Google Duplex : Moral or Not

What is Google Duplex?

Google Duplex allows Google Assistant to communicate in a human-like way with a person over the phone to complete basic real-world tasks. It will make phone calls — hair appointments or dinner reservations — in the background, so you don’t have to.

In the recent years, there has been revolution in the ability of computers to understand and generate natural speech. Still, it’s not easy to communicate with computerized devices since they don’t completely understand natural language. But with Google Duplex, you will not be able to differentiate it as a robot due to its use of real world conversation skills with words like “Um,” “Mhm,” “Oh,” and “I gotcha”.

However, with the introduction of Google Duplex in the real world, there has been some concern shown towards it comprising ethics, morality and social impact.

Is Google Duplex ethical?

As prominent sociologist Zeynep Tufekci put it: “Google Assistant making calls pretending to be human not only without disclosing that it’s a bot, but adding ‘ummm’ and ‘aaah’ to deceive the human on the other end with the room cheering it… horrifying. Silicon Valley is ethically lost, rudderless and has not learned a thing.”

To which, a Google spokeswoman responded as:

“We understand and value the discussion around Google Duplex – as we’ve said from the beginning, transparency in the technology is important. We are designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we’ll make sure the system is appropriately identified. What we showed at I/O was an early technology demo, and we look forward to incorporating feedback as we develop this into a product”.

Is Google Duplex Moral?

It depends on the morality of the user. Morals refer to an individual’s own principles regarding right and wrong. In addition, we all have different views of moral. So it is moral for Google to have this technology? Consequently, it all depends on the user!

Social Impact and Response

The main concern is, what good will it bring to the society by imposing a robot as a human?

People are already having a hard time knowing what’s fake news and what’s not due to evolving technology. Furthermore, its seems like they’ll not even be able to differentiate a robot over a human.

As a matter of fact, a transparent company would never do something like tricking their customers into believing that the robot talking to them is a human. This defies all the reasons for the need of Google duplex.

Had Google entirely miscalculated how its new technology would be perceived? Google Duplex would possibly answer with a mm-hmm.