Data Journalist Meredith Broussard, Tech Editor Sophie Bushwick, and Technologist Ben Moskowitz join Playwrights Mary Elizabeth Hamilton and Naomi Lorrain to Discuss AI Devices, Privacy, and SMART

From left: Meredith Broussard, Sophie Bushwick, Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, Ben Moskowitz, and Naomi Lorrain.

On Saturday, April 22, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of SMART, the moving new family drama by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback discussion about the issues the play addresses. SMART dramatizes questions about how and why we let technology into our homes, and the unexpected changes tech can bring. The talkback will explore the risks and rewards of using smart devices in the home, the privacy issues we should be concerned about, how AI is changing how we live, the gap between how we think technology works and how it actually works, and the future of voice-activated AI. The audience will  have the opportunity to ask questions and join the discussion.

Playwright/actor Naomi Lorrain will moderate the discussion with professor of data journalism Meredith Broussard, tech editor Sophie Bushwick, pubic interest technologist Ben Moskowitz, and playwright Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, author of SMART.

SMART is the 2023 mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the world of science and technology.”

About the Panelists

Meredith Broussard (Photo: Matthias Lundblad)

Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University and the research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press, 2023), as well as the award-winning 2018 book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting, with particular interests in AI ethics and using data analysis for social good. She appears in the Emmy-nominated documentary “Coded Bias,” now streaming on Netflix. A former features editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has also worked as a software developer at AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab. Her features and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Vox, and other outlets.

Sophie Bushwick

Sophie Bushwick is the technology editor at Scientific American, where she runs daily tech news coverage on topics from generative AI to jumping robots. She has more than a decade of experience as a science journalist and editor based in New York City, where she works online and in print, produces podcasts and videos, and makes radio and TV appearances on shows such as Science Friday. Previously, she was a senior editor at Popular Science, and her freelance work has also appeared in other outlets including Discover Magazine and Gizmodo.  

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton (Photo: JMA Photography)

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton is a Brooklyn-based playwright, TV writer and mom. She holds her MFA from The University of Iowa and an Artistic Diploma from Juilliard. Mary was a Jerome Fellow at The Lark and has participated in Youngblood, The O’Neill, Ars Nova, I-73, New Georges' Jam, and Play Penn. Her play 16 Winters won ASC's New Contemporaries Award. She is developing her play SMART with EST, and writing a pilot based on this play for AMC. She was a Story Editor on “Why Women Kill”, wrote the podcast "Power Trip" starring Tatiana Maslany, and is a resident playwright with New Dramatists.

Ben Moskowitz

Ben Moskowitz is a public interest technologist focused on strengthening user agency, privacy, and security. He leads R&D at Consumer Reports, helping consumers better navigate the digital marketplace. CR’s Innovation Lab collaborates with hackers, builders and entrepreneurs on disruptive technologies that advance the public interest. Consumer Reports has developed a number of free products to help consumers improve their privacy and security, including Security Planner and Permission Slip. Ben previously served in senior roles at the International Rescue Committee and the Mozilla Foundation, and is an adjunct professor at the New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

About the Moderator

Naomi Lorrain (Photo: Stan Demidoff)

Naomi Lorrain is a Harlem-based playwright/actor. She is a 2022-2023 member of the Page 73 writers group, Interstate 73. She was a writer for the 2022 Disney Television Discovers: Talent Showcase. Her one-act comedy, THERESA, was selected for the 2022 Black Motherhood & Parenting Festival. She is an AUDELCO Awards nominee and a NY Innovative Theatre Awards nominee for Best Lead Actress for Behind the Sheet and Entangled, respectively. Theater: La Race (Page 73/WP), Mark it Down, Song for a Future Generation (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Behind the Sheet (Ensemble Studio Theatre), What To Send Up When It Goes Down (The Movement Theatre Company). TV: "Orange is the New Black" (Netflix), "Elementary" (CBS), "The Good Fight" (CBS All Access), "Madam Secretary'' (CBS).

SMART began previews on March 30 and runs through April 30 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

A Note on the Science and Technology Behind SMART

The EST/Sloan Project is committed to “challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact on our lives.” In that spirit, we offer this essay on the science and technology behind SMART by Mary Elizabeth Hamilton, the 2023 EST/Sloan mainstage production. SMART began previews on March 30 and runs through April 23. You can purchase tickets here.

Voice-Activated AI: Mixing Convenience with Risk

By Rich Kelley, Science Press Liaison

“A lot of cutting-edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI, because once something becomes useful enough and common enough, it’s not labeled AI anymore.”—Nick Bostrom

“If something is free, you’re the product.” —Richard Serra, 1973

Mechanical devices that talk to us have a long and storied history. In 1589, Robert Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay depicted the “Brazen Head” reportedly invented by the 13th-century Franciscan friar and philosopher Roger Bacon.

