Do Androids Dream of Electric Speech? Listening Practices in Automated Psychiatric Assessment

Speaker: Beth Semel, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Location: Eric S. Dobkin Boardroom, School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM

What does it mean for machines to listen? What kind of listeners do the people who build artificial intelligence–enabled machines train them to be? After all, Amazon’s Alexa is only “listening” in the same way that she is a “she.” Drawing from extended ethnographic fieldwork with psychiatric and engineering professionals in the United States, Beth Semel argues that the concept of machine listening is both a powerful and strategically vague analogy that articulates taken-for-granted assumptions about human listening and the speaking subject. While listening technologies are central to contemporary debates about ethics and automation, Semel’s examination of the behind-the-screen labor through which a set of such technologies is assembled reveals their entanglement with deeper histories and political economies of engineering, speech science, and care work in the United States.

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About the School for Advanced Research (SAR): Founded in 1907, the School for Advanced Research (SAR) is one of North America’s preeminent independent institutes for the study of anthropology, related social sciences and humanities. SAR is home to the Indian Arts Research Center, one of the nation’s most important Southwest Native American art research collections. Through prestigious scholar residency and artist fellowship programs, public programs and SAR Press, SAR advances intellectual inquiry in order to better understand humankind in an increasingly global and interconnected world. Additional information on the work of our resident scholars and Native American artists is available on the SAR website: on Facebook: and on Twitter: @schadvresearch.

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