writer she also works in artificial intelligence composing dialogue for chat bots and her essays about bots and other topics have appeared in real life magazine the white review as well as online at the new yorker and the paris review thanks so i'm going to speak about ai and effective labor what brings me to this intersection is a statistic i came across recently from a study by the institute for spatial economic analysis at the university of redlands this is a an article about it according to these researchers women stand to lose their jobs twice the rate of men due to ai related automation reading from this chart women confront a thirteen point four percent chance of automation taking over their jobs as compared with five point eight percent for men many of these jobs to be lost involve effective labor a service with a smile and this statistic makes sense to me because i work with chat bots which are supplanting customer service representative while i haven't managed to find really any corroborating statistics my hope and airing this one to a roomful of students of the social sciences is that maybe someday someone will replicate it ok so think about it and i think in other ways this prediction contradicts much of what we've been told about automation and as i recently wrote for a garage the myth of job loss due to technological acceleration is in america one of men of auto plants and bruce springsteen's protagonist s the new yorker feature whose headline i've reproduced here is complicit i think in this myth selecting the suffering of a group of men as its exemplar of an ai related casualty they work at an autoparts factory which is implementing robots i will note that not all robots are ai so this statistic surprises us not only because of our national concern for men but also because of a widely held idea that the ways in which we set fellow humans at ease are rarefied charm is a human special team in her as i've written elsewhere theodore twombly composes messages for beautiful handwritten letters calm and given the endlessly interesting conversation on offer from his virtual personality and internal need and aspiration supposedly coming from the depth of our female character housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognized as a social contract because from the beginning of capital scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged so there is the idea that women are uniquely suited to emotional labor as well as domestic work for their grace and forbearance and then there's an idea that people of color are fit for service work because of freely given i'd like to ask whether there's anything liberating in conversely understanding this labor as so intelligible its elements can be taught to a bot this brings me to two questions which i asked experimentally i don't really plan to answer them but maybe you can so recognizing that the situation of bots hardly rivals that of women or of other service workers can the revelation that bots carry out effective labor contribute at all to the domest for in fact simple to fake the requisite effects even for a bot so at this point i should explain my job for two years i've intermittently worked for technology companies as what's called a conversation designer an interaction designer or ids users of the ai system with messages that caused the bot to appear approachable when i email clients who appear to have a sense of humor i find myself quoting in sign offs the bot that i am scripting if there's anything else i say let me know um so if bots have any affinity for effective labor this is in part our fault for anthropomorphizing them so readily and according to an experiment documented in two thousand and sixteen in the the personalities were varied the authors write the risk takers sofa bot was metaphorically described as a poker player who hides its intentions but is trembling to act on opportunities the loving parent sofa bots the authors go on at the beginning was described as ready to help participants interacting with it described it as follows it was helping me reorganize the rim i didn't feel alone it was following me and it agreed with what i was doing it observed me here  obtaining a toy robot questions whether her cat is any more complex i looked down at sadie's she writes suddenly i could not help wondering if all this asking for and getting attention this praying wasn't just like the hardwired program in the plaster robot was s nothing more than a mechanism a cheap little program and empty zombie i looked into her eyes and i asked aloud are you just a trick over the course of her essay however elmen comes to understand why she prefers her cat to a robot it is a compelling argument and while i don't have a cat myself i would not trade even my roommates cat let alone a friend of mine for a companion robot however i think it is interesting to wonder whether there are specific small tasks chores of attention for which a bot might reasonably replace a human i've been researching an early around pronouns according to templates making questions out of statements and so for example the user says he says i'm depressed much of the time i am sorry to hear you are depressed and you begin to see how this could quotation comes from wise and baum's original one thousand nine hundred and sixty six paper explaining the project he explains that the therapeutic dialogue takes the pressure off one participant because the patient will accept just anything as the cue to carry on talking about themselves so weizenbaum writes if for example when were to tell the psychiatrist i went for a long boat ride and he responded tell me about boats one would not assume that he knew nothing about boats but that he had some purpose  directing the subsequent conversation this characteristic of the therapeutic dialogue made it for wise and them a good example to try