Yolande Strengers & Jenny Kennedy | Why Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot | Talks at Google

[Music] hello everybody to talks at google uh our guests today are dr yolandi stranges uh and dr jenny kennedy um dr yolanda strangers is associate professor of digital technology and society at monash university in melbourne where she leads the energy futures program she's also associate dean of equity diversity and inclusion in the faculty of information technology and associate director of the monash energy institute her research investing investigates how digital technologies and i are changing how we live and dr jenny kennedy is postdoctoral research fellow in the school of media and communications at rmit university in melbourne and associate investigator in the australian research council center of excellence for automated decision making and society my research is focused on experiences of technologies within the home our guests are the authors of the new book called the smart wife why siri alexa and other smart home devices need a feminist reboot which discusses feminized digital assistants who are friendly and sometimes flirty occasionally glitchy but always available thank you so much for joining us at talks with google and welcome thanks for having us um my first question maybe unsurprisingly is about the title of the book um usually uh smart devices are pitched as assistants or helpers but you're using the term smart wife uh why did you decide decide to use this term yes so the the term really refers to a broad range of technologies that are coming into the home like digital voice assistance but also automated devices home robotics and also other smart home technologies which are coming in to take up what were traditionally considered the kinds of tasks that were performed by the traditional housewife so what we're kind of referring to there are things to do with homemaking housekeeping caregiving and even intimacy or sexual services as well or sexual acts um so all of those kinds of things encompass all those roles in compass what we term the smart wife and what we're concerned about and what the book kind of raises has its central ambition is the kinds of stereotypes that are built into those devices and how those might be perpetuated more broadly through society in terms of reinforcing some of those traditional roles and stereotypes yeah and we wanted i mean the point of the title as well was a provocation we wanted to really draw attention to some of the kind of the tensions and the issues in the way that we saw these devices being positioned and being experienced by people and so the the use of the the idea of like the smart and the wife um was really to try and bring attention to that yeah you described the concept of a wife drop a wife drought um can you describe what this means sure um so the term the wife drought was um a term that was coined by an australian political journalist annabelle crabb um she wrote a book about it basically looking at looking at the history of marriage figures but also about particularly around the labor of being a wife and what she found was that rates of marriage are declining and one of the reasons for that is because fewer women want actually or willing to be wives because being a wife is not often that great for women um it involves a lot more work and a lot less happiness often so for example you know some statistics like in australia women when they're married will typically end up doing more than 40 hours extra of home house-bound work than their partners and they will always they will do more housework even if they are also the main earner in the household so the benefits of being a wife basically are very minimal for women versus the benefits of having a wife are very high but i think also the point to make is that the wife drought also refers to something that actually occurs in heterosexual relationships and in marriages and not just heterosexual probably any partnership where the um changes in society and in our sort of working lives where we now have you know two adults um working most likely full-time jobs if not more as well as doing everything else has created a void where there used to be one person who was at home who was the homemaker who was the wife who was a dedicated person who was available to kind of do all those kind of likely tasks so that's also part of the drought you know this this absence of that person that dedicated person who could do a lot of these home making and house making kind of tasks for us and you know what a great kind of marketing opportunity and a great technological gap uh where all these devices all these smart wives as we call them have come in to fill yeah at one point you're quoting annabelle crap with a quote uh in an average australian family a woman will commonly behave like a host wife even if she isn't one and a man will behave as though he's married to a housewife even when he isn't i thought that was uh very poignant uh describing this um looking looking back in time uh you point to rosie uh the robot mate from the jetsons uh as a prime inspiration for many many modern smart devices how do you think we've gotten from a rosie which specifically was not a wife uh to to the smart wife devices we're talking about today yeah this i guess this is where our term wife is quite broad um and we don't just refer to it in the sense of just the traditional role of the wife but of a person it could be a servant it could be a slave it could be any other kind of helper over time over history that has really fulfilled that role of doing many of those domestic tasks in the home and rosie was one of the early sort of science fiction fantasies about what that could look like if it came in a robotic form and you know rosie even though she was sort of a bit glitchy she was you know really held up as being you know the ideal kind of robotic helper and for many roboticists and also techno technology developers the inspiration for smart wives as they you know have as they've been developed and coming into our homes and lives