- AI User
It may be that the deprioritization of the human User-subject within The Stack as a whole is made that much less frightening by interfaces designed to invite anthropomorphic empathy and identification. As of this writing, Siri for iOS is one iconic version of this new form of interface. Its significance is not only that it is voice-activated instead of mouse-click controlled, or that it responds to User inputs in synthetic spoken language, but that it is designed as a nascent form of an artificial human personality. We are invited not only to interact with iOS, and through the operating system with the semantic web (or at least the parts of the web that Siri knows how to search and process), but also to interact with Siri herself. The development of the User is also driven by the ability of artificial intelligences, simple ones and complex ones, to enter the User position and engage The Stack directly. They do this on the direct behalf of a human User, and they do this with or without human supervision, such that the human is in a way Siri ’ s co-User as much as the other way around. <sup>43</sup> So then, who is Siri and who (or what) would the wider population of similarly personified interfaces/bot agents become? As the base model of the ideal assistant, her personality is specifically defined in relation to what the range of options might be, but her supposed neutrality as a universal assistant is highly contestable. She is one individuated person, not a plurality or multitude or composite. She is by default setting female in gender. She possesses a kind of patient and understated omniscience. Though a bit hard of hearing, she is extraordinarily reliable, and by the same turn, she is reliably subordinate. When asked strange things, she may demonstrate a dry sense of humor. She is also invisible, possessing no face, like Charlie on Charlie ’ s Angels. She is always there, but also apparently spending her time elsewhere when not actually here. All of these specific qualities need not define the personified agent as they do.
In 2012 (before Spike Jonze ’ s film Her), a group of my undergraduate students who wished to explore other alternatives began developing Siri-like assistant apps based on alternative, often fractured personalities. Departing from the supposed neutrality of Siri, these artificial borderline cases would engage in less generic sorts of User-Stack relationships, not all of them healthy or immediately recognizable. Some of their assistants were moody and unreliable. They may give answers based on their jealous analysis of your recent wall posts and try to trick you into paranoid suspicions about your friends. In time, similar alternative personality assistant Apps may demand absolute fidelity and suffer virtual death when it is revoked, like a passive-aggressive Tomagotchi. At this same time, it may merge with other Apps to perform spontaneous amazing feats on your behalf. Their interest went beyond persuasive interaction design gone sideways and was based more on what kinds of complex cognition and interaction are sanitized out of synthetic User agency and how weaving those wooly leftovers back in could point in more interesting directions. The results differed from Siri in two key ways.
User Layer
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