fantasize about ourselves as the beneficiaries, not the victims, of the systems we create, and we tend to ascribe those systems their own will, even though we've made them. Early in the history of capitalism, Adam Smith suggested that capitalism or markets were an invisible hand, as

sort of a life form. And in the same way that you can interpret a market as being this living thing just because it's a little beyond our understanding, it's a little too complicated to fully predict and fully understand, and and that's actually its power. In the same way, big computational systems can be a little out of control, not entirely, but even if they're only a little bit, you can interpret that as being the new invisible hand,

which we call artificial intelligence. Invoking an external force like the invisible hand, or an algorithm that automatically reads resumes or makes parole recommendations obsculls real human decisions. We have to remember that our creations reflect us. If you use that to abdicate your responsibility. If you use it just to cower and fear, then you're not being a good computer scientist. That is not the responsible way to do things.

Just as if an economist says, well, the invisible hand says all these people should starve, that's not a responsible economist. The responsible economist fixes the problem in a sense. I think it's very hard to be effective if you believe in some kind of magical agency in your own inventions. I think you make yourself into an idiot. And and so I'm really concerned that not only economists but computer scientists make that error all the time. It's almost like

a new form of mythology. I've been calling it alchemy lately. But yeah, sure, it's certainly easier to say, oh, we should respect this amazing autonomous living thing that has arisen in our own inventions. It's much easier to say that when it's benefiting you and you're getting very rich. Jarn puts his finger on a central irony in our relationship with technology. When our creations benefit us, we're quick to

forget who pays the price. People who translate between natural languages, such as between English and Spanish, have seen their career prospects on the whole decrease tenfold since the arrival of Autumn Addic Translation, which is offered for free but companies like Google and Microsoft. Now, the thing is, you might say, well, this is very sad, but it always happens. People are made, people's jobs become obsolete when new technologies come along. The

buggy whip goes away and the motor car comes. All right, but the problem is that every single day, those of us who help run these free services have to scrape or steal tens of millions of example phrases from all over the world from people who don't know it's being done to them. And the reason why every single day there's new pop culture and slang in public events and memes and on and on and so you need to constantly get new phrase examples to feed into the translation engines.

So it's a weird thing. We're telling the people you don't get a job anymore because you're not needed. Oh, by the way, you're needed. We need to steal with you. Oh but by the way, we won't even tell you. And it's all based on this lie that we don't need people. Um, and that lie is based on this need to pretend the AI is this free standing thing, whereas we could instead think of it it's just the way that's African channel value between people in a new

and better way. The free availability of real time translation opens up a world of possibilities for travelers, for language learners, for long distance lovers. But these technologies have invisible costs, like the translators losing their jobs to a tool that was trained on their work. And this kind of unpaid labor is actually something all of us participating every day

without even realizing. Here's Lisa again. The way that these voice activated assistance are being trained is through huge amounts of data. A bit of an unknown secret by many people who have an Alexa is that every single time you are talking to that device, it's being recorded and being stored and going back to the cloud to train all of the other echoes around the world. So the users of echo devices are providing free labor on behalf of these massive organizations in order to train the system.

It's not the first thing we think that after purchasing an Alexa and using it to buy stuff online, every time we interact with it, we're also helping Amazon improve and make more money, but framing our data in terms of labor helps us think about technology in new ways, and our Alexa use reminds Jarren of another science fiction movie.

The reason. One that's really gotten to me is that probably the most famous cautionary tale about computers was in two thousand one Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark's movie And There's this computer called how that's this round thing that sits on the wall and just looks at you and talks to you, I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that, and it ends up going berserk and killing people and just and they have to the program it.

