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'

How Do You Get To Be A Radio DJ?

We rented a car this weekend to go to a family event outside the city. This morning I was returning the car and got to experience a "morning show" on The Edge with Dean Blondel and some other dude. It occurred to me, as they were making fun of Jack Layton and the massage parlour thing that they were fucking assholes. In less than two minutes they made fun of Asian accents, dehumanized women, and were just, in general, the kind of pricks you would never have as friends. And I wondered to myself if it was a job requirement to be a radio disc jockey that you be a right-wing, woman-hating jerk and if it was a course that was taught in the Ryerson Radio and Television program: "Dickwad 101", "Advanced Techniques: Insulting the Intelligence of Your Listeners", "The Historic Development of Being Stupid & Offensive Simultaneously".

WTF?! Anti-Violence Campaign Called "Hit The Bitch"

You have to be several varieties of stupid to come up with an anti-violence campaign in which you beat the hell out of a woman until you get the prize: a message telling you you're a "100% idiot". Clearly, somebody neglected to pass that message along to the shitburgers who generated this idea, raised the money for it and then implemented it. These folks get the Dumbasses Of The Year award for this one. Sheesh. Drop them a note and tell them that there might be, you know, a better way to oppose violence against women. Oh, feel free to be rude. (Thanks to Megan H. for pointing this out to me)

When Beauty Gets Creepy

SOME TIME AGO I WROTE ON THE BEAUTY OBSESSION of our society. In particular I explored the reasons why we try to hard to avoid looking like we're getting older. I rooted my analysis in the nature of our commodity-based mode of production, which is an historical anomaly, as opposed to the more historically typical method of production for direct consumption. Producing for exchange in this way has certain cultural effects, which arise from the fact that we experience social interaction not in a producerly way - because production is a privatized thing, controlled by companies and corporations. In fact, the secrets of production are hidden away from industrial spies who would dearly love to find out the secret formula for Coke or how they get the caramel inside the Caramilk bar. 

Rather, we experience social production only when it comes onto the market - in exchange. For us things have no process, only ends as consumer goods. Commodities are flat history-less objects of beauty, to be enjoyed for themselves, not for the process of their development and production. The pleasure is in their consumption. Work is seen as sullying, dirtying, a thing to be avoided - and with good reason, since work for most people is forced labour; literally we wouldn't do it if we didn't have bills to pay. This creates one of capitalism's central ironies: the thing which makes us human and allows us to develop - our ability to work on and thus transform the materials furnished to us by nature over time - becomes the thing that we avoid most. So it is with beauty - it must show no evidence of development or labour. It must be without history. It must be forever the same. This is especially the case where women are concerned since, historically, one of the roles imposed upon women has been to provide men with comfort and pleasure - a role that has expanded with a declining birth rate and the growth of leisure time. Women become the living commodity, the trophy wife, the sex object, the beauty queen.

I still stand by all this, of course, but while I was right to say that in this world beauty has no past, it also has no future. It is forever in the same moment of its perfection, the moment of consumption. How else to explain the aesthetic of child beauty pageants satirized with great humour in Little Miss Sunshine? The idea of dressing up female children to look like fully sexualized adult women is about eliminating the time necessary for their creation to make them into the perfect beauty. And the perfect beauty is that of a young woman. According to this blogger - whose graph I have shamelessly stolen - the average age of female porn stars is just under 23 years old and there are almost no women over the age of 30. And so we see women "too young" and women "too old", trying desperately to enter and remain in that golden band of commodified perfection.

Looking at the photos of these girls, made up to look like sexually mature women, one can't help but feel how confined are our identities. When I hear women say "well, I choose to wear make-up and short skirts", I will now forever think of these photos of little girls wearing make-up, low-cut tops and even "flippers" - adult sized teeth designed to give them more mature-looking mouths. 

Women's identity - and men's but in different ways - is totally determined at a very young age. The ideology of individualism, which denies the role of society in creating us as human personalities, serves nicely to cover up for the fact that we are pressed like dolls in a factory from the moment we enter the world. By the time we can speak we've already been interpellated - given the name: boy/girl. And that identity with all its implications - our career, our likes, our sexual choices, how we dress and speak and throw balls - is fixed in time. What these pictures of girls, some of whom who've barely learned to walk, demonstrates is that not only is our identity fixed in space, it's also fixed in time. Capitalism kills individuality and makes us adopt identical criteria for beauty and success or die trying. That's why beauty is creepy.

