Update 'content/topic/listening-with-the-pandemic.md'

content/topic/listening-with-the-pandemic.md

@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ There is a profound and ramifying "thoughtlessness" here: at once ethical, polit
 
 Most of us will experience machine listening as an interface. Say goodbye to spring-mounted keys and clicking mice, maybe soon even the quiet tap of fingers on capacitive glass. "Alexa," we command - or is it ask? - into an airy, expectant atmosphere. Touchlessness refers first to this invisibility of interface, but it is also "social distancing", remote work, standing no less than 2m apart in a queue for toilet paper, and, in the case of corona voice diagnostics, the idea that computational systems might determine the presence of the virus from the sound of a person's speech or cough. 
 
-There's no evidence yet that such a thing is possible, but many organisations are trying [refs], and they are thirsty for data. "Donate your voice." "Hit record and read the following sentences while pinching your nose." "Press record and cough three times." [refs]
+There's no evidence yet that such a thing is possible, but many organisations are trying [Voca.ai, Cambridge, MIT, Swizterland, Sonde, Soniphi], and they are thirsty for data. "Donate your voice." "Hit record and read the following sentences while pinching your nose." "Press record and cough three times." [refs, or maybe a video?]
 
 Touchless covid diagnosis would make life and labor much safer for primary care workers. It would also be destined for automation and embedding into existing audio systems like telehealth, the smart city, and the smart speakers increasingly found at patients' bedsides [ref]. During a pandemic, where underequipped hospitals, testing centers, workplaces and urban centers are vectors of virus transmission, touchlessness becomes a hygienic imperative as well as an economic one. In a world in which we increasingly understand the air itself as toxic, touchlessness tends towards breathlessness too. After all, smart assistants don't breathe [Andrejevic on Kurzweil's flesh phobia?].
 
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ A world of pure touchlessness is a world in which every breath becomes an examin
 
 ## Wakewordlessness
 
-Wakewords were never going to last. They were always a trojan horse, designed to inveigle voice assistants into our homes and machine listening into our daily existence via a fantasy of consent. Their tendency is to disappear. In the future, machine listening will be wakewordless. Much of it is already. The smart city in particular is always listening; though the distribution of this listening is heavily stratified by, for instance, race and class [[Shakur](https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/gun-violence-police-shotspotter/)]. Urban gunshot detection systems like Shot Spotter, and the microphones embedded in streetlamps and traffic lights, never sleep. Only personal devices retain the pretense. And not for long.
+Wakewords were never going to last. They were always a trojan horse, designed to inveigle voice assistants into our homes and machine listening into our daily existence via a fantasy of consent. Their tendency is to disappear. In the future, machine listening will be wakewordless. Much of it is already. The smart city in particular is always listening; though the distribution of this listening is heavily stratified by, for instance, race and class [[Shakur](https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/gun-violence-police-shotspotter/)]. Urban gunshot detection systems like Shot Spotter, and the microphones embedded in streetlamps [ref Aus] and traffic lights [ref], never sleep. Only personal devices retain the pretense. And not for long.
 
 In response to the pandemic, the latest OS update to Apple Watch will include a feature that uses "machine-learning models to determine motion, which appears to be hand-washing, and then use audio to confirm the sound of running water or squishing soap in your hands.” All this with a view to helping you "keep going for the amount of time recommended by global health organisations." [ref]
 
@@ -42,9 +42,9 @@ Here is a future in which the wake word becomes something we do, a situation, en
 
 ## Ambient assisted living
 
-Of the many things the pandemic has clarified, one is that aged care homes are a microcosm worth paying attention to. By August 2020, 68% of Australia's Covid-related deaths were residents of aged care. In the UK, aged care residents are dying at three times the "normal rate". No surprise then that aged care is also a laboratory for smart homes and smart cities.
+Of the many things the pandemic has clarified, one is that aged care homes are a microcosm worth paying attention to. By August 2020, 68% of Australia's Covid-related deaths were residents of aged care. In the UK, aged care residents are dying at three times the "normal rate". No surprise then that aged care is also a laboratory for smart homes and cities.
 
-In Google Home patents, elderly relatives are monitored like Tomagotchi pets. Systems send out suggestive prompts at opportune moments, reminding you to "Give your mother a call." Across the spectrum of this technological imaginary, from nursing homes to nurseries, care is automated, accident averted, and human touch is always the last resort. When ambient assisted living is generalized, it slips out of the the retirement village like a fog: it is the becoming retirement village of the world. Or as Amazon now calls it: Alexa Residential [ref].
+In Google Home patents, elderly relatives are monitored like Tomagotchi pets [ref]. Systems send out suggestive prompts at opportune moments, reminding you to "Give your mother a call." Across the spectrum of this technological imaginary, from nursing homes to nurseries, care is automated, accident averted, and human touch is always the last resort. When ambient assisted living is generalized, it slips out of the the retirement village like a fog: it is the becoming retirement village of the world. Or as Amazon now calls it: Alexa Residential [ref].
 
 Big tech knows you can get away with things in assisted living facilities that you couldn't in the city outside. Or not yet anyway. Nursing homes and their residents are already socially isolated, already underfunded, already sites of exploitation and abuse: ready and waiting for a magic bullet offered out of the goodness of some billionaire's heart. This is a context in which companies can proclaim in all seriousness that "Continuous monitoring offers greater privacy," where automated care and the total surveillance it entails justifies the absence of human care as a new feature: *greater privacy* [ref website].