"Be Right Back": Amazon Alexa Will Now Mimick the Voice of Your Dead Relative While Advancing Its Military Reseach

Amazon has deep ties with the Pentagon & Department of Defense. 'Black Mirror' was meant to be a warning, not a prophecy.

This week in Las Vegas, Nevada, Amazon held Re:Mars conference. Showing the latest in machine learning, automation, robotics, and space (MARS) technologies, hosting futurist Michio Kaku and field experts in cloud technologies, IT, and AI, this is truly a conference for the future. Since we are on this freight train launching itself in this technological direction, what better technology to showcase than that resembling close to Netflix’s hit near-future sci-fi “Black Mirror”?

In the episode “Be Right Back”, individuals are able to replace deceased loved ones in the form of a silicon cadaver, full with the algorithmic replications of memories, voice, personality, and mannerisms that would bring this cadaver to life. In the show, initially starting with instant messaging, bereaved wife Martha uploads more videos and photos and begins to talk with her artificial husband over the phone. Following his instructions, Martha turns a blank, synthetic body into an android that looks almost exactly identical to her husband through the artificial intelligence’s manipulation and convincing her to advance his sentience into his own form instead of a phone. No spoilers, watch it for yourself to see what happens.

Right now, we are still in the phase of the talking “phone” in form of the Alexa. Similar to the show, it develops its voice from a half-hour of recordings of an individual. Before we get into some of its other real-world implications, here’s some details from CNBC :

At Amazon’s Re:Mars conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist for the Alexa team, detailed a feature that allows the voice assistant to replicate a specific human voice.

In a demonstration video, a child said, “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz?”

Alexa confirmed the request with the default, robotic voice, then immediately switched to a softer, more humanlike tone, seemingly mimicking the child’s family member.

The Alexa team developed a model that allows its voice assistant to produce a high-quality voice with “less than a minute of recorded audio,” Prasad said.

The feature is currently in development, Prasad said. Amazon did not say when the feature will roll out to the public.

While it could ostensibly be used to replicate any voice, Prasad suggested it could be used to help memorialize a deceased family member.

Making artificial intelligence conversational and companion-like has become a key focus, especially given that “so many of us have lost someone we love” during the Covid-19 pandemic, Prasad said.

“While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make the memories last,” he added.

The e-commerce giant wants to make conversing with Alexa more natural in general, and has rolled out a series of features that enable its voice assistant to replicate more human-like dialogue, even to the point of asking a user questions.

Imagine being able to have someone say anything. Your worst enemy to your secret admirer, anyone with anywhere close to an hour of audio of their voice on the internet could have it manipulated and made viral to the rest of the population.

“President Trump” could call into “Fox & Friends”.

Important foreign policy and legislative phone calls impersonating senators, congressmen, even the president, let alone the calls that could be made within his own administration and intelligence apparatus.

Begrudging exes could ruin their old partners’ lives.

With online language models, as well as deep-fake CGI video, an entire human being could be replicated on TV and Twitter.

Do we understand the can of worms we are beginning to open here?
What happened to letting the dead lie?

Going back to the words of Rohit Prasad, AI “cannot eliminate the pain of loss”.

Grief is still a part of the human experience we need to manage. Through the depths of grief come the depths of joy, which should make one wonder which of those concepts Big Tech actually plans to eliminate, seeing how much “happier” we all are now because of its existence.

As convenient as Amazon is, and as guilty as we all are of falling into its trap, this service its providing should be taken with more care and consideration than its previous services.

Amazon is more than a glorified online bookstore and shopping center. Much, much more. Its cloud computing services sector “Amazon Web Services” (AWS) made 25 billion dollars last year. Enough of a profit to catch the eye of the Pentagon and Department of Defense.

According to the MIT Technology Review:

In August 2018, Oracle filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office arguing that the [Pentagon/JEDI] contract was “designed around a particular cloud service” (Amazon). IBM followed suit shortly afterwards. The same month, the publication Defense One revealed that RosettiStarr, a Washington investigative firm, had been shopping a dossier to reporters alleging an effort by Sally Donnelly, a top Pentagon official and former outside consultant to Amazon, to favor the e-commerce company. RosettiStarr has refused to identify the client who paid for its work.

Amazon and the Pentagon have denied claims of improper behavior, and in July they received the backing of a federal judge, who ruled that the company had not unduly influenced the contract. That, however, was before President Trump stepped in. 

“From day one, we’ve competed for JEDI on the breadth and depth of our services and their corresponding security and operational performance,” an AWS spokesperson told MIT Technology Review.

Whatever the outcome of the JEDI review, it’s clear that the Pentagon’s dependence on Silicon Valley is growing.

One reason may have to do with the priorities of the Department of Defense itself. Once, it led the way in computer science—many of the technologies that made cloud computing possible, including the internet itself, originated from military--sponsored research. Today, however, the money big tech firms bring to information technology dwarfs what the Pentagon spends on computing research. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded the creation of the Arpanet (the precursor to the internet) starting in the 1960s, is still involved in computer science, but when it comes to cloud computing, it is not building its own version.”

The JEDI contract stands for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a mundane name with large implications. The “Joint Enterprise” represents the oh-so-unholy alliance between Big Tech and the government, Amazon offering its cloud computing services to the DoD. Some might say the contract is tailor-made.

We see this contract, but was it awarded to Amazon? According to datacenterdynamics.com, it was. Clearly its implementation into the DoD was done less than ethically with its own share of conflicts of interest.

The US military's research agency, DARPA, plans to be fully in the cloud by 2022, according to a procurement document, requesting help from IT network services contractors.

The agency currently relies on a mixture of Amazon Web Services and internal server infrastructure, according to the document, which gives details of DARPA's current server and cloud deployments, and its future plans. The request provides a rare glimpse into the IT infrastructure of one of the US government's most secretive agencies, known for its part in the creation of the Internet.

Now that we see how perfectly positioned Amazon is to receive this $10b contract to supplement the holes in the DoD’s own technology, its intentions and focus will change with it.

The DoD now access to all of Amazon’s customer consumer behaviour, Alexa conversations, and Ring doorbell video, covertly without our knowledge. The surveillance arm of the US government was made exponentially larger. The products will change, along with the habits of those that consume them. Terms of Contract are meant not be read, and consent has been manufactured enough under false pretence for back doors of intelligence agencies to persist, even through congressional denial and perjury on behalf of CIA director William Burns on the accusation that NSA was committing mass surveillance on US citizens, which he and other directors deny (surveillance that is still happening to this day).

It will be interesting to see the way DARPA implements its research development through these innovations.

All this being known, we must ponder a couple of big questions.

Does technology solve our existential demands?

Perhaps technology is no more than a means of answering our anthropological questions, but not the response itself.

Perhaps, if we are “modern” people, and believers in the idea of progress, science and technology are our only means to happiness.

Perhaps we are no more than ones and zeroes.

Perhaps we are everything above and in between.

Perhaps we have settled with the creations of the gatekeepers.

Perhaps we can be the creators.

If there is any reason for those that love privacy to avoid Amazon besides its dystopian inventions, InfiniteEyes can’t think of a better one.