so we we got really interested in rosie because uh it's often cited as inspiration for um things like robotic vacuum cleaners for example but also many other types of products that are coming into the home and you know this constant um search for uh a robotic helper that can really take up and take over the burden of so many household tasks and it's not just rosie i mean if you look back through science fiction um as we do in the book there are so many precedents for smart wives uh in in films in books in cartoons um that are stereotypically feminine and stereotypically have quite traditional sort of feminine values uh that are brought in again to kind of fulfill fulfill those roles uh and come back to this idea of a traditional um feminine responsibilities for um for housework in the home i think yeah one of the things about rosie um you know is terms of the fact that some 60 years after her invention we're still finding reference to that kind of model in the types of devices that we're finding in our homes now like it's a long time ago but we haven't come very far from it i think there's a roomba that is rosy branded yeah yeah yeah we also we also looked at you know um what people name their roombas and one of the most popular names for roomba is rosie so it's not just technologists and you know technology companies that are looking to rosie for inspiration it's also become what many people and users aspire to from these kinds of devices you know and there are other kind of precedents like in japanese culture the inspiration is often been cited as astro boy particularly for caring robots which are growing in um in market over there so you know depending on where you look culturally you'll find different reference points but all these kind of sci-fi imaginations of what it is we should be attaining for yeah i think that's like a great point what yolanda is um making is that we how much inspiration we draw from popular culture and from science fiction and one of the things that we have kind of pointed to in the book is how this has happened over time in terms of what we how we experience technology and what we imagine our future with technology might be and it's also a great tool science fiction is a great tool to imagine those potential futures you mentioned the care robots which seem to be a big trend in japan which makes sense in the way that japan has a big fraction of aging population do you see that generally as a positive or negative trend because i can see like both sides of the argument yeah i mean we have we have obviously concerns about the way in which um robotic devices are being used for care um but also we do see positives like yolandi and i both do um both do ethnographic work with different communities and groups and especially vulnerable groups um elandi's done a lot of work around the use of smart devices in aging populations and i work in terms of with families from low-income backgrounds and what we find is you know across a really like diverse range of contexts and experiences that there are really useful um people are using these devices in really helpful ways that provide them autonomy and security and support but one of the main negatives is when um these care devices are used in place of human connection and empathy yeah i think that's you know that's one of the concerns we raise in the book is that a lot of um countries now in as part of their policies around aging populations which is probably not just in japan but in many nations now but also in terms of disability care and other forms of care they're turning to care robots and robotics as you know the solution to those problems and while they might be part of a solution uh we're concerned that you know by shifting the responsibility over to technologies and investing very heavily in that space is the as this as the solution we sort of lose um some of the needed investment and priority to be placed on on the i guess the the caring industries the caring labor the um the employment of people in in aged care for example which we know is very underpaid profession um and often very undervalued you know instead of kind of putting emphasis on that and how governments can support those kinds of agendas we're leaning more towards these technology-driven investments so um the the first sort of devices i thought of uh when i was starting to read the book is uh devices like google home alexa these smart home devices that are ubiquitous today um but we've already talked about other devices like care robots like roombas like household helping robots do you see do you see the the smart home assistants like google home as a special category with special specific problems and benefits maybe or are these uh do these all have some somehow the same uh the same sort of problems yeah i mean digital voice assistants are a unique category and they're the one that kind of gets the most attention and they're most easily to identifiable as a smart wife and probably because they have many of them have default feminine feminized personalities and some also default female names but i guess what the book tries to do is show that the gendering of these devices extends beyond just their voice and their name it's also about the types of feminized personalities and also that the one of the things that we're concerned about in the book is the incredible similarity of the personality types that are programmed into many of these types of digital voice assistants and their feminized attributes um you know on top of that but also in terms of the roles that they're being brought in to perform so um things like you know helping with to-do lists and household tasks you know all the things that the assistants the assistants do and the kind of hark back to some of the roles that women um would traditionally be doing you know kind of similar sorts of things so um and while that may not necessarily um you know be a problem in itself you know we certainly acknowledge that many of these things can be very useful one of the things we're concerned about is how um by building those stereotypes