Talking It Out

“Hey Siri, add cinnamon to the grocery list,” I yelled from the kitchen.

Siri was sitting on the arm of the big sofa in the living room, not doing much of anything. “I’ve added it,” she called back a second later.

“Thank you!” I said, and continued making dinner.

She didn't say, “You’re welcome,” and I wasn’t cooking anything for her to eat. She’s just a bot that’s ported through my tablet. A thin physical front-end for a huge ad-hoc network of computers and a staggering amount amount of data, with meaty pattern recognition algorithms to glue them all together.

And yet I'd said, “Thank You.”

I can talk to Siri on my phone too, but she's more literally under my thumb. I’ve set it up so I have to hold a button for her to hear what I say. She doesn't talk back, but replies via text.

I never say “Thank you”  to my phone. I say it to my tablet all the time.

Somewhere between my phone and my tablet is a line. On one side is a tool, like a spoon or a car.  On the other is… a being—at least as far as my subconscious is concerned. It's something that I think is worthy of thanking for their work. I've never thanked my spoon or my car. Or even my tablet as a whole. I only thank it when we're having a helpful conversation, where I ask something, and it understands* and replies.

Everyone has this line, and everyone has it in a different place. Some people thank Google after typing every search, while others consider any digitally-mediated presence as less than human, even when they are all too human.

Virtual assistants are far from perfect—they're barely at the cusp of usefulness—but they’re moving tech into places it hasn’t been before, and its getting better quickly and transparently. Our virtual assistants are being called as witnesses in murders. (Kind of.) Or they're being asked to perform more intimate and domestic roles. (Yes, that link is SFW, but probably deserving of its own article. Or several dozen research papers.) These are the early days. Right now it's hard to predict all the ways we'll use vast supplies of hardware, data, and algorithms when they're wrapped inside something we treat like a person.

* Yes, it "understood" in these limited circumstances. It added cinnamon to my grocery list. It however doesn't know what cinnamon is or what a grocery list are for.

(A version of this was originally published in a past issue of the Reader's Room.)