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@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ has_experiments: ["living-with-a-black-box.md", "listening-to-the-body.md"] |
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## The pandemic is not an intermission, it's an opportunity |
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The water behind a dam holds an immense amount of potential energy. A crack might become a hole might become a break. If legal regulation, public opinion or under-investment has been the dam holding machine listening back from becoming truly pervasive, then SARS-CoV-2 has weakened that structure throughout. Every voice industry startup and tech juggernaut, every streaming platform, every military funded machine diagnostics lab, every automated care industry device manufacturer has been ready and waiting for just this moment to spring into action with a [quick technological fix](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/tech-coronavirus-surveilance-state-digital-disrupt) that just so happens to bolster their position. From the perspective of the machine listening industry, the pandemic is a dream come true. It gets to do what it was always going to anyway, only blanketed now in the twin auras of inevitability and social good [Mattern audio? also further down?]. |
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The water behind a dam holds an immense amount of potential energy. A crack might become a hole might become a break. If legal regulation, public opinion or under-investment has been the dam holding machine listening back from becoming truly pervasive, then SARS-CoV-2 has weakened that structure throughout. Every voice industry startup and tech juggernaut, every streaming platform, every military funded machine diagnostics lab, every automated care industry device manufacturer has been ready and waiting for just this moment to spring into action with a [quick technological fix](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/tech-coronavirus-surveilance-state-digital-disrupt) that just so happens to bolster their position. From the perspective of the machine listening industry, the pandemic is a dream come true. It gets to do what it was always going to anyway, only blanketed now in the twin auras of inevitability and social good. |
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According to one team of researchers from the UK, Germany, Japan and China, machine listening is not just "ready for implementation" but "urgently necessary" in the "fight against COVID-19". In addition to audio diagnostic and "pre-diagnostic" tools, which would aim to diagnose the virus from a person's voice before symptoms had otherwise manifested, they cite as possible use-cases: "automatic recognition of deceptive speech when people are questioned about their recent contacts or whereabouts"; automatic monitoring of "telephone or other spoken conversations", which "together with GPS coordinates from smart phones... could establish real-time spread maps"; acoustic monitoring of "public obedience and discipline in social-distancing", and in hospital settings, of patients' "emotions, eating habits, fatigue, or pain, etc." Finally, "public spaces could be empowered by AI that detects potentially risky settings, which are over-crowded, under-spaced in terms of distance between individuals, and spot potentially COVID-19 affected subjects among the crowd, and whether these and others are wearing a protective mask while speaking."[^Schuller et al] |
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