Sean Dockray
4 years ago
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content/topic/against-the-coming-world-of-listening-machines.md
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| @@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ Automatic speech recognition, transcription and translation [Kathy Reid audio] - | |||
| These applications are all either currently in use by states, corporations and other entities around the world, or under development. The list is obviously not exhaustive. Nor does it convey the real diversity of markets, cyberphysical and political contexts into which these applications are quickly embedding themselves: | |||
| Digital voice assistants - voice user interfaces - state and corporate surveillance - profiling - border security - home security - pre-emptive policing - weapons systems - court systems - hospital systems - call centre optimisation - disability services - grocery store wayfinding [[1](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/27/business/amazon-fresh-first-grocery-store/index.html "amazon fresh first grocery story")] - ambient elderly monitoring - baby monitoring - house arrest monitoring - [^andre_audio_1] - remote education - school security - remote diagnostics - biomonitoring and personalised health - social distancing - music streaming - music education - composition - gaming - brand development - marketing - acoustic ecology - employee performance metrics - wearables - hearables - recruitment - banking - insurance ... | |||
| Digital voice assistants - voice user interfaces - state and corporate surveillance - profiling - border security - home security - pre-emptive policing - weapons systems - court systems - hospital systems - call centre optimisation - disability services - grocery store wayfinding [[1](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/27/business/amazon-fresh-first-grocery-store/index.html "amazon fresh first grocery story")] - ambient elderly monitoring - baby monitoring - house arrest monitoring - [^andre_audio_1] - remote education - school security - remote diagnostics - biomonitoring and personalised health - social distancing - music streaming - music education - composition - gaming - brand development - marketing - acoustic ecology - employee performance metrics - wearables - hearables - recruitment - banking - insurance ... | |||
| As with all forms of machine learning, questions of efficacy, access, privacy, bias, fairness and transparency arise with every use case. But machine listening also demands to be treated as an epistemic and political system in its own right, that increasingly enables, shapes and constrains basic human possibilities, that is making our auditory worlds knowable in new ways, to new institutions, according to new logics, and is remaking (sonic) life in the process. | |||
| @@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ Scientifically, machine listening demands enormous volumes of data: exhorted, ex | |||
| Because machine listening is trained on (more-than) human auditory worlds, it inevitably encodes, invisibilises and reinscribes normative listenings, along with a range of more arbitrary artifacts of the datasets, statistical models and computational systems which are at once its lifeblood and fundamentally opaque [McQuillan]. This combination means that machine listening is simultaneously an alibi or front for the proliferation and normalisation of specific auditory practices *as* machinic, and, conversely, often irreducible to human apprehension; which is to say the worst of both worlds. | |||
| Moreover, because machine listening is so deeply bound up with logics of automation and pre-emption, it is also recursive. It feeds its listenings back into the world - gendered and gendering [YS], colonial and colonizing, [^halcyon_audio_1], classed and productive of class relations - as Siri's answer or failure to answer; by alerting the police, denying your claim for asylum, or continuing to play Autechre - and this incites an auditory response to which it listens in turn. The soundscape is increasingly cybernetic. Confronting machine listening means recognising that common-sense distinctions between human and machine simply fail to hold. We are all machine listeners now. This must become the starting point of a contemporary politics of listening. | |||
| Moreover, because machine listening is so deeply bound up with logics of automation and pre-emption, it is also recursive. It feeds its listenings back into the world - gendered and gendering [YS], colonial and colonizing, [^halcyon_audio_1], classed and productive of class relations - as Siri's answer or failure to answer; by alerting the police, denying your claim for asylum, or continuing to play Autechre - and this incites an auditory response to which it listens in turn. The soundscape is increasingly cybernetic. Confronting machine listening means recognising that common-sense distinctions between human and machine simply fail to hold. We are all machine listeners now. This must become the starting point of a contemporary politics of listening. | |||
| But machine listening isn't exactly listening either. | |||