those stereotypical attributes into the personalities of these devices we we reproduce those we perpetuate those stereotypes instead of kind of thinking about how we can we can help to sort of move beyond them and we we with digital voice assistance in particular we're perpetuating a very particular type of femininity um that that we don't see a lot of diversity in in terms of the product range that's currently on offer so while they might be you know there i know that google for example offers you know a male voice option and their celebrity voices the default still seems to be this female character and that's certainly how it's also referred to um often in the media and in popular culture and in many of the homes where we've been doing research and others have been doing research as well um yeah one one quick remark for everyone who's watching us um if you have questions please put them in the youtube chat we will be um uh we will be taking questions uh later on um my next question is uh just um how did you get professionally interested in this subject uh it's uh like uh what what made what made you think uh you'd like to write a book about this um well i had been um researching technology uses within the home for quite some time now um and was really interested in the way in the dynamics of the home and what the way in which the introduction of different technologies kind of augments or inter intersects with those dynamics and and sometimes troubles them as well so i was looking for example i was looking at australian homes as they introduced high-speed broadband into them in terms of what the rhythms and routines and daily life practices were of the people within the home and one of the things that i noticed was that there were very gendered practices around technology in the home in terms of who would make decisions about what kind of technology would come into the home about who would who would be mostly responsible for setting up like a new device a new smart tv or a new wi-fi network and who would who the other members of the household would fall to if some if there was a problem with that so this was i guess pre kind of pre these kind of voice assistants being um being so popular but already was kind of aware that there were some on the markets and so yolanda and i came together presenting very very kind of similar work in terms of thinking through the kind of the gendered aspects of how technology gets used in the home and we're looking at the kind of the emergence of these smart assistants and how that might trouble that yeah so for me i've i've been or i had been working on the smart home for quite some time and what really piqued my interest was um when i would go into people's smart homes and this is when voice assistants were just sort of coming in to australia and there would be a voice assistant there and that voice assistant would actually become part of the research you know we'd start having conversations with it they'd demonstrate they'd be almost they you know i have these interview transcripts where i have you know the names of the voice assistants uh appearing as part of as part of the transcript so i felt like they were part of they were like my research participants in a way and what really struck me about that was the kinds of conversations people would have with them you know they'd say things refer to it as the other woman they'd um talk about um how she or her was was sort of helping them the kind of role that it played as um yeah as this um helper but as a feminized helper and that was something that really kind of got me very interested in that space but also as jenny said you know one of the things that brought us together was just the broader gendered aspects of the smart home um and what jenny didn't kind of mention then is that it's typically men that are sort of bringing this technology in and setting it up when it comes to smart tech and that has implications for all the kinds of housework that gets done in the home so what we were finding there is that smart technology cannot often create additional what's called digital housekeeping which is all the kind of labor associated with keeping the technology running and setting it up and maintaining it and upgrading it and whatever else has to get done and that was disrupting the the um the actual you know who does what the the division of labor of house work in in the home more broadly with uh women typically kind of picking up some of the more traditional labor so so even though these devices were getting brought in to help with the wife drought you know this comes back to our earlier point they weren't necessarily you know they might have been helping with some of these tasks but they were also creating additional tasks that wasn't necessarily helping overall with the the you know helping with housework and and um easing the burden on everyone so um you know that was another kind of aspect of it that we became really interested in the kind of hidden or the additional impacts that come with having these kind of devices in your lives when you say a hidden work that comes uh comes in addition to what you had before what are you thinking of in terms of the home assistance in the additional work do you mean yeah so um yeah so um well for instance i've done a quite a few projects with people with robotic vacuum cleaners just as one example and this has also been found in many other studies now as well where even as the technology advances there's a lot of sort of supervising of these devices that needs to kind of go on as it gets you know as a kind of tidying process first in terms of removing all the clutter from the floor so that the machine or the device doesn't get stuck on things there's a process of kind of maybe monitoring it making sure that you know if it gets pulls in something that you're around to pull it out but also most people don't think that it cleans at the level that you know is needed for a home to maintain a certain standard of cleanliness so it's an additional or a supplementary cleaning tool um with manual vacuuming