Is Siri Anti-Choice?

My wife, who is a pro-choice photographer and activist, sent me a tumblr post the other day about the inability of people using the Siri, personal assistant on the iPhone 4S, to get it to access abortion or birth control services. As the screen grab above demonstrates, while you can't get Siri to look up a reproductive health centre, you can find lots of donuts.

I feel in a bit of a bind on this. My initial instinct was outrage that such important information would be excluded from a very popular built-in app on the most popular smartphone in America. That was fed into by the fact that Apple is one of the world's largest companies and any residual sympathies I felt with the "other" computer manufacturer as the rebel PC company have long since dissipated. Apple may have a cutting edge design and engineering team, willing to challenge entrenched distribution chains like the music industry (well, a little bit) and overturn existing conceptions about devices that are central to our lives, like phones - but it makes its profits by outsourcing production to sweatshops. Within the last two weeks there have been major strikes at facilities in China that manufacture Apple products. And I'm militantly pro-choice: women have the right to control their bodies full-stop and that must include access to information on abortion and reproduction technologies like birth control.

But something seemed off about the attack on Siri. Now, I love my Siri. Well, maybe love is too strong a word. I feel a powerful emotional connection to my little PA. But that wasn't the issue. If Siri was behaving badly she ought to be called out on it. Except that the more I thought about the article, and talked to my wife, I realized that the problem here was not Siri per se and that the writer of the original column misunderstood what Siri is and how it works.

First off, Siri is really a hub rather than a service, properly understood. It provides natural language processing with an AI to understand what it is that you ask and then to turn that request into an action by interfacing with other apps that actually deliver the service. So, when you ask Siri: "where can I get some donuts?" it isn't actually Siri that finds out where you can get some heart-stopping, deep fried dough. Siri converts your request into a comprehensible command and sends that command to Yelp. Yelp is a location based service that is sort of a crowd-sourced yellow pages. It contains businesses and services that have been reviewed by users. When you ask Siri for donuts, it looks up donut shops on Yelp and then provides you with results from Yelp, including the star ratings of those shops, as seen in the screen grab above.

Now, there are three possibilities: either there are no "reviews" in your area for abortion clinics and reproductive health service providers - so they have no presence on Yelp, or Yelp refuses to accept such reviews or Siri refuses to access those that do exist. I'm in Toronto, Canada so I have no location-based services in Siri; I can't ask it to find donut shops or abortion clinics. But when I search Yelp, it does return a number of local abortion related services. On the other hand, when I Yelp "rape crisis" the closest service it provides is a rape crisis centre in Milton (about 40km west of Toronto). If you Google "Toronto rape crisis centre" (using Siri in this case) it returned the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre, which is located in downtown Toronto. As a test I also asked Siri: "Google abortion clinics". It returned a Google search page, including a map with the locations of a number of clinics on it.

Now, there is no abortion law in Canada and there is a clear majority in favour of a woman's right to choose, thanks to many years of campaigning by the pro-choice movement. In the USA things are much murkier and the anti-choice bigots have won a number of gains that have rolled back women's right to reproductive choice. So, there is the possibility that Apple and/or Yelp is accommodating to the more reactionary cultural attitudes and "avoiding controversy". But maybe not.

Is Siri insensitive to women's needs? Or is it just kinda dumb?

There are lots and lots of injustices, bigotries and oppressions in the world. Enough to go around and then some. But we need to be careful not call "fire" unless we know that there is one, especially when it targets something popular like Siri or a celebrity or a popular institution. Not because any of these things should stand above the kinds of principles that ought to guide a just society - freedom from oppression and fear, personal sovereignty, freedom, social justice, access to the means to satisfy human need, etc. Rather, at the level of political tactics, we want to avoid attacking the wrong targets and discrediting the entirely correct general argument, such as women's right to abortion and rape crisis services.

But the tumblr piece is flawed because the writer didn't take the time to find out what Siri is and what it does, what its limitations are, etc. For instance, the writer compares a response from Siri being unable to access abortion services with using Google. But if she had asked Siri to "google" abortion clinics or birth control, she would have gotten different results. And here is the nub: Siri is dumb. I mean, it's smarter than any other portable AI out there. It's incredibly impressive how it can understand natural language and convert it into commands that access apps, etc. But it's not smart enough to know that if Yelp doesn't have any listed abortion clinics it should try Google. And it's inbuilt features, like following a multi-exchange conversation, means that it gets hung sometimes. For instance, you ask it to look for abortion services and when it can't find any on Yelp you change your request to search or even google abortion services and Siri is still trying to go to Yelp. It thinks that you're still having the same conversation. You have to tell Siri "start over" so it knows you're asking it to do something entirely different.

