![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Artificial intelligence is rapidly giving rise to new automated technologies. Among the most important of these innovations is the development of artificially intelligent machines that produce increasingly sophisticated forms of oral and written discourse. As more of our communicative encounters are with artificial agents, our notions of communicative labor, surveillance, and digital rhetoric will have to contend with these extensive shifts. As a step in this direction, the present article evaluates several trends in the automation of oral and written discourse, examining their social and economic impact.
Notes
1. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964), 135.
2. Noelle Devoe, “Why Some People Want the New Talking Barbie Banned,” Seventeen Magazine, March 16, 2015, http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/news/a29315/new-smart-barbie-can-hold-a-conversation/.
3. Digby Tantam, “The Machine as Psychotherapist: Impersonal Communication with a Machine,” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 12 (2006): 416–26.
4. Paul Wiseman, Bernard Condon, and Jonathan Fahey, “Practically Human: Can Smart Machines Do Your Job?” The Dallas Morning News, January 28, 2013, http://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/headlines/20130127-man-vs.-machine-a-losing-fight.ece.
5. Supratip Ghose and Jagat Joyti Barua, “Toward the Implementation of a Topic Specific Dialogue-Based Natural Language Chatbot as an Undergraduate Advisor,” in Proceeds of the International Conference on Informatics, Electronics, and Vision, 740–44. Also see Tony Feghali, Imad Zbib, and Sophia Hallal, “A Web-based Decision Support Tool for Academic Advising,” Educational Technology & Society 14, issue 1 (2011): 82–94.
6. Zeke Miller and Denver Nicks, “Meet the Robot Telemarketer Who Denies She's a Robot,” Time, December 10, 2013, http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/10/meet-the-robot-telemarketer-who-denies-shes-a-robot/.
7. David L. Chandler, “Automated ‘Coach’ Could Help with Social Interactions,” MIT News, June 14, 2013, http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2013/automated-coach-could-help-with-social-interactions-0614.
8. Atsuko Fukase, “Pint-Size Humanoid Helps Customers and Japanese Bank,” The Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2015, http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2015/04/14/pint-size-robot-helps-customers-at-japanese-bank/.
9. See, for example, http://sextadventure.com/.
10. For instance, most forms of online teaching typically entail the automation of several professorial tasks. In addition, automated grading has become particularly controversial in recent years. See Steve Kolowich, “Writing Instructor, Skeptical of Automated Grading, Pits Machine vs. Machine,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 28, 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/Writing-Instructor-Skeptical/146211/.
11. For a critical commentary on related developments in communicative labor, see David Carlone, “The Contradictions of Communicative Labor in Service Work,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5, issue 2 (2008): 158–79.
12. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Suspceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?” Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, September 17, 2013. Available at www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf.
13. Moshe Y. Vardi, “The Consequences of Machine Intelligence,” The Atlantic, October 25, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-consequences-of-machine-intelligence/264066/.
14. Vardi, “The Consequences of Machine Intelligence.”
15. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004), 59–77. For more on the automation of immaterial labor, see Jeremy Packer, “Screens in the Sky: SAGE, Surveillance, and the Automation of Perceptual, Mnemonic, and Epistemological Labor,” Social Semiotics 23, issue 2 (2013): 173–95.
16. Some scholars, however, have hinted at the importance of this problem. See, for example, Robert Mejia, “Posthuman, Postrights?” Explorations in Media Ecology 11, issue 1 (2012): 27–44; and Clifford G. Christians and Mark Fackler, “The Genesis of Social Responsibility Theory,” in Robert S. Fortner and P. Mark Fackler (eds), The Handbook of Media and Mass Communication Theory, Vol. 1 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 333–56.
17. See, for example, Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
18. For an innovative take on the relationship between capital and communicative labor, see Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37, issue 3 (2004): 188–206.
19. See especially Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, NY: Penguin, 2004), and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
20. Noam Cohen, “He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work),” The New York Times, April 14, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?pagewanted=1.
21. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1961), 39.
22. See Howard R. Turner, Science in Medieval Islam: An Illustrated Introduction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 181–7, and Mark Rosheim, Robot Evolution: The Development of Anthrobotics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1994), 9–10.
