Technology and the Good Life? An ethical evaluation of Siri

Despite the possible benefits that the AI personal assistant Siri might bring, this paper, based on a preliminary study, raises and discusses some ethical concerns implicated in the adoption of Siri among university students. We present an empirically informed ethical evaluation of Siri in relation to the students’ well-being and flourishing, based on the responses obtained from semi-directive individual interviews of 23 university students in Hong Kong. They were randomly drawn from the 300 university students who completed a survey on the use of Siri and social interaction. First, we identify how the students engage with Siri: to get Siri to perform functional tasks, mundane assistant tasks and social tasks. Next, we examine their responses to questions about a few core conditions in some prominent frameworks of well-being including engagement and meaning (the PERMA model; Haybron 2013). We check their replies to questions related to social interaction and the engagements with Siri against a list of virtues, including empathy, patience, self-control, reflective self-examination etc. which are deemed crucial for a flourishing life (Vallor 2016). Our results suggest that the students’ attainment of well-being and flourishing hinges significantly on the human interaction they have, whereas Siri plays a far more limited role in that attainment. At the same time, the adoption of Siri is associated with subtle changes in the students’ form of life that raise three ethical concerns: (1) the reduction of the needs for human interaction; (2) the developments of dependencies, new vulnerabilities and obsessions; (3) the values the students attend to including hedonic pleasure, disburdenment and frictionless/hassle-free interaction.