A woodblock engraving of Miles (the assistant to the friars) playing the tambour while friars Bacon and Bungay sleep and the Brazen Head finally speaks. From the 1630 edition of Robert Greene's The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, and Frier Bongay.

In the play, Bacon and his fellow friar build a large brass head that they hope will speak and reveal to them the secrets of the universe. It takes them seven years. Then, having watched the head night and day for two months waiting for it to speak, Bacon falls asleep and never hears the head’s mysterious oration: “Time is. Time was. Time is past.” After which the head explodes.

So even in our earliest imaginings smart devices failed to live up to expectations.

Today we are most familiar with chatbots in their incarnation in the voice-driven digital assistants we find in Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Samsung’s Bixby. While they are all voice-activated, their features vary. As primarily virtual assistants for phones, Siri and Bixby are more integrated into their phone’s ecosystem: sending messages, making phone calls, setting reminders. Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant are more focused on smart home control and home devices like lights, locks, and thermostats.

These devices have enabled the corporations behind them to use the data they have been collecting on customers’ transactions, web searches, and browser data to make conversational chitchat about the weather, sports scores, and what the listener should buy next. According to Business Insider as of 11/22, Alexa is third in the voice-assistant wars with Google Assistant at 81.5 million users, Apple’s Siri at 77.6 million, and Alexa at 71.6 million.

Is Anyone Listening?

In 2019, Bloomberg reported that Amazon uses thousands of contractors and full-time Amazon employees in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica, India, and Romania to listen to voice recordings captured in Alexa owners’ homes and offices. The teams then transcribe, annotate and feed back those recordings into the software to help improve Alexa’s understanding of human speech and to help it respond to user requests.  These listeners work nine hours a day and can parse as many as 1,000 audio clips a day.

Amazon Echo unpacked (2105) (Photo: Brewbooks/ CC 2..0)

Alexa software is designed to record snatches of audio continuously, listening for a “wake” word, “Alexa” by default for Alexa. “Hey, Google” for Google Home. “Siri” for Apple’s Siri. When Alexa detects the wake word, the light ring at the top of the Echo turns blue indicating that the device has started recording and is sending a command to Amazon’s servers.

But sometimes Alexa begins recording without any prompt at all. One interviewee said the auditors can transcribe as many as 100 recordings a day when Alexa receives no wake command or an accident triggers the recording:

“Occasionally, the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, or a child screaming for help.”

Two workers interviewed in Romania said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. After requesting guidance, they were told it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere.

Recordings sent to the Alexa auditors don’t include a user’s full name and address but do include an account number, the user’s first name, and the device’s serial number. Apple’s Siri also uses human auditors. According to an Apple white paper, the recordings lack personally identifiable information and are stored for six months tied to a random identifier. Google also employs reviewers of audio snippets from its Google Assistant, but the company says, they are not associated with any personal identifiable information and the audio is distorted.

Enter ChatGPT

ChatGPT, released by the AI research company OpenAi in November 2022, uses the large language model — millions of human-created texts available online — to produce answers based on which word it considers most likely to come next in a human response. As prominent computer scientist Stephen Wolfram explains in “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?”

“ . . . at each step it gets a list of words with probabilities. But which one should it actually pick to add to the essay (or whatever) that it’s writing? One might think it should be the ‘highest-ranked’ word (i.e. the one to which the highest ‘probability’ was assigned). But this is where a bit of voodoo begins to creep in. Because for some reason if we always pick the highest-ranked word, we’ll typically get a very ‘flat’ essay, that never seems to ‘show any creativity.’ But if sometimes (at random) we pick lower-ranked words, we get a ‘more interesting’ essay. The fact that there’s randomness here means that if we use the same prompt multiple times, we’re likely to get different essays each time.” 

In early March, OpenAI released ChatGPT-4, representing a quantum improvement over ChatGPT-3.5. Where ChatGPT-3.5 scored in the tenth percentile on the Uniform Bar Exam law students must pass to practice legally, ChatGPT-4 scored 298 out of 400, the 90th percentile.

The Risks of Home Devices

Connectivity has its costs. Not only is there the risk, recounted above, of smart devices recording conversations without having heard the “wake” word, there is also risk because the cloud is hackable. Cloud-based gadgets can be vulnerable to hacking since not all data transmitted over the web is encrypted. Most people secure their networks with weak passwords, making them vulnerable to hacking.

Since your home network is likely to have all your personal and banking information, that information is also vulnerable. Smart home devices are connected to a Global Positioning System (GPS) that automatically identifies the location of your home. If someone steals this information, your identity is at risk.

As AI and natural language processing technology continue to advance, smart devices will become even more sophisticated and capable of handling complex tasks. Smart consumers need to decide what tradeoffs of personal risk they want to make for the additional convenience.