still being used so it's not necessarily displacing the the physical manual vacuuming but a potential additional vacuuming kind of process that adds to the overall cleanliness and comfort of the home that might not necessarily be removing the kind of labor associated with vacuuming that's a very specific example but i guess more generally um it's things like choosing what you know devices to buy installing them in the home making sure if you've got a kind of a bunch of different devices or an integrated system that it's all talking to each other that when there is a blackout or a wi-fi outage or whatever it is that which often we found disrupts all the systems in the home that there's someone available to kind of set that all back up again installing updates um making sure cables are neat and tidy uh yeah there's a whole range of things that are now required um in these kinds of digital environments that we live in yeah i remember the the story about the vacuum cleaner that spread uh dog poo all over the place yeah copper licks no poo poo i'm not getting the word right that's it yeah yeah that was probably not the intended way uh how the device works no but yeah there's a lot of work basically in getting these things to work and the most complicated and sophisticated the setup often the more work that goes into keeping them up and running and the more often they actually fall down of course of course you know the natural kind of counter argument to that as well you know maybe they're just emerging and they need a bit more time to get established and things will get easier that's not something that we're seeing yet in our research so even as these devices are advancing there's they're changing um either the software or the hardware is changing there's i'm not seeing any less sort of digital housekeeping as a result of more advanced technology i don't know if that will change in the future maybe it will but at the moment that's certainly not what's currently happening so even though the prom you know it seems kind of intuitive that this stuff will improve and that the housekeeping associated with it will diminish over time that's that doesn't seem to be playing out yet in the research that we're doing what do you think that so many of the devices are um produced with uh with female characteristics whether it's the voice or physical attributes yeah i mean one like the female voice i mean obviously like the most ubiquitous um type of smart wife is the voice assistant and you know there's a lot of research to suggest that people prefer in many ways a female voice or we've been we've been taught in our society to prefer a female voice within particular contexts and especially when those contexts are domestic or around care or requiring some kind of trust so it makes sense that an assistant that's going into the home that is going to want users to go to want to encourage users to make use of to ask questions of to provide data to um to be as you know couch as trustworthy as possible yeah i mean this is a question i'd actually love to to ask your colleagues on the course as i'm sure you've done a lot more research about this one than we um but you know from what we we understand from the research we've done it's very much about likability and usability um and you know falling back on those stereotypical feminine traits is i i get it you know it's a familiar it's it's likeable as jenny says it's trustworthy what we're interested in is if we can uh challenge what likeability is if we can kind of innovate around likability certainly not kind of advocating for you know angry evil voice assistants but um we do wonder if there are other ways to achieve the same aims with different types of personality traits um one one category of um robots we haven't talked about are sex bots which you have dedicated the chapter to as well um which is unsurprisingly uh somewhat a market as well um where do you see the the line between uh maybe a harmless sex toys and problematic sexualized smart wives yeah i guess you know we haven't got an issue with sex toys or sex robots in and of themselves um but the kinds of sex robots that we're seeing on the market are have very similar kind of issues as what we're seeing with some of the feminization of other forms of devices in that they are reduced down to a very um a very particular stereotype of femininity and the main issue with sex robots is that often that femininity that they are stereotyped at is based on very pornified ideas of of what a woman is and how she how she should act and how she should perform and there's just not there's not enough variation there i guess the the other sort of interesting development i think in this space is the um the continuum that we talk about in the book between a digital voice assistant and a sex robot and how the sex robot industries ambitions are very much a sort of stepford wife style robot that can really do it all you know that has um it's able to have a conversation with you that's able to do housework and that's also available for sex and and again very much going back to those kind of traditional and service oriented roles of um stereotypical wife um and embedding those in a you know well it's more of a design ideal at the moment i'm not sure that we really have many of these currently on the market but um at least not in the in the way that they're envisioned but um certainly that's the kind of end goal and that's that's quite concerning and it's not so much about um the individual's interaction necessarily but about what these devices potentially do on mass when we've got say something like a digital voice assistance what which you know millions of people have when when we have them all performing uh or delivering a very similar type of personality what is you know what is millions billions of people interacting with these things what does that reinforce for us in terms of stereotypes what does it do to the relationships that we have both with those devices in family and household units but also uh in terms of how we think about uh femininity and women