Susan and I have been watching the second season of Halo – a Paramount+ series based on the X-box/PC video game series of the same name that is centered on the game character Master Chief who becomes the persona of the game player. The game, introduced in 1999, includes an AI that is built into Master Chief’s combat suit. That AI has a female avatar whose name is Cortana.
If you are a Sci-Fi nerd, you will remember that the TV series Andromeda Ascendant had an AI whose name was Rommie. She was the heart of the war ship Andromeda. Rommie was played by actress Lexa Doig. It’s probably only by coincidence that Google named its digital assistant Alexa.
Then there is Apple’s Siri – another personal assistant assigned a feminine persona. I think that this whole feminine digital assistant thing is part of an emerging, paternalistic if not overtly misogynist, ethos. As a younger adult, my part of American history claimed the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and the civil rights movement. With all of its imperfections, my part of our history offered a better deal for most people than our current society. America today is too much in thrall with performative religiosity, bigoted authoritarianism, and a dystopic vision of justice in which some people have more freedoms than others and can access more justice than othered groups. Call me old fashioned; I’m a middle-old boomer, after all.
Back to Cortana. Microsoft introduced digital assistants in various versions of its products going back a couple of decades. There was that annoying paperclip Clippy that hid in MS Word and other MS productivity apps. Then came Cortana in 2017. The name Cortana, as it turns out, is taken from the video game Halo – a Microsoft X-box gaming property.