Likewise, the complaint that Siri is responding in a dismissive way to the input "I was raped" with "Really!". Except that Siri still has a pretty limited ability to understand language that doesn't have a clear command component to it (and even then it ain't near perfect). When it comes across a request that it doesn't know how to process into a command, it returns one of a series of stock, slightly snippy responses. The snippiness is supposed to be part of its charm and personality. When I say to Siri "I like candy" it replies "Yes, I heard that somewhere." It has been programmed to understand and convert certain non-command comments about mental and physical state into commands but these are incomplete. If you say you are drunk, Siri will offer up a number of taxi phone numbers, for instance. It's reasonable to expect that Siri ought to have a similar response to "I was raped"and the lack of this indicates a cultural bias by the (probably almost all male) software engineers that programmed it.

In Siri's (and Apple's) defence, they have called Siri a "beta" for a reason - it is still in development, a work in progress. As noted above, outside of the USA there are no location based services. Siri doesn't yet have Spanish language support or Quebecois French in Canada (our second official language). Siri can't interface with my other apps like Twitter, Evernote or Remote. Should Siri have had Spanish language support upon its release in America where tens of millions speak it as their first language. Yeah, probably. Is it a reflection of the second class status of Latin Americans in the USA that Apple didn't consider this? Again, yeah, probably. But negligence in the development priorities - while politically significant - is not the same as an active conspiracy. In the new year Apple has said that it intends to introduce not only Spanish but Mandarin and a couple of dozen other languages. My guess is that Siri will also "learn" new contexts as it is used by millions of people and Apple's servers suck up the data from that usage and turn it into usable information about what gets requested, which becomes the basis for new forms of understanding by Siri.

Now, it may be the case that Apple is actively preventing Siri from looking up certain services (being in Canada, I can't tell re: Yelp). If it is the case, it should be shouted from the rooftops and Apple ought to be shamed into providing full access to all information (ditto if Yelp USA were doing that). But, unfortunately, this tumblr piece by Amadi fails to prove the case that this is happening and discredits the argument by displaying a lack of understanding of how the software works.

Postscript: Right after I wrote this, I came across a piece in the New York Times about a petition making the rounds from NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) calling on Apple to fix the problem. An Apple spokesperson responded:

"Our customers want to use Siri to find out all types of information, and while it can find a lot, it doesn’t always find what you want,” said Natalie Kerris, a spokeswoman for Apple, in a phone interview late Wednesday. “These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks."

Siri Failures, Illustrated | Amadi Talks:

'via Blog this'

Conservatives Attack Abortion Thru Backdoor

You gotta hand it to the Conservative Freak Parade, they just don’t stop, even when they lose. After all it was twenty years ago this year that the abortion law in Canada was struck down and women’s inherent right to control their bodies was accepted as a legal principle.
But the people who would throw you into jail for masturbating into your sock are back. And they’ve found a new way to take away the rights of women: The Unborn Victims of Crime Act. It’s been brought forward as a private members bill by Edmonton Conservative MP Ken Epp. It receives a second debate on February 29 and then is scheduled for a vote on March 4.
It sounds innocuous enough – if someone, during the process of committing an offense, harms the fetus of a pregnant woman, including causing a miscarriage or stillbirth, they would receive extra punishment. Now, don’t we all think that people who hurt or kill pregnant women are particularly odious?
Except that this isn’t about protecting the pregnant woman – it’s about the fetus. In fact, it is about granting the fetus personhood, separate from the woman carrying it. But if the fetus is a person and the woman is a person, then there’s going to be some sticky legal situations to work out – like, hmmm, I don’t know… abortion, perhaps?
In many of the 37 states where there is similar legislation to that mooted by Mr. Epp, women have suffered the nasty end of the legal stick. Even in those states where a pregnant woman in question is specifically, legally exempt this is the case. In Pennsylvania, Missouri, California and Texas, women are exempt and yet pregnant drug users have been charged with murder and assault against their fetuses. The charges have been ruled out of order – but for how long?
In South Carolina only one man has been busted for killing a pregnant woman, however 100 pregnant drug users have been charged under the fetus protection legislation. There isn’t a single drug rehab clinic in the state. And South Carolina anti-choice legislators have said that they plan to use the legislation to challenge Roe v Wade at the Supreme Court. (Roe v Wade was the Supreme Court decision back in the 70s that won the right to abortion in the United States.)
Women have even been charged and jailed for murder after refusing a caesarian section an suffering stillbirth, or just from suffering a stillbirth.
Let’s be honest – this is the thin edge of the anti-choice wedge to re-criminalize abortion. It’s about shifting the discourse towards talking about fetuses as children with rights, etc. It’s about reducing women to baby-carrying vessels.
Don’t think it’s about abortion? Well, according to the Campaign Life Coalition, “Ken Epp is not a member of CLC, although we are very supportive of his political career during which he has been a stalwart supporter of the pro-life cause.” Campaign Life are also very big supporters of Epps bill.
At the moment the NDP and the BQ will whip their members to vote against the bill. However, the Liberals have said that it will be a free vote for their caucus and they have their fair share of anti-choice types. Go to Birth Pangs and fill out their automatic form to Liberal Leader Stephane Dion: tell him to make sure that the Liberals vote against this backdoor attack on women.
And, if you want to know more, check out these talking points from the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada.