in society so they're all the kind of bigger questions i guess that we're concerned about when we see these uh stereotypes um some more harmful than others as jenny said uh you know embedded in these these kinds of things it's a very interesting um uh connection you draw to between uh sex bots and digital home assistants which are clearly not sex books but which may um react inappropriately to sexual advances by the user or by abusive behavior by the user or even encourage them um do these devices have to learn to say no better or how should this be addressed yeah that is one of the issues that we raise in the book is that these are very um docile subservient assistants they're not able to or they're not programmed to respond back um against any kind of abusive language um generally and so what that has the effect of doing is creating kind of expectations around what um what kinds of abusive engagement might be possible um so we would like to see again like more options there in terms of what and how devices could respond to abusive language um how that um how that can be done we're not entirely sure that's one of the kind of again conversations to have he had with your colleagues and with other kind of yeah other scholars in this space and you know that we are aware this is an area where um companies like google have been responding you know proactively for some time and things have improved in terms of responses to sexual harassment and abuse but there is we think still some way to go and you know there is another chapter in the book called with glitches which is all about how when a device malfunctions or behaves what might be deemed inappropriately or just can't understand something or whatever that the feminized device is blamed so rather than say the company or um the team that was responsible for the problem or the glitch and technology companies that make these devices sort of um facilitate that occurring by um presenting the device as a um a personality as as its own sort of anthropomorphized um entity rather than um sort of being very clear that when something goes wrong or when a device is unable to respond that it is something that you know the company is addressing and kind of bringing it back to the the people that are designing the devices rather than letting the blame sit with the feminized device and you know that where we see this most commonly occurring is in the media and in popular culture and in the discussion around these devices not necessarily in uh in the design itself of the devices or that it's obviously facilitating this issue um and you know we talk about like the headlines that are used when uh a device goes wrong and we have a whole you know pages dedicated to examples of this of how you know siri needs needs its mouth washed out with water or you know and they often use very um derogatory feminine stereotypes to dismiss or blame the devices rather than again kind of addressing it at the company level uh at the design level you know and and putting the blame where we think it it belongs or the issue where it belongs uh yeah again one remark if you're in the chat and if you're watching live um please do post your questions um i'll have a couple of more questions but uh then we'll take uh audience questions as well um so in the in the past decades um i'd like to think that a lot of progress has been made towards gender equity but obviously we all know that there's still a lot of progress to be made left would you say that the popularity of the devices that you call smart wives inhibit that progress i'm not sure i'd say that they inhibit as much as they um don't necessarily propel us forward and i think what we've seen especially over the last year with kovid and with um like people being kind of working from home and the way in which that has like gendered tensions around labors within the home have re-emerged it kind of shows us how tenuous the gender equity we have gained is and so to introduce devices with the stereotyped feminized personas that are based very much around these domestic labors that can you know can be the subjects of verbal abuse and therefore kind of you know be models of the kind of ways in which you can speak to a feminized or female being um is problematic yes i think there's also you know the place where maybe okay so what we've what we've been focusing on i think for that last decade is how to not design devices that harm progress towards gender equity how to not you know have unconscious biases or overt biases in the design of devices you know how not to promote sexual harassment and abuse so very kind of explicit um and and quite clear design decisions that can be easily remedied and that's one thing and that's that's great that's progress where i think we can go next is thinking about how can we use technologies to actually progress gender equity and that is a much much bigger question that goes beyond just the usability and the interactions that individuals might have with with a particular device and whether or not you know um it's uh it's promoting harassment or not it's about how are these devices kind of operating in our lives and in our homes and our families are they uh are they for example meaning that we divert the tension away from um the the the questions issues the conversation's been on for decades about um women's labor in the home um and in a broader conversations about aged care like we were talking about before and how we properly resource that are they are they sort of um you know are they supporting our progress towards all of those things as well or are they or are they not uh and and so those kinds of questions require you know kinds of research i think that jenny and i are kind of involved in which is that kind of in-depth social science research not the kind of direct kind of usability design interaction kind of stuff and and yeah they're much harder to tackle uh and and probably also to evaluate and analyze the impact but given the scale of this technology now and how ubiquitous ubiquitous it is across so many countries i think we can