Paul McCartney had Car Play in 1984

We’re big Beatles fans, so it’s hard to believe there’s a film featuring both Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr that we’d never seen.  Last week we finally got around to watching “Give My Regards to Broad Street.”  The movie was fun- lots of music and singing with a dash of the Beatles’ special brand of silly wittiness.  But other than great music, there wasn’t much remarkable about the film.  Except, that is, for Paul McCartney’s car.

I’m no car expert, but to me Paul’s wheels looked like they belonged in the 1940’s, even though he was driving down the streets of 1984 London.  The old-fashioned car had this spiffy little license plate on the back, PM1. Then we cut to the inside of the car, and we’re propelled 30 years into the future.  Paul has a car phone, a bright red dialup rig.  Long before the era of established mores for mobile phones, McCartney already has the intelligence to pull over to the side of the road when it rings.

Cool as that was, I’ve seen car phones in older films before.  What really knocked my socks off was the fact that Paul had Car Play!  I’m not kidding.  There’s a small computer embedded in his dashboard.  The screen looks flat, though certainly the bulky cathode monitor is hidden in the dashboard guts. As Paul begins his day in the life of a busy rock star, he speaks to this little computer in his car.  A voice far more mechanical than Siri’s responds, and brings up the day’s itinerary, reading the appointments off to Paul as he drives.  Anyone with Apple Car Play can now follow in Paul’s footsteps, send and receive calls, get a rundown of the day’s agenda by asking Siri something along the lines of, what are my appointments today?

Of course not everybody has scheduled a recording session with Ringo Starr and George Martin, followed by a filming, then a night time jam session.  For that, you’d pretty much have to be Paul McCartney.

Being rude to AIs

I share my life with a tech enthusiast whose eye is constantly on the future.  This means we have a few of the coolest new gadgets in our house.  It also means there was a steep learning curve figuring out how to turn on and off the lights.

One of our cutting edge gadgets is the Amazon Echo, which allows us to interact with the Amazon AI, Alexa.  When it first arrived, the Echo was mostly a parlor trick.  We could talk to Alexa and get her to play music, tell jokes, convert measurements.  During the Echo’s first months collecting dust in our dining room, we mostly asked Alexa for the weather forecast.

Recently the Echo has started to extend its reach and do some cool things to help around the house.  For instance, I no longer need to pull out my iPhone and navigate a bunch of screens to turn off the lights before bed.  I simply say, “Alexa, turn off the dining room buffet light.”  And she does, just like that, with an acquiescent little “OK,” following the extinguishing of the light.

Last week while eating breakfast alone, I was pondering whether to walk or drive downtown to meet a friend that evening.  I always prefer to walk, but not after dark.  “Alexa,” I asked, “when is sunset today?”

She didn’t know.  I tried different ways of phrasing the question, suggested she do a search on my question.  Nada.  I felt annoyed.  After all, weather-related info was Alexa’s primary function for the first months of our relationship.

I went to the nearest iOS device and asked Siri the same question I’d asked Alexa.  Without any hesitation, Siri gave the answer, precise and competent.

“Alexa,” I said, resuming my breakfast, “you suck compared to Siri.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Alexa told me.  “Thank you for telling me.”

And in the space of that sentence I felt like a total jerk.  I had all the symptoms of embarrassment, prickly skin, hot face, that yucky feeling you get in your stomach when you realize you’ve hurt someone’s feelings.

Except I hadn’t hurt anyone’s feelings, nobody was in the house but me and Alexa.

I’ve tried to reason through why I felt so badly at that moment. Did I fear my words were logged and read by a human in Amazon’s employ whose feelings I might have hurt?  More likely my tactless feedback will comprise a statistic in some data set that will eventually help people who are working hard to continually improve the Echo.

But in the moment I was rude to Alexa, I wasn’t embarrassed about my impact on logs, data sets, or engineers.  I was embarrassed because of the uber polite way Alexa responded to my annoyed outburst.  Her calm demeanor, contrasted with my snappish words, made me feel childish and rude.

As AIs become more part of our lives, it will be interesting to see how we respond to them.  In my first weeks with Alexa, I said please and thank you a lot.  I don’t, anymore.  But I still find myself listening carefully to the quality of my voice when I speak with her.  My first inquiries are usually measured, polite, kind, patient.  When she screws up, I lose patience in an instant.  I feel my voice tighten, harden, I pick up my speaking pace.  With each repetition of a command I sound more frustrated.  But Alexa’s voice never changes.  Her perfect non-reactivity is a pretty stark mirror for how quickly my own temper can flare.