Promises to stop them ‘going forward’.
I have conducted a full-scale interrogation of Google over its overt use of deception in the testing of its artificial intelligence/artificial voice technology. I had previously written about the incredible dangers of allowing machines to imitate human voices. This is an appropriation, an outright theft by engineers, of the very deepest expression of our humanity.
As a working journalist, I approached the Google Press Team, who repeatedly declined to acknowledge my queries. I finally asked them one more time recently, querying whether their policy of ignoring African journalists might be racist. This actually solicited a reply. The reply is so interesting that I’m simply going to paste the whole thing in verbatim, this is quite a rare document. It contains one clear grammatical error that indicates it really was written by a human being, and not a robot; and moreover, perhaps a slightly stressed human being. You can spot this error for yourself. It introduces a slight ambiguity exactly where I was asking for clarity. I received this on February 5 2019, my 62nd birthday:
Dear Karl,
Thank you so much for your mail, we appreciate it. At I/O last year, we showed a preview of Duplex — a new technology that uses advancements in AI to carry out tasks over the phone. We’re starting this experiment with trusted testers in select states in the U.S., and as we get feedback from people and businesses, we’ll continue to expand to more people over time.
Duplex has been through multiple phases over the course of development. Over time, as we’ve developed the technology, we’ve had human operators make training calls for our use cases. And we’ve had earlier versions of the system make training calls for our use cases as well. The disclosure has varied over time as we worked through experimentation. As you saw at I/O, some of those call didn’t have a disclosure. So in some cases we disclosed, in some cases we did not, and in some cases we disclosed when we were asked. Going forward, we’ll always disclose that you’re speaking with an automated system when we make a call. In all the experimentation we’ve done, we’ve always followed local laws regarding calling.
You can also find more information in these blog posts with regards to Duplex, hopefully these can answer your questions.
Thanks again for reaching out,
Press@Google
Google Press Team
Those blog posts are well worth checking out, they literally made my skin crawl. Did you spot the error, “some of those call didn’t have a disclosure”. Some of those calls? Some of those called? What was this person thinking when they made this little slip? Never mind. You can see it happens right on the critical disclosure: where they “didn’t have a disclosure”.
Google is here openly admitting what it had so proudly demonstrated to the world: their experimentation on human beings includes completely blatant exercises in deception, without the faintest hint of informed consent. This is not just a clear violation of all research ethics. This is a textbook crime against humanity. There’s a golden bullet in this game, the “greatest document in the history of medical ethics”, the Nuremberg Code. It was signed by all the Allied nations after World War 2, after the atrocities of Nazi experiments on humans had been revealed, to make sure that these crimes against humanity never occurred again. The Code begins:
1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
Google is now openly admitting that it has acted in total violation of this code. Google says something interesting: “In some cases, we disclosed when we were asked”. Clearly, there were cases where they were not asked, and did not disclose. However, their wording is very ambiguous here as well. Were there other cases where they were asked, and did not disclose? Are there cases where they were experimenting on someone, who said: “Who is this? Is this a machine?” — and Google just hung up the call? How can we audit this, literally, listen to all these experiments Google undertook and see exactly what they disclosed and when? They feel they can invade our privacy; what right do they have to keep private all the details of the experiments they’ve been carrying out on us?
These mass surveillance firms like Google and Facebook are just harvesting all the human data they can squeeze out of us, to track and train and model and slice and dice and serve us to advertisers and dumb us down and take over our jobs. Now, with these experiments, they are literally recording and modelling and gaming our very breathing patterns. As humans, we have rights against these machine intrusions. Google clearly does not understand this. Google therefore has no right whatsoever to undertake any kind of human experimentation, going forward or in any other direction. Google has proved and now openly admitted that it is not cognisant of the most basic principles of human research ethics. Google must be investigated for crimes against humanity, period.
This sentence reveals the truth: “The disclosure has varied over time as we worked through experimentation.”
One of the “findings” of this experiment was that Google got called out, and was forced to wake up and realise that what it was doing was simply wrong. One of the “results” of this experiment is thus: “We learned that we are supposed to disclose what we’re doing, when we are experimenting on humans. We learned that we are supposed to have research ethics.”
What is going on at American universities? Are you all asleep? Can you not see clear violations of all human research ethics occurring right under your noses? What is going on with the tech reporters? Let’s not go there, shall we. There aren’t any in the mainstream media, is the simple answer. Not one tech journalist remotely worth the name, in the whole wide world.
I am going back to Google soon with some further repeated questions about their human experimentation that they still haven’t acknowledged. This time, I will try to force some answers out of them on their experiments in the mass microwave irradiation of populations, using balloons that crash with alarming frequency, the Google Loons, an unfortunate name if ever I heard one. They have been experimenting on radiating African populations for a while now, I know their Loons have crashed in South Africa and Kenya, for example. This was the only “disclosure” many people will have had, that they are being experimented on with radiation from above.
I want to know if any Google Loons or any other experimental Google microwave irradiation platforms have ever flown over the Kingdom of Eswatini, where I live. I also want to know the dates and exact populations involved in South Africa, so that I can investigate the results of Google’s radiation experiments on the ground. To my knowledge, I am the only person who has ever recorded a public health incident from satellite microwave radiation. This is now experimentation being carried out on thousands of people, maybe millions, who knows. This may be a unique opportunity to research the irradiation of previously unexposed rural populations with broadband microwaves.
Will Google tell us what they are doing, have done, plan to do “going forward” with their irradiation of human populations? What health “results” have they been collecting on the ground, if any? If they didn’t look, why not? If they found problems, did they keep them secret? What did they disclose to the populations they were irradiating? What is your guess? What will Google disclose, when the whole subject is Google’s visible incapacity to understand the need for disclosure?