Those of us who have spent much of our professional lives working with words know all too well why this is happening. Back in the 1990s, when speech recognition software was in its early stages, vendors were eager to conquer the document-driven markets of legal and medical transcription. Both fields were populated with court reporters and skilled typists who, as language specialists, were expected to meet high standards of accuracy. If these people (and their employee benefits packages) could be replaced with software, the cost savings would be impressive.
This new technology (like some of today's artificial intelligence) was supposed to "learn" on the fly as it adjusted to the quirks of each speaker's voice. The selling point was that huge numbers of transcriptionists could be replaced with a much smaller group of editors who would scan each document for errors. The fact that a critical human safety net that, for many years, protected the integrity of patients' medical records was being destroyed in pursuit of downsizing didn't matter to the vendors (who stood to gain financially).
I mention this because, as decisions in our daily lives are increasingly being made by artificial intelligence, errors continue to happen. Some of our nation's most respected publications (The New York Times, The Washington Post) are chock full of grammatical errors that make no sense to people who never performed secretarial or transcription work. So let me outline some of the factors causing these problems:
- Some people are running digital sound files through speech recognition engines without realizing that the software can easily be tripped up by contractions and homophones.
- In many cases, speech recognition will spit out something that comes close to what it heard, but is nowhere near what the person said.
- After cutting and pasting text while editing, words that have not been properly deleted can make hash out of a supposedly "corrected" sentence.
- Electronic spell checkers and grammar checkers do not always understand the context that the author intended.
- After using such electronic tools to "check" an article, many authors don't take the time to read their work carefully to make sure it is correct. In numerous situations, human editors are no longer available to fulfill that function because they're simply too expensive.
"Bankers never said they were going to make the world a better place. Nor did makers of toilet paper or potato chips. Maybe soda makers like Coca-Cola said it in their ads, but we were all in on the joke when they told us that sugar water would bring the world together. But Silicon Valley truly believed its own myths (that tech leaders had arrived from the mountaintop to deliver the gleaming devices and magical software that would transform humanity, and that they would never be evil). Most of all, they really believed they were more than whatever they actually were doing, whether slinging better ads by sucking up our data, or taking a vig for getting us a date, a car, or in Amazon’s case, selling us piles and piles of stuff in really cheap and convenient ways."In the early days of the Internet, I was surprised at how the combination of some people's hyperreligiosity and technophobia led them to proclaim that the Internet was a source of evil. Over the past 25 years, it's become apparent that machine learning simply reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the humans who feed it data. Grifters like Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone will quickly find ways to exploit data in order to gain an unfair advantage over others. Sometimes it takes a science-fiction thriller to show us the weak points of the brave new worlds we've been creating. It's not like we haven't had plenty of warnings.
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick's brilliant sci-fi classic entitled 2001: A Space Odyssey gave audiences an early taste of what can happen when artificial intelligence goes rogue.
John Badham's 1983 thriller entitled WarGames focused on a teenage hacker (Matthew Broderick) who gained access to a government supercomputer with the capability of predicting potential outcomes of a nuclear war that was also linked to a network of nuclear weapons.
The above two films depended on prohibitively expensive government-funded supercomputers. But a half century after 2001: A Space Odyssey was released into theatres, our smartphones are minicomputers capable of phenomenal processing power, much of which is driven by artificial intelligence. We take that intelligence for granted at our own risk. Other than an occasional Tesla bursting into flames, we assume them to be benign instruments.
In 2009, Mamoru Hosoda's full-length animated feature film, Summer Wars, depicted an international crisis in which a virtual world ruled by a sadistic artificial intelligence threatened the global economy while holding Japan's citizens hostage. The saving grace? A group of grandmothers with land lines who kept all of their phone contacts in handwritten personal phone books!
The 2019 SFIndieFest recently screened a Japanese thriller set in 2027 in Nagoya, Japan, where everyone rides around in autonomous vehicles. The opening scene (guaranteed to make users of Siri and Alexa laugh out loud) follows a prosecutor named Amane Yonago (Marina Yoshimi) as she rides to work in such a vehicle. The minute she sneezes or coughs, the car's AI device asks if she wants to stop at a pharmacy and immediately announces the nearest one along her route. The mere mention that her back hurts triggers the device to start checking her physician's schedule for available appointment slots.
To her chagrin, Yonago has been transferred to the Transportation Division of the Aichi Public Prosecutors office, where most cases are never brought to trial because human error is always listed as the cause of an accident. With true prosecutorial zeal, Yonago decides to interrogate the AI device that forced a self-driving car to cross the center line on a highway, thus causing a fatal accident. But as soon as the trial commences, the MACO2 device admits that it killed the victim intentionally, leaving Yonago faced with the challenge of proving that an AI device can have feelings.
At that point, Takumi Shimomukai's film veers off into unpredictable territory as the prosecutor is confronted with a condescending corporate attorney (Ken Kurahashi), a fair share of sexism in the courtroom, and a judge who must determine how to punish the defendant if Yonago can prove the AI device guilty of murder. Once the case reaches its conclusion and the judge determines a punishment to fit the crime, Yonago must also deal with the feelings she has developed for the maleficent MACO2.