23. See E.C. Spary, Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 42–6.
24. Daniel Cohen, The Misfortunes of Prosperity: An Introduction to Modern Political Economy, trans. Jacqueline Lindenfeld (Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995), 32.
25. See Rosheim, Robot Evolution, 9–11.
26. Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Contexts (Malden, MA: Polity), 30–33.
27. See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver, ed. Jim Fleming (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991), 140.
28. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), 498.
29. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris De Bres (London: NLB, 1975), 176.
30. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 3.
31. Ellul, The Technological Society, 136.
32. Ibid., 136.
33. Ibid., 135.
34. See Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 108–109.
35. Ibid., 114.
36. Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” 15, 16.
37. See Jodi Dean, “The Networked Empire: Communicative Capitalism and the Hope for Politics,” in Empire's New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, eds. Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 267–90.
38. For an extended discussion, see Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Philadelphia, PA: Basic Books, 2011), 103–26.
39. Clara Moskowitz, “Human–Robot Relations: Why We Should Worry,” Live Science, February 18, 2013, http://www.livescience.com/27204-human-robot-relationships-turkle.html.
40. Moskowitz, “Human–Robot Relations.”
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Robert W. Gehl, “Teaching to the Turing Test with Cleverbot,” Transformations 24., issue 1–2 (2014): 62.
44. See Paul Williams, “Self-Driving Fleets Are Steering Big Rig Operators Toward Obsolescence,” The Globe and Mail, February 19, 2014, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/news/self-driving-fleets-are-steering-big-rig-operators-toward-obsolescence/article16937157/.
45. Wade Roush, “Hamburgers, Coffee, Guitars, and Cars: A Report from Lemnos Labs,” XConomy.com, June 12, 2012, http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/06/12/hamburgers-coffee-guitars-and-cars-a-report-from-lemnos-labs/. According to this article, the company's co-founder has remarked: “Our device isn't meant to make employees more efficient . . . . It's meant to completely obviate them.”
46. See Robert Trappl (ed.), Your Virtual Butler (Heidelberg, Germany: Springer, 2013). Also see The New York Times, “Daily Report: Silicon Valley Hotel Puts Robotic Bellhop to the Test,” The New York Times, August 12, 2014, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/daily-report-silicon-valley-hotel-puts-robotic-bellhop-to-the-test/.
47. Pew Research Center, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,” Pew Research Center, August 14, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/, 11.
48. Ibid.
49. For a full transcript of the original report, see Will Oremus, “The First News Report on the L.A. Earthquake Was Written by a Robot,” Slate.com, March 17, 2014, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/17/quakebot_los_angeles_times_robot_journalist_writes_article_on_la_earthquake.html. The L.A. Times’ website that carried the initial story has now been heavily updated by human writers. See Ari Bloomekatz, Rong-Gong Lin II, and Matt Stevens, “Is 4.4 Jolt an End to Los Angeles’ ‘Earthquake Drought’?” Los Angeles Times, March 17, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/earthquake-47-quake-strikes-near-westwood-california-yxdnr8-story.html#axzz2wEizlTan&page=1.
50. Oremus, “The First News Report on the L.A. Earthquake.”
51. Steven Levy, “Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?,” Wired.com, April 24, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/.
52. Will Oremus, “The Prose of the Machines,” Slate.com, July 14, 204, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/07/automated_insights_to_write_ap_earnings_reports_why_robots_can_t_take_journalists.html.
53. Automated Insights, “Wordsmith: A Platform for Automated, Personalized Writing,” AutomatedInsights.com, 2014, http://automatedinsights.com/wordsmith/.
54. Paul Colford, “A Leap Forward in Quarterly Earnings Stories,” Associated Press, June 30, 2014, http://blog.ap.org/2014/06/30/a-leap-forward-in-quarterly-earnings-stories/.
55. Joshua Reeves, “Temptation and Its Discontents: Digital Rhetoric, Flow, and the Possible,” Rhetoric Review 32, issue 3 (2013): 314–30. Also see Jeremy Packer, “Homeland Subjectivity: The Algorithmic Identity of Security,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, issue 2 (2007): 211–15.
56. Evgeny Morozov, “A Robot Stole My Pulitzer,” Slate.com, March 19, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/03/narrative_science_robot_journalists_customized_news_and_the_danger_to_civil_discourse_.html.
