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@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ If this sounds like a blueprint for intensified surveillance, for even greater c |
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One US company hoping to capitalise on the pandemic sells [voice analytic technologies](https://www.clearspeed.com/technology/), which it says can "vet for fraud, security, and safety risks" with greater than 94% accuracy. All this based on a 2-10 minute long phone call, in which it isn't what you say that matters, but how. Your voice, it is presumed, will betray you. Representation not only can but *should* be bypassed. Before the pandemic, this company's products were already available in 13 languages across 12 countries and 23 industries, including to government and military contractors. Today, they also offer “automated telephonic vocal risk assessment” for the determination of fraud in allocating Covid-related welfare and stimulus packages. How the system works, what precisely constitutes "vocal risk" and why, is never explained. It is, after all, proprietary. |
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The imaginary that underpins this kind of technology does not emerge with machine listening. It is directly related to the history of the stethoscope in medicine,[^Sterne, Rice] along with lie detection and personality profiling in security and policing.[^Goldenfein] But vocal risk analysis also extends and modifies these practices insofar as it follows on from machine listening's original wager: that silicon ears might discern what meat ears[^Wark] never could; that there is a layer of auditory truth beneath or beyond the threshold of human hearing, and that this can be accessed *only* by machinic systems whose workings, in many cases, cannot be reverse engineered or explained to those same human ears. |
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The imaginary that underpins this kind of technology does not emerge with machine listening. In addition to the obvious economic incentives, t is directly related to the history of the stethoscope in medicine,[^Sterne, Rice] along with lie detection and personality profiling in security and policing.[^Goldenfein] But vocal risk analysis also extends and modifies these practices insofar as it follows on from machine listening's original wager: that silicon ears might discern what meat ears[^Wark] never could; that there is a layer of auditory truth beneath or beyond the threshold of human hearing, and that this can be accessed *only* by machinic systems whose workings, in many cases, cannot be reverse engineered or explained to those same human ears. |
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There is a profound and ramifying "thoughtlessness" here: at once ethical, political, and epistemic.[^McQuillan] Once you start down the road that machines might directly audit reality, where to get off? A computational physiognomy of voice becomes so much easier to imagine, sell, and embed. |
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