start to do that and we are starting to do that kind of research to see what kinds of uh broader impacts we can have we live in a time where more and more people understand that gender is not just man and woman and not just binary but that it's a whole spectrum um can this insight somehow be helpful in understanding how to leave these binary patterns behind when it comes to um smart devices yeah so absolutely i mean uh it's not we we focus on fermenization on the smart wife in that so we've got a fairly clear focus in the book on um on women really um but the the book has implications for all genders and and so does the design of these devices and it is something that we address through some of the reboot suggestions that we include at the end of the book you know one of the things we talk about is queering the smart wife and uh and by that we mean queering its personality diversity diversifying out the different forms the different types of them that we see away from you know the kind of dominant forms that are really in the mass market right now and that could be uh diversifying at um not just kind of switching genders or going genderless but actually different expressions of femininity and masculinity that are available through these technologies but also different ways that uh different genders might interact with these and and that they might support other progress towards gender equity beyond that kind of binary um male female as you said um would you when designing these devices would would you propose to aim for building somehow genderless robots um and what what would that even mean if that is possible or will we always be in a situation where even if it's not intended by the producers people will genderize these robots and um see them as uh as persons or something like this um and how should we deal with this i guess i mean i think it's it's you know humans we like to categorize things and place things in a kind of a knowable kind of setting so one of the kind of issues with um trying to de-gender or ungender devices is that when they're author anthropomorphized then we seek to kind of apply quite human attributes to them so people will look for signals or um or features that can be kind of identifiable um and the the other kind of issue is that it's not just about how they look how they sound it's about how they are interacting with others or with us so as you know andy was saying like in the last point about kind of widening and broadening the expressions that these devices have and the kind of the opportunities for engagement with these devices is probably the most important way we can diversify the the gender expressions too yeah i mean in in the book we actually we actually sort of steer away from genderless or you know gender lists um versions of these these devices and we say let's stick with gender because where we see you know the move towards um removing or trying to remove gender it's sort of in a way it sort of sweeps the issues under the car but it doesn't necessarily address them or solve them just sort of pretends that they're not there anymore when they still are you know what we suggest is another way forward is to just diversify out like we were talking about before the types of gender that are on display or the types of femininity and masculinity and other forms of gender expression that are coming through these devices you know we wouldn't expect to only encounter one form of femininity in the kinds of interactions we have with the broad network of people that we all encounter and yet that seems to be um the case now with many of these um types of anthropomorphized devices so you know and i know there are some variations i'm sort of speaking quite generally here but we would like to see a lot more a lot more diversity in those kinds of expressions and that that can be done by staying with gender it doesn't have to be done by removing gender uh i understand it's a big question but it's my last question before we go to the audience um how do you fix it we have um we have nine nine proposals in the book on on different things to do i mean and then they're we tried to be not typical because we know this stuff's been hashed over before and uh many of these conversations have been going on for some time so you know i guess there's a couple we could mention and then jenny you can you can mention a couple couple more yourself as well i mean um one of them is about um where we draw inspiration from so we talk a lot in the book about science fiction and how it's become the sort of prototype or the the inspiration for many uh roboticists for many technology designers and and many products that we now see in our homes so and it's also a like the tech industry it's another male dominated sort of domain and one of the things we'd like to see there is some new smart wives kind of new inspirational smart wives being written into science fiction and being imagined through that that portal rather than you know let's accept that is what many of us turn to for these kinds of futuristic inspirations so why not use that and foster that um that opportunity to help us think about what else we could create what else we could design given it's been so important to us in the past so that's that's one one kind of angle uh another is to um is to look at the the industries you know people companies like google and and amazon and other companies that are making these types of devices and the types of teams that are um involved in designing and developing these kinds of technologies and i know that um this has been you know something that's been evolving over the you know last decade or more now as well in terms of involving uh more diverse you know having more diverse teams and you know considering gender and also other forms of cultural and ethnic diversity as well what we're also interested in is bringing in um a lot more diversity around the disciplines that are involved you know very centrally in the design of these devices people like sociologists like us you know we're not what we're necessarily asking for jobs