and reproduce with the bot eliza still lives in corners of the internet and it seems we are experiencing something of a renaissance of therapy bots i've taken this collage of headlines from articles this year in last year that subhead at the top about a new category of and medical treatments accompanied a feature in the new york times about non bot apps that are prescription only like the one put out by a company called pair therapeutics maybe they were running out of names but i do like whoa called the recovering in which she i haven't read it she deals with she says in this interview the cliches that are present in twelve step programs which have helped her she's a recovering alcoholic and she says to krauss i struggled with those cliches at first but it came down to shifting away from the belief that speaking always had to constitute an act of self expression and towards seeing speaking as a means of connection how can these words may be familiar maybe trite serve as a bridge between our very different lives at an industry conference last year i spoke with the woman who planned a bot that would help in recovery from addiction which can entail as jameson notes wrote steps we typically associate this wrote quality with replicability by a machine recently a friend shared via google drive a trove of documents about a mediation technique called nonviolent communication maybe trying to tell me something it is a technique whose usefulness in calming this discuss reassurance which i've translated came from a friend of mine in paris to whom i was complaining about my paid work personally she wrote i don't object to a shrink app that might prompt me daily not to drink too much or g certain moments to manage my violence that's got to exist but i don't even have an iphone in the meantime we get along by our own methods i was moved by my friends thoughtfulness and simplicity so supposing that bots can perform effective labor i see several options for a conclusion per my friend is there anything hopeful in all this when i moved from paris to new york i found the language of emotional labor was everywhere in brooklyn like the language of astrology there was a great pressure in america to render everything available occasionally i worried that this cast human interaction as depleting maybe hasn't as individuals we can learn from the bots and it's rote reassurances lately i think about bots in connection with my grandmother who turned ninety a week ago with her i spend my time answering small questions she asks repetitively alternatively returning to federici do bots offer us any possibility for demystifying effective labor a problem in crediting bots with this demystification is that they have much more time than we do because they perform tasks almost instantly and do not immaculately exploitable and i haven't spoken about the effective labor hidden within ai systems that have poorly compensated ai trainers and workers contracted through amazon's mechanical turk service to help the bots tell right from wrong are we only pawning off our sacred duty of keeping each other company on lifeless robots and so i have to end with it can i end with two sentences i have to thank you i have to end with a caveat so we must remember that in interacting with for example siri we are actually interacting with apple the most pressing concern about our attachment to a bot is with what it compels us to buy or to buy into but my job has caused me to consider the other option for human bot interacting relationships i have come to is an mfa candidate in the critical and curatorial study program at the university of california irvine and her research currently focuses on institutional curating and new media art hi everyone um thank you to the conference organizers for having me again um so my talk is called do you want to quit intimacy site and self and i just wanted to add the addendum that this is a curatorial reflection on a project that i had been working on over the last eight months or so your very presence they're what manifests you in the virtual world and how you use them consequently tends to shape that world's perceptions of you in much the same way how you look frames with the real world thinks consequently this sentiment is very much  construct a cross referential historical survey by using amazon's friendly recommended for you search function the idea of using amazon's algorithm within the art institution as some iso teracle yet plausible and it's late for shadowing i want to potential of the internet as a tool in curating is the ability to connect to something else that ultimately generated this exhibition subtitle intimacy sight in himself i attempted to curate an exhibition based on personal public effect with a very small budget a very tight budget and a loose conceptual framework so with the internet i imagine that amalgamation of works in the space the exhibition would be in in this case it was at uc irvine's university art gallery so i was working with the do not enter room sixteen of the panther modern which you can actually play online now and then i had hannah quinlan rosa rosa hastings uk gave our directory from two thousand and sixteen and there's another picture of it for some reason tying up my parents phone line so i could connect aol for just an hour to as i inhabited each avatars identity i created another bridge to another identity online even though i was very young and curious i collaborated of mouth these days if i type in a few keywords into a search bar i will find an interesting bit of information that will lead me to something else i do believe expanding on upon the intuition of the network is in the future especially causes its users physically and emotionally manage themselves to continue to actively participate in the culture of the internet and i felt i've always felt this way especially in these