The Machine Speaks, and We Cry Out

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 25, 2007

Do you hear them, too? The voices?

You are standing in Aisle 13 of the local supermarket. And automatic voices around you are talking. Sterile, disturbing voices. Repetitious and demanding.

" Your bonus card was not recognized. Please try again."

"Weigh your bananas. Please try again."

A cacophony of commands from electronic voices.

Has anybody else noticed this growing revolution of robotic voices and machines supplanting much of the casual human contact we once had? Disembodied voices telling you your bank balances. Vehicular voices in your car telling you to turn left. Airport voices telling you, "Caution, the moving walkway is ending."

Voices in control, replicating humans, replacing humans.

"The bagging area is full. Please bag some items and continue scanning."

People around you are scanning groceries. A lady in a black coat swipes a soda across the scanner, then pulls out something very old-fashioned to pay for it. She is inserting pennies, one by one, into the machine. Nosily, you note the incongruity -- new machine, old currency -- wondering about peculiar human behavior. The machine interrupts your thoughts:

"Please select your payment method." Repeating insistently until you do what it tells you. "Please remember to take your receipt."

You walk away from the scanner with your bananas and wonder what has society gained with its efficiency? And what has it lost?

Machines doing the work of humans is nothing new. But it often seems their voices are increasing. Getting louder. Popping up in everyday life with urgent frequency. Multiplying. Reproducing little robot babies: the airport, the parking garage, the tollbooth, the elevator, the burger joint drive-through. Deciding whether humans on the telephone can really talk to humans on the other end. Electronic guardians, measuring your worthiness as if they understood your desires.

As you travel through the region, you take note of the ever-present voices and the anger they often provoke.

Take Alice Thomas, 44, a law professor who had a simple question about a damaged piece of furniture that was just delivered to her home in Northwest Washington. Question: Could she simply return the damaged part to the store or would the return require her to remove the entire heavy piece from the second floor and drive to the store in the 'burbs?

"I looked at their Web site," Thomas says. "They had one of those Ask Annas, one of those computer-animated people." Ask Anna had red hair and blue eyes and red lipstick and pink skin and moved her head side to side as though she cared. Thomas typed: "A piece of my furniture is damaged. Do I need to bring the entire piece of damaged furniture back or could I return only the damaged part?"

Anna replied pleasantly: "We want you to be satisfied. Return your furniture to the store."

As pleasant as Anna seemed, Anna had not answered the question. Thomas called the 800 number. She went through several walls of prompts, hoping to get to a human. She eventually hit the right combination of buttons and, miraculously, a human man answered.

"I tell the person my story. He says, 'Let me put you through to the return department.' I said, 'Wait! Don't go! Before you transfer me, will there be a human being on the other end of the phone?' He said, 'Yes, a human being will answer your question.' He transferred me. You do know I ended up right back in the loop. There was never a human being that answered the phone."

She gave up, dragged the heavy shelving down two flights of stairs and returned to the store to find that only the small part needed returning. "It's like, more and more, nobody wants to talk to their customers," Thomas says. "Sometimes it's frustrating because you need a human being."

Why does it make us so angry that robots don't seem to hear us? What is the difference between being heard by a machine and being heard by a human?

"It boils down to the question of power," says Jaron Lanier, a scholar-in-residence at the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology at the University of California at Berkeley. "People are most unhappy when the machine is serving as a proxy" between themselves and the person they want to talk to. "That makes them realize they have less power. It comes down to an old-fashioned power struggle." Furthermore, Lanier says the machines require clear voices from humans speaking into them. "If you listen to the human side, that person has to talk like a robot," Lanier says. "People are turning themselves into robots to make robots function."

The transformation is almost complete. As you wander amid the voices, you think about a time when real people answered the phones, when real women split red-lipstick smiles and told you, "Honey, did you see those are on sale?" as they rang up groceries. Real men pumped gas and washed the bird stuff off your windshield. Human beings took your quarters at tollbooths, smiled reassuringly and gave you directions when you were lost. You can't tell a machine you are lost, or are having a bad day. Or can you?

"This is one chapter in the drama that started in the 19th century with the Luddites," Lanier says. The Luddites were workers who created a social movement that smashed machines and protested against changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. The word Luddites has come to mean any person opposed to technological advances.

The Luddite movement has extended to this era of information. A movement that leads to a question, says Lanier: "What exactly happens to people when machines get more capable? I think there is almost like a cliched dialogue that happens when a worried person will say, 'Oh my God, people are losing their jobs.' And a reassuring technologist will say, 'Don't worry. They will have new jobs. You displace people from the crappy jobs, and new jobs will come along."

Then the new jobs become defined by the machines. The humans are employed to sort "whatever chinks there are in the machines' armor," Lanier says.

Intuitively, we know the machines may control our future. Many of us find ourselves powerless talking to machines that don't seem to understand all the complexities of our lives and the questions that our complex lives produce. Don't understand the sobs.

"Please speak clearly," the machines say.

Are we entering a sterile era in which humans will eventually be rendered irrelevant? Is that the societal price we pay for all the conveniences the machines allow in this do-it-yourself age? Look at all the other things that machines, computers, the Internet could someday render obsolete. Things that, not long ago, bred human contact, held power: books, phone directories, CDs, newspapers, television, movie theaters, pay phones, home telephones, vacuum cleaners pushed by humans. And the places: libraries, travel agencies, music shops, photo-developing stores. Now some people even "watch church" on television in the overflow rooms.

Does vanishing human contact mean increased loneliness?

Modern advances have also created different hubs for those seeking human interaction, says Gayle Porter, associate professor of management at Rutgers School of Business in Camden, N.J. "A good example is Starbucks," Porter says. "There is absolutely no reason to not have a cup of coffee at home. What makes you walk several blocks to sit there and pay two dollars for a cup of coffee when you could sit and drink it at home?"

The machines have forced people seeking casual human interaction out of their own comfort zones and into other ones -- often with deep, soft velvet sofas and shelves of books.

If you think about it, Porter says, the social interchange you had with the bank teller was really all done at a surface level anyway. "There was not much depth to it," she points out. "If I have to decide to get out of the house and interact with people, hopefully that will put me in contact with people I have a shared interest with and much greater opportunity for depth."

A big part of how we define ourselves as human beings is what we see reflected from other people, so if we don't have interaction with other people, we begin to feel a little bit adrift. There is a need to connect. If you say hello to someone, you want -- in fact need -- that person to acknowledge you. "It helps us to define who we are in the world through interactions with other people," Porter says.

People pass you and you wonder about the need for interaction, the need for human reflection, a mirror in a world free of machines.

That need has drawn Ethel King outdoors. King, a retired teacher of art education, is wearing a red turtleneck and standing outside a library in Silver Spring. She has come to the library this day in search of humans. In search of contact and interaction. Here, people know her, unlike the electronic voices that she often hangs up on. She is annoyed by the voices. She misses the response of humans, responses that made sense outside machine logic, responses that connected with the question asked and the person asking it.

"I wonder about the human persons who used to listen to you and understand where you were coming from," King says. "You can't help but think about it every day, how we are losing human contact with fellow human beings."