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For its first Sandbox Series production of 2019, the San Francisco Playhouse is presenting the world premiere of a new work by Chelsea Marcantel. “After seeing Ms. Marcantel’s play Airness at the Humana Festival in 2017, we immediately wanted to bring her unique voice to San Francisco,” states the company's Artistic Director, Bill English. “A White Girl’s Guide to International Terrorism is the first play in our five-year, 20-play commission program to reach production and is a milestone of which we are very proud.” |
| Blaze (Isabel Langen) has been making videos and posting them on her YouTube channel in A White Girl's Guide to International Terrorism (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
The protagonist of A White Girl's Guide To International Terrorism is Blaze (Isabel Langen), a high school senior who has been working part-time at a local Dairy Freeze in order to earn some spending money. Though she has two close friends at school, much of her life is spent in isolation. Raised by a single mother who has never hesitated to make sacrifices on behalf of her child, Blaze feels almost estranged from Kit (Arwen Anderson), whose schedule as a nurse is subject to frequent changes. Kit, however, is keenly aware that when Blaze turns 18 in a few weeks, the monthly child support payments from her father will come to an abrupt halt.
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| Kit (Arwen Anderson) tells her daughter, Blaze (Isabel Langen) that it's time to live on her own in A White Girl's Guide to International Terrorism (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Whereas the United States is often described as a land of opportunity, Blaze finds herself stuck in a land with no opportunities for a teenager without any marketable skills. She and Kit live in a trailer park along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana where drug overdoses are common, television delivers a steady stream of toxic disinformation, and unless someone has enough money to leave town forever, there isn't much hope for the future.
As a result, Blaze (who is one of the smartest students in her class) often seeks refuge on You Tube, where she uses her webcam to record videos about female saints that she uploads to her channel. For an intelligent but lonely teenager, the fact that Blaze has 30 followers is meager consolation for the sad truth that she lacks a foreseeable future that could fulfill her hopes and dreams. As she drapes a plaid bathrobe over her shoulders and attempts to speak with a Scottish accent, her videos ache with loneliness, a desperate desire to be noticed, and a painful sense of vulnerability.
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| Blaze (Isabel Langen) records a video about a Scottish female saint for her YouTube channel in A White Girl's Guide to International Terrorism (Photo by: Adam Tolbert) |
One day, her latest video gets a comment from a mysterious follower who offers a ray of hope. As the two women begin a correspondence (which hints at Blaze leaving home and moving to Syria, where she can really have a chance to change the world), the audience becomes increasingly suspicious of the other woman's motives. When Blaze confesses that she went to the library to find some more books about Syria, Wafiya (Liz Sklar) becomes adamant that she only trust the information she gets from Wafiya and does not let anyone know about their communications. Upon learning that Blaze has already given her mailing address to another follower, Wafiya becomes increasingly agitated and warns the teenager that she knows where Blaze lives, who her friends are, what they look like, and where she works.
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| Blaze (Isabel Langen) and Rowena (Neiry Rojo) attend their high school prom in a scene from A White Girl's Guide to International Terrorism (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Throughout all this, Blaze and her friend Rowena (Neiry Rojo) make clumsy attempts at New Age self-awareness exercises as they prepare to attend their senior prom. Blaze even gets up the courage to ask her close friend, Gabe (Davied Morales), to be her date. Confused by his mixed signals after he receives a scholarship to attend an out-of-state college, she is somewhat taken aback when Gabe explains that he doesn't want to be Blaze's friend just so he can get laid; he wants to know that they will remain friends for the rest of their lives.
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| Gabe (Davied Morales), Blaze (Isabel Langen), and Rowena (Neiry Rojo) are high school seniors in A White Girl's Guide to International Terrorism (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
With scenery by Maya Linke, costumes by Alice Ruiz, and sound design by Madeleine Oldham, the world premiere production of A White Girl's Guide to International Terrorism has been skillfully directed by Morgan Green with lighting and projections by Wolfgang Wachalovsky. Though some curious details appear during the performance (Wafiya's stylish beige high heels are highly suspicious), Marcantel has cooked up a surprise ending that points to the fallibility of overzealous FBI agents who, in a post 9/11 world, may do more harm than good.
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| An undercover FBI agent, Salem (Mohammad Shehata) keeps track of young American women being recruited in A White Girl's Guide to International Terrorism (Photo by: Jessica Palopoli) |
Isabel Langen and Neiry Rojo give solid performances as Blaze and Rowena, with the affable, easygoing Davied Morales scoring strong points as Gabe. As the three adults in the script, Arwen Andersen, Mohammad Shehata, and Liz Sklar do their best with scenes that don't exactly jump off the page as the playwright might have intended.
SFP's production is hampered by a curious dimension of the Creativity Theatre, whose extremely wide stage undermines the claustrophic environment in which an unhappy teen (who feels betrayed by her mother, enticed by a mysterious online "friend," and is caught in a web of lies beyond her understanding) might feel trapped. I expect the production and performances to tighten up during the play's initial run here in San Francisco.
Performances of A White Girl's Guide To International Terrorism continue at the Creativity Theatre through March 2 (click here for tickets).
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