And the hot new gadge for the last few years has been this round thing that sits there and looks at you and you talk to I'm afraid I can't do these smart speakers and so on, and it's like, no matter how many cautions we put forward, people just follow right into it. It's it's astonishing to me. Of course, Alectra is powered by artificial intelligence. It takes a machine learning to understand what you say to it. But maybe the bigger breakthrough has been our decision to let listening

devices into our homes. Yeah, I think that's true. I didn't grow up talking to something in my house. It's interesting when you read those articles like deep inside North Korea. You know, the thing that journalists always writes, there's a speaker in every house which projects the chairman's voice into the homes. As always the shocking detail. And of course now we will have Alexas in our houses, you know. I think it's interesting that Amazon was being delivered to

us the boxes on our door step. That was the farthest they were going to get right, And now with Echo and Dot, these are devices that are inside of our homes, that are on our countertops. We're at this place where Alexa is now a part of the family. And now we have this first generation of children growing up with Alexas and other smart devices at home, interacting with them, seeing their parents talk to them all the time,

and they're already used to this responsive technology. The giving away our data piece is disconcerting, but there's another piece of our shifting relationship with technology, which is why I dragged Julian into New Jersey to one of the smartest homes I know. And no I'm not talking about i Q. Let me ask you a question. What does your little brother look like a little guy? So what would you say? What does Alexe look like? But where does she live in?

They really so every time you talk to Alexei, you're talking to space, despite having an Alexa who lives in space. My friend and her husband live in the suburbs with their sons, who are almost two and five. When they recently moved to New Jersey to fit their expanding family, they did not scrimp on smart home devices. Yeah, we've got two little kids. We both work. It doesn't bother me that they know our habits make it easier for us,

like to get stuff done. Like I'm cool with Amazon just sending me diapers because it knows what I need diapers for parents like my friends, devices like the Amazon Alexa, Google Home and their marriad counterparts are genuinely helpful, which is probably why over a hundred and eighteen million American households have a smart speaker. That's half of the US. And when you've got something so involved in your home life that it helps with diapers and groceries, it's bound

to affect some other areas as well. Your dad said, they're too There's there are three women in the house Google, who I don't know, who's the third woman in the house? And even bedtime is different. Hey, Google, tell me a story. Sure, here's one from Nickelodeon. It was a sunny day and Mr Porter was visiting farmer. He'll have I'll Google reading a story when he's in bed and we don't want to read any more books. You for your Google go

off when you as if closed the door. Yeah. To be clear, Google Home has not replaced real life bedtime stories, but it has enabled my friend's kid to get more out of bedtime. He can keep asking for stories long after his parents need to stop reading. But focusing on the privacy component of these devices doesn't capture the full picture. Not only can the rhythms of family life change in response to a digital assistant, but so can kids expectations. And that's true for all of us, even those of

us already passed early childhood development. We should think about how we're affected long term by our expectation of seamless delivery. You've got a good rapport with those kids, Kara. Neither of us have our own kids, but our editor among

us does. I was curious for his take on next to joining the family So I'd gone out to this wedding a couple of years ago in Seattle, and it was in this fancy hotel and there was an Alexa there in the room, and Azzie and I went out for dinner or something, and we left the kids with a sitter, and the kids were mesmerized because they never encountered one of these devices before, so they were watching the babysitter interact with it, calling up music and whatever else.

But then she also ordered food, so they were just floored by this. Then the next week, we were back at home and I was watching my four year old just like stomping around the house, and she started barking Alexa pizza, and it was just so confusing. She immediately knew that there was this thing you could just bark at it and and get food, and she wanted results.

But I have a conflicted feeling about all of this because I had grown up in the States, very middle class, and every couple of years we go to India and visit my relatives who were a little wealthier. And we went to a party once with one of my cousins and I saw this kid who was super wealthy, and he was yelling at his chauffeur. He was yelling at his mom, he was barking at the maid that they had,

and it was just so gross. And when you see this sort of entitlement in front of you and expressed in this way, you don't want your kids growing up with that, right, and you want everyone to be treated as humans. And and so for my daughter to be stomping around barking what she wanted, you know, I don't want that to be her way of speech. This kind of reminds me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except the Monash version, which is that you know, he