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton on trusting tech, making connections, and SMART

Mary Elizabeth Hamilton (Photo: JMA Photography)

How are smart devices changing how we live . . . and love? Are we aware of all that can happen when AI becomes an intimate part of our home life? Playwright Mary Elizabeth Hamilton has dramatized these questions in SMART, the witty and topical new family drama about why we let technology into our homes, and the unexpected changes tech can bring. SMART is the 2023 EST/Sloan Project Mainstage Production. Learn more about what other questions concern Mary below.

Previews of SMART start March 30 at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the show will run through April 30. Reserve your ticket here.

(Interview by Rich Kelley)

How did SMART come to be? 

EST/Sloan gave me a commission to develop SMART five years ago. At the time, we had just gotten an Alexa for my partner’s mom, who was dealing with memory loss after a stroke. I became interested in the ways in which the device — and tech in general — can be used for communication with people dealing with memory or language loss. 

As I understand it, the play began as a one-page proposal when you first submitted it to EST/Sloan. How has the play changed over the past five years? 

We had a workshop in which the play changed quite a bit, in all the ways a play changes in an early workshop. We had a second workshop. And then the world shut down. Suddenly, the idea of a character working remotely (which we worked so hard to explain in that first draft) was painfully familiar, and the characters’ experiences of loneliness, feeling cut off, trying to communicate with family from afar, made sense in a new light.

I also developed the play as a TV pilot, and parts of the story changed pretty drastically, but the relationships of the three women in the play, and the questions about privacy, communication, boundaries and technology, have remained central in every iteration. Returning to the play, I wanted to update some of the tech to be more in conversation with what’s happening in the world now. Everything has changed so much. And I’m sure will be wholly different in a week.  

Why this play? Why now? 

When I started, I would have answered that questions about technology and privacy, and the ways tech impacts our personal lives and relationships, feel pretty central to our world. That’s still true, but as the play evolved, and as AI was more in the news, I became interested in the ways tech relates to memory and language, and how it impacts how we try to create a shared experience of reality. 

Do you own any smart devices? What do you use them for? How would you characterize your relationship with your device’s persona?

My daughter was given a Siri at the start of the pandemic. I was deep into research for the show at the time, watching and reading everything about how tech companies are using these devices to monitor and collect our data without our consent. So I was super creeped out by it and unplugged it every chance I got. But I eventually came around to the idea that it’s probably not much worse than my phone, and it does make listening to music easier . . . I go back and forth between intense paranoia and resignation. I do try to be polite to the robot’s persona, just in case. 

Both of your main characters, Elaine and Gabby, have close relationships with a parent. SMART is quite powerful in capturing the stress and conflicting emotions of caring for an elderly parent in decline. Does your sensitivity on this front come from your own personal experience?

My grandfather had aphasia, and was a big part of my life growing up. My mom cared for him during that time, and seeing him transform from a person with incredible speaking ability to someone who struggled with the most basic utterances made a huge impression on me. And as I mentioned, my ex’s mom had dementia from a stroke when I started working on the play, so she was very present in my mind as well. 

You wrote all eight episodes of the wonderful podcast Power Trip with Tatiana Maslany. How does writing a podcast differ from writing a play?

The biggest learning curve was realizing just how much we rely on visuals in theater. Telling a story that is only auditory became a lot more reliant on dialogue. Another note I ran into is that audiences listening to podcasts space out, so you need to find organic ways to keep circling back and reminding them what’s going on. 

You have been a member of EST’s Youngblood program. How has that affected your playwriting? 

I had no idea as a clueless 28 year old what a lasting part of my life that program would become. At the time, I was nannying, raising a toddler, and not writing very much. The handful of Brunch sketches I managed to crank out made me feel like I was still a playwright, and that community was really central to keeping me sane during a pretty intense period of my life. Many of my closest friendships and collaborators remain people I met in Youngblood.  

How does the development process at EST differ from the process at other theaters?

So, yesterday I walked into Graeme's office [Graeme Gillis is Co-Artistic Director of EST], during a particularly intense moment in an overall intense rehearsal process. I unloaded all of the many things I was concerned about, some more ridiculous than others, and Graeme took the time to talk through each one, then asked calmly if I had slept (not in a while) and if I had been eating (some stale chips I found backstage?). An hour later, he showed up in rehearsal with a banana and a granola bar, and later that day came to a run with a bag full of fruits and vegetables for the cast and crew. I don't know of another theater where the newly appointed artistic director takes time out of his doubtless busy day to not only listen to your problems, but to personally walk to the deli and make sure the artists are nourished.  So that’s one way the development process at EST is different.

What do you want the audience to take away from seeing SMART?

As much as the play explores themes of boundaries in technology, it’s also a play about communication, and the ways in which we attempt to connect using whatever means we have at our disposal. I think tech has become part of the fabric of how we try and fail and continue to take stabs at making meaningful connections.