chat rooms and drawing together intimacy site in the self it is important to address these three concepts as a response to the network in terms of technology in the internet but also the internet as a conceptual framework in the same way theorists like alexander galloway and tatiana terranova among others have discussed it the red blue green and yellow cables that fill those buildings are ultimately what we connect through when we connect to the internet to move away from and back to the material example of the network as necessary in framing this exhibition i believe so i was the general function of the network as a way to transport data and  information between bodies in an infamous essay for art forums th anniversary issue scholar clare bishop posits whatever happened in digital art despite the backlash that she received after her essay was published this initial question led into a succession of controversy it's very much present in the world of contemporary art even today of six years later which has institutions and galleries only dedicated to it and it's post modernity or lack  thereof however i do not feel that something has happened a digital art but rather digital art has been off separated from the rest of fine arts at large shortly after her initial question bishop wondered why digital works have not thoroughly filtered especially and in framing the research with i with ideas of the network's relationship with community and social spaces as well as emotion itself the management of emotion and considering digital games as art within the whole sphere of contemporary art framework in the actual physical exhibition and the process of communicating with artists before during installation leaves little room for critical discourse aside the essay i drafted before the exhibition was up there are many handbook and there's a curatorial toolkit by a canadian based curator karen love although i've meant admittedly skim these texts just to see what's going on formulating the exhibition itself is largely done on my own and i just wanted to call back skipping forward there's some more installation shots just as an example there's this exhibition called hashtag social medium that opened at the fri art museum in seattle washington in two thousand and fourteen it's tagline curator the idea the exhibition was and it still is a little provocative for an art museum leaving the curating largely to anyone with a social media account and so there's a lot of input from the audience which is really interesting especially with new media and thinking of how that could be incorporated and so i was really lucky actually um it aid for a class a few months ago in which this is not common but the undergrads had to go to my exhibition for credit so extra credit this dark exhibit baffled me at first as i observed the pieces happened to be projected presentations on the wall as i made through the room observing the mystery of the atmosphere music i strolled over to the game and all of a sudden felt like i was in another installation of the  playing into this idea of collaborating with algorithm as well as the likes commons what have you in response to the collaboration and the very  is a part time grad student at the oxford internet institute and a user experience researcher at the government digital service i'm so just a quick content warning i am just slightly changing tact i'm gonna be talking about terrorism so if anyone has any personal practices at times of  express grief you can turn to rituals and result rules presented by these organizations or you can express something called ganic you have religious choice and you can express within your immediate family or attend a community event and critically how long you grieve for can be a personal choice or following a authority and the status quo in general it was a kind of just a general expression of frustration so it was as much protest against boredom and malaise in general than any specific cause of it so the situationist international were partly a school of political the report on the construction of situations which was published eleven years before sixty eight so in fifty seven so he talks about changing the world and the life in which we are confined and all these kind of big grand but quite general statements o in the face of increasing technology led productivity they argue the human labor had become more and more trivial but we continue to spend the vast majority of our time on it they didn't just mean work in the kind of literal sense of waged work however they were spectacle it's a short book which sets out a bunch of ideas about this stuff so he claimed that just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being having post industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing and further that spectacle with things going on today so a big part of the kind of situation is strategy for rebellion was the what they called the constructed situation it was a deliberate participative and playful intervention intended to highlight the spectacular qualities of the world around us they a so which side am i on i'm really sorry there we are okay so there are very specific reclaiming of culture by putting it by putting it rebellious users reclaiming the the space and culture full rebellion i'd like speech take it and take it out of context and show a different use of it and it's this kind of playfulness that i think is really useful a kind of undermining a bunch of the the expectations and a bunch of the kind of the ways in which these  would necessarily disagree as well so does our comparison fall down here can we talk about can we talk about these kind of techniques in a way that we can kind of celebrate their value as resistance without kind of giving credence to a bunch of a bunch of reactionary stuff that's  kind of stuff to expand on that a bit