but um you know sociologists media and cultural studies people gender experts and i do know that these people are in these you know in companies like google but perhaps not as many as we would like to see sort of being very much essentially part of artificial intelligence of voice communities and helping to answer some of these bigger questions and explore some of the the impacts of these devices on um on society at large jenny do you want to mention uh i think i mean like say you know we had nine in total i think suggestions um but the two key ones are the ones that yolandi has already outlined i think they're the um the most pressing but also the most difficult to mobilize um because it involves a kind of addressing at you know such a systemic level um we have some other suggestions in terms of that have already been kind of mentioned in the conversation in terms of rethinking how we talk about these types of devices rethinking how like in the media how they're reported how they kind of perpetuate that and morphization and that kind of derogatory um gendered language um and and also thinking about the uh adjusting perhaps some of the responses that we get from these devices perhaps to be more um equitable to be more more feminist um but also to be more queer as well um is is one of the i think kind of more immediate steps that we can make in terms of reprogramming some of the devices that are already in existence and in our homes this probably adds one more thing to that i mean i think companies like um like google obviously are already doing an amazing job at usability and about you know and and that that is kind of the to me looking from the outside in seems to be you know the key strengths of comp of of companies like google really understanding user needs responding creating devices that people want that people like you know i think that that's all really well covered the questions that we want to see considered uh the broader impacts of those decisions on um on households on communities on society on workplaces on issues like gender equity and inequality and progress towards whatever it is that you know we collectively want to achieve and those require different different skill sets but also different methods uh and different research to kind of help us understand that and i guess probably also a kind of different ethos of um you know not just focusing on the products that people are most likely to want use and buy or but also how those those products can also feed into a broader sort of set of values around progress on particular issues and matters that we should all care about yeah these are great great points and i think um learning about the other the other points of these nine points uh is a great incentive to buy the book as well um we do have time for uh for audience questions i think there's at least one question in the live chat um yeah sashin asks uh how do you envision the next 10 years with ar seems more likely to become mainstream example science fiction an ar interactive hologram which can act like your french helper etc well you're right there there are already um you know devices on the market with um an interactive hologram um so that that are kind of already perfect like have the same issues we talked about one of them in the book and the names kind of escaped me at the moment that's it yeah yeah that's it yeah um then augmented reality reality though isn't it i guess it's kind of a combination of both yeah yeah but i guess what it kind of points to is we need to we need to think about these gendered problems now given that these devices like the voice assistants are already mainstream but there will be new permutations of these kinds of assistants perhaps you know with ar perhaps with holograms uh and if we don't think carefully about the the way in which um they are and qualifiers they are humanized and they are gendered and we don't provide range as they're being built then yeah this this issue becomes even larger yeah one of the things that struck us in writing the book was that it seems like and this is just you know kind of i guess a general observation that we made but the more advanced the technology is seems the more we want to hack back to traditional gender stereotypes so i'm a little bit concerned about emerging technologies like ar and vr and even some robots for this reason and you know we reflect on that a little bit in the book and why that might be the case and i think it comes back to that sense of familiarity and trustworthiness that jenny mentioned before that we when we're faced with something new and potentially confronting with all the kinds of challenges it might have and the uncanny valley and everything you know we we sort of um we look to what's familiar we look to what you know we knew from our our past and our childhoods or um you know we look to just traditional values um and uh and that's that's kind of maybe why uh we see some of that kind of coming into what should be you would think the most progressive technology that we're making but not necessarily in terms of the values it's promoting so i don't know what that means for the next 10 years but hopefully conversations like this can and maybe some um some more inspiration from sci-fi uh depending on where we kind of go to with that next uh might might help with that yeah i guess the main question is like how do you how do you design in diversity into something that you also want to be mass produced but even you know at question two you know everyone even terms like friend and helper i think that there are another there are other terms that we can really kind of interrogate a bit more what does it mean to have a friend i mean a friend to you know there's many different types of friends in society we all have you know lots of there's lots of diversity in what it means to be a friend so again we want to sort of avoid uh i think locking in a particular type of friendship that is embodied on mass in advanced technology just like we want to avoid a particular stereotype of gender being locked in and the same the same