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

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

@@ -19,9 +19,9 @@ If this sounds like a blueprint for intensified surveillance, for even greater c
 
 ## Thoughtlessness
 
-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.
+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](https://www.clearspeed.com/covid-19-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.
 
-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.
+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.
 
 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.
 
@@ -31,13 +31,13 @@ Most of us will experience machine listening as an interface. Say goodbye to spr
 
 There's no evidence yet that such a thing is possible, but many organisations are trying and they are thirsty for data {{< nosup >}}[[i](https://voca.ai/corona-virus/ "Voca.ai and Carnegie Mellon University partner to enable fast diagnosis of COVID-19"), [ii](https://covid-19-sounds.org/en/ "COVID-19 Sounds App"), [iii](https://news.mit.edu/2020/signs-covid-19-may-be-hidden-speech-signals-0708 "Signs of Covid-19 may be hidden in speech signals"), [iv](https://coughvid.epfl.ch/ "Send us a recording of a cough sound and help research on COVID-19"), [v](https://www.voiceome.org/covid19/index.html "Use Voice to Fight COVID-19"), [vi](https://futurism.com/neoscope/app-claims-covid19-voice "This App Claims It Can Hear COVID-19 in Your Voice"), [vii](https://www.soniphi.com/ "Soniphi is developing a screening solution for COVID-19 that uses your voice.  If you have recently tested positive we need your help")]{{< /nosup >}}. {{< nosup >}}["Donate your voice."](https://www.voiceome.org/covid19/index.html){{< /nosup >}} "Hit record and read the following sentences while pinching your nose." "Press record and cough three times." 
 
-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.
+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](https://hitconsultant.net/2019/12/10/digital-voice-assistants-hospital-room-near-future/#.X2LCyVBS_OQ). 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.
 
 A world of pure touchlessness is a world in which every breath becomes an examination, every word an interrogation. Do you have COVID? Have you been displaying psychotic tendencies? Are you happy or sad? Local or foreign? Were you *really* in quarantine for the last 14 days? How will we determine what questions can be asked of a voice? Who will decide? And with what degree of scrutiny? What will become of [the freedom of speech itself](https://soundcloud.com/forensic-architecture-1/the-freedom-of-speech-itself)?
 
 ## 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](https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/gun-violence-police-shotspotter/). Urban gunshot detection systems like [Shot Spotter](https://www.shotspotter.com/), and the microphones embedded in streetlamps [ref Aus] and traffic lights [ref], 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](https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/gun-violence-police-shotspotter/). Urban gunshot detection systems like [Shot Spotter](https://www.shotspotter.com/), and the microphones embedded in [CCTV cameras](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/08/privacy-comissioner-grave-concerns-listening-devices-moreton-bay-council-australia) and [street lights](https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/sensors/remote-sensing/cops-smart-street-lights), 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](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-23/apple-wwdc-2020-ios-14-digital-key-and-hand-washing-arm-chips/12383124 "a watch that tells you when you can stop washing your hands") 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."
 
@@ -47,7 +47,7 @@ Here is a future in which the wake word becomes something we do, a situation, en
 
 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 [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 for Residential](https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-for-residential "Delight your residents and improve your properties’ operational efficiencies").
+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 for Residential](https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/alexa/alexa-for-residential "Delight your residents and improve your properties’ operational efficiencies").
 
 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"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf3y6vSKKY4&feature=emb_title "CLB Acoustic Monitoring"), where automated care and the total surveillance it entails justifies the absence of human care as a new feature: *greater privacy*.