further let's go back to that first quote we looked at the main thing here is that revolutionary actions in large life rather than just seeking to explain it or to express the order of life as it currently is there by definition kind okay so the question is in tim's talk talking about data ism is a mode of critique if any of the other three panelists have any thoughts along those lines  concept online because i i feel that it's often so much about sort of the body in the city the psychogeography and sort of and and and so there are questions about who's comfortable in different parts of the city and and and  sort of is is there a kind of transcendence of the body where you're only observing in the city or but i think and let's see so applying it to bots and i'm not totally sure i mean i think and you think w i mean i did it so that is what triggered me to do this it was kind of reflection on my own actions which was so abnormal to how i normally conduct myself on social media and then to see it happen over and over again and i  really kind of poses itself as a ready made of some sort for artists to adopt and to incorporate into their art practices and you find a lot now that a lot of not artists and contemporary artists in general really kind of perform on these platforms and they have they adopt with certain personalities like cindy sherman for instance he was very famous uses her instagram a very specific way she's adopted he's very you know it's not professional she's kind of using it for fun but it's also her art practice too and there are a lot of artists that also use youtube to perform on too and it kind of takes a while for everyone else to get it on the joke but i think that's kind of how it relates to memes meme culture and because you're dealing with quite sensitive topic where i think we heard yesterday from chris boswell that it's a deep less to you right even if they are virtually signaling that's probably a degree of to them that also does experience that i'm and they do you relate to i completely agree with you i'm again my concern more is the absence of choice and it becomes a very binary scenario whereas offline the public spaces the style the way you negotiate grief designs respond or do not respond to the diversity of users and specifically about how alexis designers have recently rolled out a version of the echo that is like for kids and which is the first i've heard of it so it's very interested thank you i think like youtube videos or articles about how kids can just sort of like really like insult alexa and it's it's and it's sort of this idea of reinforcing and that kind of behavior i would be very curious to know whether alexa for kids like tells them like you don't you know wash your mouth out with soap don't speak to me that you know like i i'm very curious to know like what it's responding to and because yeah they're also been reports that kids really love alexa and which is kind of alarming but maybe not so surprising yeah let's see i mean yeah i think this this comes up a lot and i i think that like customizing bots for different users is a really interesting question i don't know how how often it it actually happens practically um but in theory i think it would engage some of the kinds of questions we have about um sort of intelligent systems like the facebook newsfeed that are customized for each user and what's kind of the data harvested in order to make that super personalized experience that you love um that's sort of where my mind goes but i'm very interested thank you really really rapidly accelerating sexual robots but now in the wake of like especially now with the in cell community being more brought to light and the fact that sexual yeah thank you so much i think that there are a lot of concerns around this i mean in my talk i spoke about how ai may be counter intuitively given our myths about bruce springsteen the you know detroit whatever is actually coming for women and for women's jobs and maybe this is another example and i let's see i don't know how good these these like sex robots all right that that we like call them robots and not dolls that's maybe kind of beside the point and but um i don't know the the the sociologist catherine cross has set some really has written very interestingly published a couple of years ago about the idea that abuse or behavior toward these thoughts that are feminized reveals how users would like to treat women were no one watching which to me is very compelling but at the same time i also wonder whether users treat bots or or when feminized robots this way because they understand their robots and not women not only because they're like they they they fear retaliation for treating women this way and i don't know i mean maybe like it doesn't it means i really like love like my friends have made jokes about like okay so like this like solves the problem of the in cells they can just sort of like have acai smell then they can like stop bothering us but i don't think it actually solves the problem but i for like stop me if i'm going completely off of track here i roll for kind of regulation in enforcing the kind of enforcing or ab holding the kind of the norms and the expectations we have a public space online okay i'll get that capacity for generative action in this capacity for surprise i don't know i i really don't know how that could be codified but i don't think this is i mean i don't want to kind of do down the road of regulation in general because i think this is you know there's a bunch of other kind of modernity which is particularly interesting i think in light of what you were discussing i think that's as good a place as any to to let it go yeah i thank you so much everybody for coming and for all your wonderful questions to our panelists for a really great set of presentations yeah thanks enjoy the rest of the conference