Beckham? Feck 'em!

Christ, it’s bad enough that we have to deal with the bloody British royal family and all their hijinx. “Ooh, look at little Prince Willie dressed up like a Nazi for his friend’s costume party.” “Gosh, I hope they don’t send Prince Harry into battle in Iraq.” Besides being fucking nauseating – after all close to a million Iraqis have died since the 2003 invasion, who gives a crap if that spoiled brat buys the farm? What’s more, it’s a complete and utter distraction from the real issues, uh, you know, things like: why is there a hereditary monarchy in a supposedly democratic country and why do they own, you know, half the land in Britain and why is Queen Elizabeth, that sour-pussed parasite, one of the wealthiest women in the world.
And now those bastard Brits have sent us Beckham and I can’t read the newspaper while taking a dump without having to see an article about David and Victoria. Christ. Fine, he’s a good soccer player, maybe even a great one – I’ll have to trust what other people tell me. But so fucking what: it’s SOCCER! Did the guy cure cancer? Solve world hunger? Create a work of art so astounding that it will live through the ages or a have a philosophical insight so deep that it will change the way our culture thinks about itself?
No. HE KICKS A BALL AROUND ON THE GRASS!
Jiminy Crickets people. And what about his wife? I can barely put word to page because it brings to mind her image, which makes me want to launch my lunch across the keyboard. Will someone give that lady a cheese sandwich and a beer?
I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on Victoria Beckham, after all she’s about as skill-less and useless as Prince Harry and his inbred ilk. Her claim to fame – other than marrying a cute guy with certain financially valuable sporting skills – is that she was part of an entirely manufactured girl group called The Spice Girls. Had these women even met before they auditioned for the band? Can they play any instruments? Uh, no. Did they write any of their own songs? Uh, no. In other words she is a fashion mannequin with a soundtrack. And now it’s been recognized by Glamour Magazine, which has just awarded her “Woman of the Year” for 2007?! What? Woman of the year? Her combination of anorexia and breast implants makes her look like a toothbrush. That’s glamorous?
I do have a certain sympathy, I suppose, for the self-absorbed git. She is the ultimate expression of sexism – women aren’t about their talents or hard-won skills, their value derives from their ability to provide sexual satisfaction to men. And that ability comes from two places, the completely arbitrary luck of the genetic draw and, with enough money, cosmetic surgery and a personal trainer. It’s the old story over again: the rich are beautiful because they can afford to be.
Now, maybe I should show more pity to this obviously psychologically unhealthy woman and her over-inflated, soon to be forgotten ball-kicking husband. Perhaps. But I won’t. They’ve gotten rich by riding the wave of the most important ideological con job of our times: envy us, emulate us because, with enough hard work, you could be us.
That’s right, don’t spit in your bosses eye or protest the government sending you overseas to get your ass shot off so the oil and gas companies can continue to fuck up the planet with environmentally destructive technologies. No, no, no. Instead sit slack-jawed in front of your fucking tv and wish that you had Victoria Beckham’s non-existent ass, or that you could kick a ball like Beckham and shag Victoria (and not your wife who’s as soft as you are from living in the burbs) and get invited to drink martinis at the Oscar party.
And while you’re at it, believe that if you only worked hard enough you could be David and Victoria. It’s the old rags to riches story. Suck it up and pull up your bootstraps and then you can be like these pathetic assholes. I mean do you really want the fucking paparazzi hanging outside of your house in the hopes of getting a shot of you taking a piss first thing in the morning? Do you really want every part of your body turned into a saleable object – Beckham shoes, Beckham pants, Beckham shirts, Beckham watches. Fuck, next they’ll have a Beckham shlong so you can fulfill your secret oral sex fantasies.
So, no, I don’t care if Beckham will play in the game vs Toronto this week. Frankly, I don’t give a shit if his plane power dives into Lake Ontario's polluted waters.
David and Victoria, kindly fuck off.