*It's anything but a polite and civilized Everyware.
Adam Greenfield, who at this point may be wondering why he is even in Britain
(...)
At first, such devices seem harmless enough. They sit patiently and quietly at the periphery of our awareness, and we only speak to them when we need them. But when we consider them more carefully, a more problematic picture emerges.
This is how Google’s assistant works: you mention to it that you’re in the mood for Italian food, and then, in the words of one New York Times article, it “will then respond with some suggestions for tables to reserve at Italian restaurants using, for example, the OpenTable app”.
This example shows that though the choices these assistants offer us are presented as neutral, they are based on numerous inbuilt assumptions that many of us would question if we were to truly scrutinise them.
Ask restaurateurs and front-of-house workers what they think of OpenTable, for example, and you will swiftly learn that one person’s convenience is another’s accelerated pace of work, or worse. You’ll learn that restaurants offering reservations via the service are, according to the website Serious Eats, “required to use the company’s proprietary floor-management system, which means leasing hardware and using OpenTable-specific software”, and that OpenTable retains ownership of all the data generated in this way. You’ll also learn that OpenTable takes a cut on reservations per seated diner, which obviously adds up to a significant amount on a busy night.
Conscientious diners have therefore been known to bypass the ostensible convenience of OpenTable, and make whatever reservations they have to by phone. By contrast, Google Home’s frictionless default to making reservations via OpenTable normalises the choice to use that service.
This is not accidental. It reflects the largely preconscious valuations, priorities and internalised beliefs of the people who devised Google Home. As throughout the industry, that is a remarkably homogeneous cohort of young designers and engineers. But more important than the degree of similarity they bear to one another is how different they are from everyone else....