went out to dinner with his wife. He comes back, his daughter is like Alexa pizza, and he's like, what has Alexa done with my chid? You know, she was like the sweet little girl, and now she's like a child that's aware of an Alexa based on one encounter. Right. I feel like if an alien came down from space and came into my apartment and saw me cooking dinner and then saw me go, Alexa turn on Paul Simon radio, the alien would be like, is she yelling at a

woman who's going to go turn on the music? Um? I think right, now we are all, you know, Mangesh's daughter included, participating in this life altering moment of self delusion where we're sort of collectively accepting smart devices in our homes. We're not just accepting them, we're treating them as human right, And I think this is the slippery

ish slope of using voice assistance. More and more we're speaking to voice activated devices as though there are family members, and there have got to be some long term implications, both emotional and psychological, of blurring the line. I agree, and we're going to hear more from Jared about that after the break, But we'll also speak to Poppy Crumb again, who believes that we've barely scratched the surface of how these devices can change how we live for the better children.

Interacting with Alexa and Siri and other digital assistance is particularly striking because of the developmental implications, But interacting with machines who understand and respond to us can his questions about who and what gets to be treated as a person. Here, Jarren, I think the problem isn't the math or the computer science algorithms. I think the problem is our framework for

thinking about them tends to be machine centric. Instead of human centric, and it tends to create dangerous for the whole and and to create a lot of confusion, And a lot of it is because of this ideology of thinking of the machine as being alive. And when we remember that our AI inventions aren'to live and simply reflect the inputs we give them, we can do a better job at harnessing their power for good. You may remember kai Fu Lee from the last episode. Before running Google China,

Kaifu worked at Apple, where he helped develop Siri. AI is programmed by people. It is up to us to remove the factors that we don't think it's appropriate to be considered in the decision from an AI. So if we want to eliminate sexual orientation from a long decision engine, we can do that, or if one to eliminate it from a job application, we can do that. It's actually better than people. You can't force people to completely ignore these sort of things from their decision. They can try,

but our brains are not separable in that way. Engines actually are being able to program a way out of our messier human biases is a big deal, but it's only made possible when we acknowledge that we control what an algorithm learns from. So if we get it right, just how good could our relationship with technology get? His Poppy crume again. I had a relative who you know, was at the end of life, and I was with him for the last few weeks in the hospital. He

hadn't been speaking for a couple of days. I had taken on Amazon Alexa. I was using it simply to play music. I was playing classical music. And all of a sudden, he says, Alexa, play al Green and I was, And you know, and Poppy had always interacted with our uncle through classical music. It was their thing. And here he was, at the end of his life, requesting R and B an interest she didn't even know he had. He wanted to hear Algreen and sly in the family stone,

and I was like, nowhere near that. But the empowerment the device allowed at a very vulnerable and sensitive and important time, he smiled the end of life. And it's the access to memories, the access to that internal richness, the things that might bring someone the most comfort are

we all don't know. Amazon's Alexa really opened up great opportunities for what our relationship with our technology can be suddenly, Alexa isn't just something that dims your lights or tells you if his reigning as you rush out of the door, but actually a device that can change profoundly how you live and die. And Poppy noticed other ways, and Alexa could have up her uncle beyond playing al Green. I sat in a hospital room where I saw errors be made.

I saw information be captured, incorrectly written on the board one way, shared to a different nurse, another, shared to a different doctor, another And I said, all of these different things happened that with the right coordination of that same device that just allowed my uncle to hear al Green on Q it could have also been a huge part of improving not just his mental wellness but his

physical wellness. Because we're humans, we make errors, we make mistakes, We're not good at integrating information all the time, and our fallacy comes in places that technology can solve. I don't want to discount hospital stuff. They work very hard, uh and and everything, but people are sometimes you haven't had enough sleep, or they don't know someone else. You know. People try to help at different points in time and end up sometimes introducing error and mistakes. Technology that's actually

capturing or registering information for a user. There's obvious ways that it can help improve the interaction to Poppy. The true power of Alexa is not to respond to specific requests like a super assistant. It's to monitor us constantly, detecting patterns that we can't more like a parent. And as of now, as far as we know, that's not what it does. What Alexa does right now is not what would actually benefit us most from a healthcare perspective.