with helper so and i i know why we sort of turn to those those more kind of non-threatening versions of of friends and helpers that are really just there to serve us in the in the design of technology but i hope that we can um find ways to innovate and get past that to to think about different types of relationships and different types of personalities that could be part of these these devices that we live within the future are you yourself optimistic that the the industry and the market will react to this feedback and uh integrate these things or are you pessimistic about that it depends on what day you asked me because today i'm optimistic yeah i mean i think i'd probably i'm probably the same um the same as jenny there are there are other there are other things that we touch on the book as well that are probably a bigger concern to me like the uh the ethical and the environmental impacts of mass-produced smart lives which we have a whole chapter on in the book and also the gendered impacts of that in terms of the labour in terms the creation of smart wives and also where the impacts are felt around the world in terms of extraction of minerals and also e-waste so those are probably things that leave me quite pessimistic when i start to think about those implications i like to like to think that the gender equity and the equality issues are things that we can actually uh tangibly address i think from the book we managed to be kind of in the writing of the book we we would both kind of oscillate between being optimistic and pessimistic and we would each take turns in both and that kind of helped balance out the writing and that we don't take we don't take an overly pessimistic view but we don't take an overly optimistic view either i think we have more questions from the chat isabel asks uh in your studies did you ever come across on the topic of smart devices being used against women as form of domestic abuse i've i've been seeing in the news and even non-profit organizations discussing it yes yep we've got also a chapter in the book on this topic and i guess some of the precedents that lead towards it we've already touched on this idea that the types of work that goes into putting devices into the home the digital housewife digital housekeeping tends to be done by tends to be done by men in in a heteronormative household and often and so there are opportunities to use smart devices for coercion and for control because if one person is knows the network knows what devices are there has all the passwords then yes you know there are there are growing numbers of cases of smart devices being used in domestic abuse situations and it's something that first responders are having to be ever more aware of when they're when they're helping helping victims it's one of the things i think that um that we talk about is this idea that um the safety around these devices like it's often not um like the security to use security smart devices are often marketed in terms of protecting the people within the home from unknown others outside of the home but what we're finding with these devices is is often it's not the device itself that's the problem it's the the relationship and the dynamic that it is being used within um but you know like all forms of domestic abuse the the threat generally comes from within the house rather than outside it yeah and this this particular issue comes in with a um a range of smart devices or smart wires which we you know typically kind of smart home and automated setups in the home so not so much with digital voice systems often they're like a gateway device that helps us kind of control various um various other appliances and various other kind of smart home devices and it is uh and those we look at how they're often marketed towards men those kinds of devices um particularly things that involve security and entertainment um and then how that kind of becomes part of this larger sort of smart home ecosystem with the end goal being a home you know the obviously the the dream that has been around for many many years um that we have a home that sort of does it all and and and does everything for you kind of the ultimate smart life if you like you barely have to lift a finger it'll um basically you know do the dishes and cook your dinner and put you to bed so um you know that that kind of um vision has been uh more appealing to men uh and and hence you know kind of they've been the ones mostly instigating bringing this stuff into the home which raises all these other issues as jenny said and they change as well yeah so hopefully that will change we have one more questions from the chat i'm asked can't we say that feminizing speech machines is simply a reflection of language in general which is which also treats gender in clear classes and associations yeah i mean to some extent yes all language is is gendered if i understand this question correctly um so i'm just kind of not entirely clear what um i means here but i guess what what what the point we were making is that um the gendered speech of most machines is is is a of a very narrow kind so gendered language in general i would say is a lot more diverse even the ways in which we refer or speak about women the types of feminisation that we might encounter on even a day-to-day basis would be much more diverse than what we're seeing built into assistance and various other types of robotics and and smart home devices yeah and i think like you know the the issue with this of the feminisation of um a voice is that the feminization comes mostly from the pitch of the voice from the tone of the voice and and through limiting actually the language that is available for the machine to use in in ways that reflect and represent kind of norms and expectations within society yeah i think that's all we have time for today thank you so much for joining us and for uh talking about your book with us um dr yolanda strangus and dr jenny kennedy thank you so much thanks for having us yeah thank you [Music] you

2021-07-30 21:28

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