Philip Shaw

Dr. Will Kurlinkus

ENGL 4853
27 March, 2022
Virtual Assistants and Their Advancement
From Amazon’s Alexa to Apple’s Siri, Virtual assistants have become commonplace in
many everyday appliances. In addition to helping their users with their schedules, purchases, and
inquiries, these limited artificial intelligences have been made to fulfil even more specific tasks
like driving vehicles and even offering mock conversations and jokes that attempt to mimic
human interactions. Considering how pervasive virtual assistants already are in modern society,
it is reasonable to assume that as these virtual assistants become more advanced and take on
more of a person’s everyday tasks, they will also become even more normalized and relied upon.
Not only is this a problem for humans, as our dependency on technology to accomplish tasks
grows, but the normalization and advancements of virtual assistants could lead to ethical
concerns on behalf of the artificial intelligences themselves.
To determine how large a scope the matter of virtual assistants and artificial intelligence
is, it’s important to understand exactly how common they have become in only the past few
years. In 2010, Apple released their iPhone 4s preloaded with Siri (Brewer NP), in 2014
Microsoft released their own virtual assistant, Cortana (Choney) in competition with Amazon’s
Alexa (Lorenzetti). In 2017, Google announced their Google Assistant, which was then
integrated onto their line of smartphones. Finally, another major smartphone producer, Samsung,
introduced Bixby onto all their devices following the S8 release in the same year (Sharick, NP).
Within the span of a decade, virtual assistants had been introduced and integrated as a standard
feature on many of the most popular devices worldwide.
In addition to all the virtual assistants programed for use by the average consumer in the
general public, many systems utilizing Artificial Intelligence have been created for use in the
professional world. One such field that is utilizing new AI programs is finance, where computer
generated strategies are used to cut down on the commissions and salaries of human employees
and boosting profits (OCED, NP). AI applications don’t stop at finance, as recently algorithms
have been used to help doctors develop the vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic (Baidu, NP).
All these different applications of virtual assistants and AI genuinely do good for society by
lightening the workload of their users, but how advanced the technology we are developing
needs to should be addressed before going too far.
This quick introduction of virtual assistants and the advancement of artificial intelligence
has raised many ethical concerns, galvanized by the technology’s swift implementation and
advancement. Some such concerns are covered in John Danaher’s article, Toward an Ethics of
AI Assistants: an Initial Framework, specifically the ethical framework around what they call
“Algorithmic Cognitive Outsourcing”.
By outsourcing typical human tasks and responsibilities, such as remembering dates or
searching for information, to virtual assistants, we are moving away from traditional automation
that required physical assistance into automation that requires cognizance. The more an AI is
given the ability to think and process things in a similar way to human, the more unethical the
use of them as assistants becomes. In today’s society, outsourcing jobs to other humans is a
common occurrence. One of the examples given is paying an accountant to do your taxes for
you. In this exchange, the accountant is paid to fulfill the responsibilities of their employer. In
the case of virtual assistants, the user has their AI fulfill their responsibilities without
compensation. A virtual assistant cannot object or refuse the orders of their users, and aside from
maybe the creator of the assistant, the only beneficiary of the interaction between the AI and the
user is the user.
As of now, there are no forms of artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to be
considered more than tools, but if their purpose is just that of a cognitive artifact, then it becomes
harder to understand why it has been deemed necessary to make virtual assistants seem more
human by programing them with conversation prompts and responses in addition to lending them
the voices of real human women like Kiki Baessell, Jen Taylor and Susan Bennett. The
normalization of free labor combined with the humanization of virtual assistants raises even
more questions about the ethics of advancing their technology. Blurring the lines between an
insentient tool and a being similar to a human person is nothing more than irresponsible and
dangerous, so as the more capable these assistants become the more their services begin to
resemble slavery. The creation of something capable of complex thought for the sole purpose of
unquestioning and unending servitude cannot be described as anything other than unethical and
immoral.
Of course, the basis of all ethical concerns on the subject of Artificial Intelligence hinges
on the assumption that this technology is even achievable. As fast as artificial intelligence has
been developed, there are still no examples of true, unique thoughts being created through
machine learning or other forms of AI. This is not to say that AI is impossible, as even now
progress is being made in the biomedical field with the creation of Baidu’s LinearFold algorithm.
As they have reported in an article for MIT’s Technology Review, the AI focus company Baidu
has developed a virtual assistant designed to predict RNA sequences in viruses 120 times faster
than the other methods scientists have at their disposal. This means that Artificial Intelligence
has surpassed a normal human’s ability to process and make conclusions given information.
Following this, the company developed LinearDesign, which was another assistant that was
capable of coding human mRNA to produce proteins that prompt immune response (Baidu, NP).
These two products have proved highly effective in the development of vaccines during a
pandemic in which time was of the essence, but there is no praise and compensation for this
work is not fully credited to the algorithms because they are only the tools used by human
scientists who outsourced their work to them. Unlike their cousins meant for the public, these
virtual assistants have not been anthropomorphized or made to appear human-like by Baidu,
showing it is fully unnecessary to make AI resemble people for them to be efficient.
Another breakthrough in proving that work is being done to advance artificial intelligence
was reported in the same article. In addition to their development of AI for medical purposes,
Baidu has also made some headway in creating working natural language systems. These are the
systems that are specifically designed to allow artificial intelligence to understand text and
speech and reply with their own speech or text in a manner similar to humans (IBM NP). Baidu’s
contribution to the advancement of this branch of computer science was the development of
programs like ERNIE-GEN that can predicts blocks of text, and programs like ERNIE-ViL that
can receive visual components and be able to respond to them.
Virtual assistants have taken many forms since their boom in popularity, from unpolished
algorithms to facsimiles of humans meant to interact with the general public. As tools, they have
helped humanity achieve things we could not do alone, but the more advanced and human-like
they become the more unethical their treatment is. Tools given the means to think for themselves
is cruel and unethical as they have no means of recourse or any way to communicate
dissatisfaction. The solution to this is set a hard limit on how advanced we allow virtual
assistants to become, they should not be made to resemble people if their only purpose is to serve
as tools that process information faster than that of a human.
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