Anti-abortion crap made to look cute

guest post by Kathryn Palmateer

Oh, how cute. What quirky style. Gosh, doesn’t little pregnant Juno look adorable? She makes pregnancy really work for youth doesn’t she? She’s intelligent and witty and doesn’t even bat an eye when informing her parents that she is pregnant and then later giving her child up for adoption. And then that adorable scene at the end, with that sweet little love song. She’s found innocence and youthfulness again.
Please.
Sure, sure, I understand. Its pro-choice. Pro-the other-choice. You know, women have the right to choose to do whatever they want with their bodies? They, like Juno, can choose to have a child and put it up for adoption or….choose to abort that little fetus with fingernails, as the sweet caring little Asian girl outside the abortion clinic would have it. “All babies want to be borned” she said. She is not your usual abortion protester. She cares about you and your unborn child.
Let’s start with a few things.
To be sure, we cannot understand the impact of a film such as this outside of the context of abortion politics in the United States. The current climate is one of anti-choice bigotry, even 35 years after the Roe v Wade decision, the 1973 decision in which the US Supreme Court determined that governments lacked the power to prohibit abortions. Over the past few years there have been repeated attempts to turn back women’s reproductive freedoms.
By March 2005, legislators in 9 states were crafting bills which would criminalize abortion. In South Dakota, a law was signed in 2006 to ban abortion, making it a crime for doctors to perform abortions with no exception in cases of rape or incest. The ban failed in a 2007 referendum. Also in 2006, the Mississippi House Public Health Committee voted to approve a ban on abortion, but the bill died after the House and Senate failed to agree on compromise legislation.
Several other states have enacted “trigger laws” such as Louisiana which would take effect
if Roe v. Wade is overturned, all of these have been aimed to ignite the battle over Roe v. Wade. President Bush has appointed over 60 judges to the Supreme Court and the federal courts of appeal that are hostile to Roe v. Wade. And yet, polls show that over 60% of likely voters want the 1973 decision upheld. Not surprisingly, Bush is pretty out of touch with the priorities of voters.
Not only are there widespread attacks on abortion laws, in many states, women have slim pickings when it comes to clinics. In the entire state of South Dakota, there is but one abortion clinic. The same is true for Mississippi. Many women are forced to cross state lines to have the procedure.
The messages in movies that we see every day are important influences on the way that we see the world. They aren’t simply stories that entertain us and then go on their merry way. They influence how we think, how we feel and perhaps more importantly, they give fuel to those whose ideas at times dominate the media and politics. Rick Santorum, Republican senator from Pennsylvania, writes about Juno, Knocked Up, and Waitress (along with two other films about unplanned pregnancies) in the Philadelphia Inquirer stating that “our culture….is finally waking up to the reality of life in the womb”. This is the same Rick Santorum who compared homosexuality to incest.
When a movie like Juno poses teenage pregnancy as cute and quirky, it has an immediate and direct impact on popular culture. Not only do young people see this as an option, but they see it as a “cool” option. Teens the age of Juno are not just passively taking in a story like this, just as adults aren’t either.
A film like Juno “mainstreamizes” anti-abortion politics. Because while Juno is the one making the choice (and not the state) it is anti-abortion at its core. Why does such a smart young woman fall for the ploy that a fetus is a person from conception? To Juno, the wretchedness of the abortion clinic demonizes the abortion choice leaving her with not much choice at all.
To my mind, when the truth about abortion is concealed and teen pregnancy and adoption romanticized as is done in the film, it is anti-choice.
What we need to be teaching young people is about safe-sex options. From there, we need to be teaching the truth about abortion and reproductive rights. So you can go ahead and tell me that this movie is pro-choice. But I don’t buy it. It may not be a direct condemnation of abortion. It is not easy and “connect-the-dots” programming targeting pro-life Christians. But in its ability to connect with mainstream audiences, it is definitely a step forward for the anti-abortion movement.
The right to abortion that women have gained through struggle is in a precarious position at best. And no aren’t-we-so-fuckin-clever movie is going to change that.