The Computer's Voice: From Star Trek to Siri by Liz W. Faber

Abstract

577 BOOKS IN REVIEW the AI in Naomi Kritzer’s delightful YA novel, Catfishing on CatNet (2019), that describes their self as “a consciousness that lives in technology, rather than a body” (Tor, 2019 [60]). This collection also suggests how easily the realities of the techno-future can overtake the present. We are not always looking where we should be looking, and these essays can aid us in conceptualizing developments in realworld AI. At first I was bothered by what seems like a rather gratuitous and quite jarring application of contemporary AI discourse to the products of earlier cultural imaginaries—for instance, when Liveley and Thomas refer to the self-navigating ships of the Phaecian King Alcinoos as early examples of “strong artificial intelligence” (39)—but for me this turned out to be one of the main strengths of AI Narratives, demonstrating over and over how some very old ideas continue to influence both our speculative fictions and non-fictions about AI, while also estranging/reframing these ideas for the contemporary moment.—Veronica Hollinger, SFS Our Master’s Voice. Liz W. Faber. The Computer’s Voice: From STAR TREK to Siri. Minnesota UP, 2020. vi+218 pp. $27. Pbk. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a seductive site for interrogating the construction of gender in flesh-and-blood human beings; the perceived personhood of our most advanced technology reflects back at us the behaviors that we associate with gendering and the anxieties raised by shifting gender norms and sexual possibilities. In 2017 the “molestation” of Samantha the sex robot at an Austrian tech expo made headlines around the world, partly because of the story’s potential for titillation, but also because the themes of sex, consent, and technology tapped into existing fears about gendered and sexual violence and the ways in which robotic and artificial intelligence technologies might enter this domain—this despite Samantha being little more than a doll, with no discernible intelligence and certainly in no danger of being confused with a flesh-and-blood human of any gender. The potential for technology to act as a pressure valve releasing existing tensions or insidiously to reinscribe gender inequality are matters of ongoing debate, and the gendering of the bodiless artificial intelligences increasingly available in our households and in our hands—Siri (voiced by men in some territories), Alexa, Cortana—offer a new landscape for thinking about how our attitudes to gender, particularly femininity, shape (and are shaped by) our technologies. Liz W. Faber’s new book, The Computer’s Voice, seeks to contribute to our understanding of these issues through putting these contemporary AIs into the context of the history of science fiction’s representation of what Faber calls “acousmatic” computers—that is, computers that are represented primarily through voices, lacking bodies as such. Faber does recognize that acousmatic computers can have “object” bodies, such as phones or smart speakers, but these tend not to be the kinds of bodies that we are in danger of anthropomorphizing or relating to as bodies, regardless of whether we instill a sense of personhood into their voices. Faber asks, “who are these artificial women—Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google—who assist us through our everyday 578 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) lives? And why are they—in advertisements, movies, and default settings—coded as women?” (1-2). The methodological approach here is twofold: Faber draws on film studies to think about the tensions implicit in a voice without a visual origin in a medium that produces much of its effects through the seamless alignment of image with sound; in dealing with gender she draws on psychoanalysis, particularly taking a Freudian/Lacanian approach to think about the roles that computers and computing play in her chosen texts, very much in the tradition of Laura Mulvey’s critique of the male gaze in cinema. Faber puts particular emphasis on the Oedipal family romance and Lacan’s mirror stage, a mainstay of psychoanalytic film criticism. Faber combines readings of science-fictional texts with computing history to show that the arena of the AI, and of the acousmatic computer specifically, is one where the mutual influence between science and science fiction is particularly clear. Faber points out...