Reading Bayne’s article on the ‘teacherbot’ project (2015) brought to mind some conversations I had with my family during the Christmas holidays around the topic of Amazon Alexa. It had been a recent addition to one household and the way in which its owners interacted with it attracted the attention of their guests and provoked some debate surrounding the value and utility of such new(ish) technologies and the principles which might govern their use. Something about these conversations made me feel uneasy and slightly disappointed, and I later concluded that it was the one-sided, cynical, even hostile attitude towards the technology which had been unanimously shared. During the discussion I began to foresee the kind of responses I may be confronted by upon starting this course and attempting to explain its content and justify my choosing it as a subject worthy of study.

During the conversations, two main objections were made to Alexa, one of which was specific to the way in which the guests had witnessed it being used by its owners, and the other of which concerned the value of this and other similar technologies. Apparently Alexa’s owners had developed the habit of speaking to it (her?) curtly and mockingly, commanding it to play music without so much as a ‘please’, calling it stupid if it encountered any problems in carrying out the command, and telling it to shut up when it grew tiresome. This interaction openly took place in front of the guests, who included a young child in the early stages of learning to speak. I could sympathise with the objections of his parents in that there was a risk that the child would go on to imitate this undesirable model of interaction, or may simply be confused at the sight of his grandfather barking orders at an invisible entity. What I was less convinced by was the suggestion that conventional standards of politeness need be applied when interacting verbally with a machine.

The other objection to Alexa’s existence represented a common reaction to the introduction of ‘smart’ technologies in general, calling into question the need for an ever-increasing repertoire of gadgets to perform tasks so basic that any inconvenience involved could be deemed negligible. This was an understandable resistance to the current trend towards automatisation and the possible implications of this phenomenon, albeit resting on the assumption that technology-use should only be accepted and encouraged if it meets a genuine need; i.e. if it performs a task that not could easily be performed without it. At this point I interjected that reference to many of the technologies already in widespread use nullifies this argument.

While I partially agreed with the objections raised, I would have also liked to introduce a different perspective, which I chose not to do at the time in the interest of preserving familial harmony and Christmas cheer, but which I later discussed with my mum. Regarding the nature of the interaction with Alexa, I firstly admitted to having behaved in a similar way towards Siri, and then suggested that rather than judging this interaction in the same way as a human-human interaction, perhaps it would be more helpful to frame it in terms of an experiment in playing at the boundaries of the human-machine distinction, in testing those boundaries and orienting oneself to a new form of interaction involving a non-human interlocutor. Much like what I interpreted to be a core aim of the teacherbot project outlined in Bayne’s paper (2015).

I am attracted to the proposal which Bayne (2015) puts forward as an alternative to the wholehearted resistance or embrace of technology, drawing on a post-humanist conceptualisation of contemporary reality as an ‘assemblage’ or ‘entanglement’ of the human and non-human, challenging both the notion of technology as a threat to ‘desirable humanity’ and the anthropocentric, instrumentalist view of technology as serving human needs. This may not provide much consolation to the parents who were concerned about the unduly negative influence of a specific human-machine encounter on their child’s social development, but it could form the basis of a more balanced and generative consideration of how technology’s increasing presence stands to influence our cultural practices and assumptions, and what our reaction to this – be it resistance, embrace or compromise – might teach us about ourselves.

Bayne S. (2015). Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), pp. 455-467.

Week 2: Alexa – friend or foe? / Jemima Collins/An introduction to digital environments for learning (2018/2019)[SEM2] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0