A NEW RELATIONSHIP

Vahe H. Apelian

Today I read Garo Armenian’s  comment head lined MAN-MACHINE SYMBIOSIS. His choice or words caught my attention and I will come to it a bit later.

He noted in his comment that he remembers “writing a paper at Wharton on the man-machine symbiosis... during the 60's of the century that we just left behind.”  He further noted that “Man-machine symbiosis was indeed the intellectual buzzword in the US management circles at the time. J.C.R. Licklider had just published his book ("Man-Computer Symbiosis") which was to become a classic in the field. George Stigler, the economist demigod of the "Chicago School", was predicting that the computers would soon become -- "in the foreseeable future", he said -- a technology available to the everyday man... An exciting prospect that -- despite Stigler's firm conviction -- nobody believed could become reality in our lifetime. “!

Wharton Business School or simply Wharton of the University Of Pennsylvania  is considered  one of the premier business schools. It was fitting that they would have their students ponder about the upcoming symbiotic relationship of man and machine some six decades earlier. It does  sound way in the distant past now, does it not?

I was drawn into the man and machine relationship when in 1997 the IMB Deep Blue defeated Gary Casparov in a six-game chess. It was a watershed event. I think it was the Time Magazine and not the Newsweek that reflected on  the significance of what transpired. For the very first time in history a machine strategized, that is to say thought, better than the best in chess. That far all that machines did was mostly menial manual jobs relieving us from hard labor such as hauling the huge boulders ancient Egyptians did when they  built the pyramids.

Garo Armenian’s reflection came about when he passed by an Apple Store. A few days earlier I had a similar experience in the Apple Store in the Solomon Mall, in Marborough, MA.  My wife and I were attending an instructional course on the newest iPhone she purchased. During the presentation the instructor got engaged in real conversation with the iPhone. For a  while I thought that he was on the phone talking to a lady on the receiving end. It turned out that he was engaged in real conversation with Siri. When I remarked my astonishment of what just transpired. The instructor commented that it is a NEW RELATIONSHIP.  We now seem to have entered a new era. Its no more MAN-MACHINE SYMBIOSIS but its a MAN-MACHINE RELATIONSHIP with a machine with an authentic and responsive female voice. I will have to admit that It indeed sounded a real relationship.

This brings me to the voice. Why is it a female voice and what could it be the voice's implications?

A few years back I was watching a documentary about the military airplanes. The documentary was titled “Breaking the Human Barrier”. The crux of the matter was that it’s no longer the technology that is preventing the manufacture of faster and more agile military airplanes but that it is us, humans, ourselves, because our biology is not evolved to handle such instantaneous changes in gravitational (G) forces, that come about as the airplanes engage in split second maneuvers. Welcome to the era of drone…. 

But what I wanted to note is that the documentary also noted that the voice in the cockpit for the pilots is a female voice. It turned out that the U.S. Air Force had long determined that the we respond better to female voice than to male voice. The reason is  attributed to the imprinting of the fetus in the mother’s womb to her vocalization. 

I think Siri will likely remain a female, at least for the foreseeable future. I wonder whether  men, more than women, or both genders will equally be receptive to forge the new relationship with the talking and responsive female machine . And as machines get much more sophisticated the HUMAN-MACHINE RELATIONSHIP will get even more  intimate.

It has always been a  new brave world. Has it not?