Right Alexa is listening for a wake word. It's listening for a particular que It's not holding that longitudinal data to learn our behaviors and and such right now. Not because of technological barrier, No, because of I think social and privacy barriers, and those barriers tend to erode in response to new technology. Twenty years ago, we would never have believed we would summon strangers from the Internet and climb in their cars either, you know. So we evolve

when the capacity, when the convenience is introduced, and the capability. Clearly, technological innovation is only part of the equation. Becoming comfortable with new uses for those technologies opens up new worlds of possibilities and everything from how we listen to music, to how we take care of each other. So let's say we accept this new bargain and open ourselves up

to constant monitoring what might the future look like. Companies are looking at these things as ways of knowing not just someone is taking their medicine for an aging population or someone who's healing, but to know if actually they're depressed, are they under mental stress as well? And that becomes a great opportunity for autonomous living for elders, where the caretaker knows a lot more about how well the individual is healing and is doing at a particular point in time.

There's this real irony in all of these situations that where through more tracking of my information comes freedom and you gain autonomy through the amalgamated data. There is an angel belief that more privacy we have, the more freedom we have. But Poppy says it's time to rethink that relationship.

If you look at an elder who might otherwise be in a care home but instead gains ten years of autonomous living because you now have more ubiquitous understanding of our mental and physical wellness, you have people having a lot more freedom with simply having a richer understanding of

their internal experience and their personal data. Crucially, if we do feel comfortable trading our privacy for more agency, we need to be very sure we can trust the people who get to see our data, because they're not just seeing us naked, they're seeing under the hood. The physiological tells that betray our private emotions. For me, everything is about transparency. No one should be tracked when they don't

know they're being tracked. How our technology interacts with us, whether we share information or not, our technology can't know. I think that's the real issue. We have to recognize that this sort of cognitive sovereignty or agency that we believe in is a thing of the past. It means

we have to redefine what that future looks like. It's a future we can all participate in building, and it's one way better off building as citizens with a collective voice and long term objectives, rather than as lone consumers in search of the best deal, whatever the cost to

us in society. As Poppy says, there's a difference between an Alexa waking up to respond to commands like play our green and an Alexa that is always on building a model of our behavior that knows us better that we know ourselves, but the crux of that difference is more cultural and political than technological. Are we willing to give up our poker faces and allow ourselves to be read by sensors and algorithms in return for longer, safer,

happier lives like Poppy's uncle? Or knowing the history of governments who have monitored and categorized citizens, Should we be doing everything we can to hit pause? Will our technology become a safety net or a spider's web? Next episode, we travel to Facebook's headquarters and investigate some of the more dangerous corners of the Internet, and, knowing that AI can both learn about us and imitate us, we take a hard look at deep fakes and examine a world

where it's increasingly difficult to tell truth from fiction. I'm az veloshen see you next time. Sleepwalkers is a production of I Heart Radio and Unusual Productions. For the latest AI news, live interviews, and behind the scenes footage, find us on Instagram, at Sleepwalker's podcast, or at Sleepwalker's podcast

dot com. Special thanks to Briany Cole. We had a conversation with Briany that made this episode possible, and Brian is the host of a fascinating podcast called Future of Sex that's all about using technology to make our lives better. Sleepwalkers is hosted by me Ozveloshin and co hosted by me Kara Price, with produced by Julian Weller with help from Jacopo Penzo and Taylor Chikoin mixing by Tristan McNeil and Julian Weller. Our story editor is Matthew Riddle recording

assistance this episode from Tofarel and Phil Bodger. Sleepwalkers is executive produced by me Ozveloshin and Mangesh Had to Get Up. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Alexa Pizza