57. For a highly insightful discussion of this development, see a later essay by Martin Heidegger, “Traditional Language and Technological Language,” trans. Wanda Torres Gregory, Philosophical Research 23 (1998): 129–45. Also see Mejia, “Posthuman, Postrights?” and Christians and Fackler, “The Genesis of Social Responsibility Theory.”
58. Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, 195.
59. Mike Eigan, “When Machines Make Our Decisions for Us—In the Cloud,” Forbes, August 4, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2014/08/04/cortana-siri-google-now/.
60. See Jeremy Packer, “Epistemology NOT Ideology OR Why We Need New Germans,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 10, issue 2–3 (2013): 295–300.
61. Mark Andrejevic, “The Work that Affective Economics Does,” Cultural Studies 25, issue 4–5 (2011): 606.
62. Wisman, Condon, and Fahey, “Practically Human.”
63. Sheelah Kolhatkar, “Where Have All the Secretaries Gone?,” Business Week, April 4, 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-04/where-have-all-the-secretaries-gone.
64. Agnese Augello, Orazio Gambino, Vincenzo Canella, Robert Pirrone, Salvatore Gaglio, and Giovanni Pilato, “An Emotional Talking Head for a Humoristic Chatbot,” in Applications of Digital Signal Processing, ed. Christian Cuadrado-Laborde (InTech: Rijeka, Croatia, 2011), 325.
65. For insight into the future of computational humor research, see John Charles Simon, “Computational Humor: Promises and Pitfalls,” in Technical Report FS-12-02, eds. Victor Raskin and Julia M. Taylor (Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2012), 84–7. The other reports in this volume—which covered a 2012 symposium on the artificial intelligence of humor—may also be consulted.
66. Augello, Gambino, Canella, Pirrone, Gaglio, and Pilato, “An Emotional Talking Head,” 321.
67. Ibid., 320.
68. See, e.g., Jonathan Gratch, et al., “The Distress Analysis Interview Corpus,” Proceedings of the Language Resources Evaluation Conference, 2014. Available at http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/summaries/508.html.
69. For examples of recent DARPA-funded computerized psychotherapy research, see Fabrizio Morbini, David DeVault, Kallirroi Grorgila, Ron Artstein, David Traum, and Louis–Philippe Morency, “A Demonstration of Dialogue Processing in SimSensei Kiosk,” in Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue: Proceedings of the Conference (Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2014).
70. Report on VA Facility Specific Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), and Operation New Dawn (OND) Veterans Coded with Potential PTSD—Revised (Washington, DC: Department of Veterans Affairs, 2012).
71. For recent research about its cost-effectiveness, see Albert Rizzo, JoAnn Difede, Barbara Rothbaum, J. Martin Daughtry, and Greg Reger, “Virtual Reality as a Tool for Delivering PTSD Exposure Therapy and Stress Resilience Training,” Military Behavioral Health 1 (2013): 48–54.
72. Gretchen Gavett, ‘Web Therapy’ for PTSD?” PBS.org, September 9, 2011, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/woundedplatoon/web-therapy-for-ptsd/.
73. James W. Carey, “Historical Pragmatism and the Internet,” New Media and Society 7, issue 4 (2005): 443–55.
74. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Book 1.4, 1253b38–9.
75. See “The Fragment on Machines” in Marx, Grundrisse, 690–95. Also see Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991), 146–50, and Poster, The Mode of Information, 32.
76. Norbert Wiener, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” Science 131.3410 (1960): 1358.
77. Pew Research Center, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs.”
78. Packer, “Why We Need New Germans,” 300.
79. See, e.g., Matthew S. May, “Orator Machine: Autonomist Marxism and William D. ‘Big Bill’ Haywood's Cooper Union Address,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 45, issue 4 (2012): 439.
80. Les Perelman, “Critique of Mark D. Shermis and Ben Hamner, ‘Contrasting State-of-the-Art Automated Scoring of Essays: Analysis,’” Journal of Writing Assessment (2012). http://journalofwritingassessment.org/article.php?article=69. For more background on the controversy, see Steve Kolowich, “Writing Instructor, Skeptical of Automated Grading, Pits Machine vs. Machine,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 28, 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/Writing-Instructor-Skeptical/146211/. It should be remarked that Perelman has contributed to a rival automated grading project in which he appears to have more faith.