Could it be that voice-activated robotic systems are just another ploy to keep women from attaining true equality?
Probably. Last week my dad and I took a long road trip so that we could be there for one of the final Tragically Hip concerts. I thought it was a neat idea given that the first concert I ever attended was a Hip show that my father drove me to more than 20 years ago. Also, I was curious to find out whether taking a road trip with an adult instead of my two very loud children would reduce the number of times per trip that I contemplated driving the car off a cliff.
Haha, just kidding. I would never allow an hour of non-stop screaming to convince me to drive my family off a cliff. Besides, our latest trek was through the Prairies so I couldn’t find any cliffs.
For this trip with my dad I had one job – program the audio system on his car, a nice little 2011 Toyota that he picked up last month. The plan was to spend a lot of the trip doing what we always do when we have long conversations: solve all the world’s problems, including but not limited to gender equality, Donald Trump, the unjust treatment of First Nations people, racism, Donald Trump, patriarchy, Donald Trump, the bullpen for the Toronto Blue Jays and Donald Trump.
But first I needed to set up the stereo’s Bluetooth system so that we could play podcasts and music from time to time to break up the trip. It seemed simple enough. Given the law of electronics programing, I as a man in my 30s was the most qualified person for the job in the car. My father, wise and witty as he is, falls into the age category in which it is recommended he not attempt to program any electronic device more complex than an old tennis ball. Of course if a 12-year-old had been on the trip he could have programmed it all in 10 seconds while also converting the air conditioning system into a catapult for Angry Birds.
We hit the road and I started pushing buttons to set up the Bluetooth system. That’s when the trouble started. It soon became apparent that this model of automobile wasn’t going to let anyone – including me, the idle passenger – manipulate the controls of the audio system while the car was in motion. This was due to “safety concerns,” the helpful robot woman assured me. Instead we were required to have the driver press the “talk” button on the steering wheel and then we could have a nice conversation with the robot woman about setting up the audio system.
Summing up: Passenger fiddling with buttons while driver focuses on the road = not safe.
My recently retired father taking his eyes off the road to find the talk button while we both yell “play Andy’s iPhone!” at the dashboard = safe. Gotcha.
Complicating matters was that we were driving on the secondary highways of Saskatchewan, which as far as I can tell are maintained about as well as the secondary highways of hell.
The audio programming did not go well. The big problem was that the robot lady knew the exact words she wanted to hear from us but she certainly wasn’t going to tell us what they were.
“Pardon?” she’d say coldly when we uttered anything that didn’t meet her needs. And when we somehow managed to get something right she a had a peculiar way of making us repeat and confirm all of our clearly stated choices until we weren’t even sure what we were talking about in the first place. I was about to point out to my dad that this would have been a very familiar situation to any man who had been married for any length of time, but I didn’t because of feminism and hegemony and male privilege and other such important things.
Things got hotter when we admitted defeat in the Bluetooth setup and simply tried to get back to the main system so that we could listen to the dang radio. The robot lady would not go back. She would not go forward. All she would do is ask us to “talk” to her. Clearly, she had won the argument.
All that was left for my dad and I was to talk to each other, which was actually the best part of the whole trip. And we reckoned that when we turned the car off, the system would reset and we could at least pop in a few Hip CDs.
This is when things got nasty. We stopped for lunch, came back out and the robot lady still wouldn’t budge off the impenetrable setup screen without hearing the secret password. That’s when I lost it. “Just let us listen to a CD, you robot b****!” I shouted.
I felt bad, like I’d wronged all women. And robots. I made a mental note to send an apology note to Hillary Clinton. And C3PO.
It was then that I started wondering why the annoying, rage-inducing voice had to be a woman.
Was this a ploy to make women take all the blame when dummies like me couldn’t figure things out? Would I have reacted in the same way if the robot had been voiced by James Earl Jones?
Before we hit the highway again I finally figured out the secret word we needed to say to make all our troubles go away. It was “go back,” which was kind of funny because I was wishing I could “go back” to 1997 when cars didn’t talk, no one listened to Donald Trump, and there was nothing tragic about The Tragically Hip.
If only I could get my time machine working. Well, maybe I could give it one more try. Let’s see here – “to manipulate the time space continuum, press the ‘talk’ button. …”
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. [email protected]
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