Will the future be voicepilled? | Canada Voices

Over the past year, I noticed myself talking to my phone more. Not to someone on the phone, but to the phone itself. The two-finger texting, which used to come so easily, now feels like a drag, with my finger power unable to keep up with my train of thought. I‘ve also asked Claude questions while walking my dogs, speaking into the phone like I would to an acquaintance, and reading his replies when I stop at a light. Had he replied with a voice, who knows how long the conversation would have continued.

So when Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, posted on his platform that he was using voice-to-text and voice AI almost exclusively, and that the future of our engagement with technology will be through our voice, not on a keyboard, I nodded along. But he did something else in this otherwise benign announcement: He labelled the trend of choosing voice over typing, calling it “voicepilled.”

As Hoffman explains, “Per The Matrix, it’s that moment of sudden mental clarity, a way of seeing the world differently once you’ve taken ‘the red pill’ or ‘blue pill.’”

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Cue the collective cringe because the “pilled” suffix is a meme that refuses to die. In The Matrix, Neo gets offered a blue pill or a red pill. The blue allows him to stay in the Matrix, blissfully unaware of the mechanized world behind the scenes. The red pill opens his eyes to “the truth.” But the Oracle herself would never have guessed that a pill-popping protagonist from 27 years ago would continue to influence our cultural and political landscapes to this degree. The blue- and red-pilled dichotomy hit a cultural peak in 2016 – those that swallowed red had their eyes opened to conservative causes and far-right extremist beliefs. And those red-pillers claim blue-pilled liberals live in a fantasy world.

Over the years, these pills started to come in many colours, including the black pill, which takes the red pill to a nihilistic end, suggesting that unattractive men are doomed, women are the architects of their failure and violent acts are warranted to exact retribution.

Almost always, pilled implies an all-or-nothing scenario. So when Hoffman tried to hard launch the term voicepilled on his own platform, he wasn’t merely promoting a technology in which he has a vested interest – Hoffman was an early investor in OpenAI – but a conversion. In this dystopian future (because it’s always dystopian; watch any sci-fi movie) voicepilled suggests communicating with computers and AI with voice will radically change the way we engage with the world. Unfortunately, Hoffman used language long associated with 4chan and incel culture to describe this transformation.

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Granted, some argue that it’s possible to detach pills from what the Anti-Defamation League calls “an extremist medicine cabinet.” We now have orange-pilled for bitcoin proselytizers and AGI-pilled for artificial intelligence believers. On a lighter note, there’s fish oil-pilled, pizza-pilled, even Taylor-pilled for Swift converts. A writer in The Atlantic argued years ago that the suffix has been overused to the point where “it means almost nothing at all.”

Structurally changing a word to be a suffix is a fairly common exercise, explained Barend Beekhuizen, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto. He cites other examples, such as gate, made famous with Watergate, and then spoofed ad nauseam, to the more current and red-pill adjacent maxxing. The maxxing suffix, meant to take any activity and optimize it to an extreme, originated in gaming culture, but really took off with looksmaxxing, a way to turn incels (see black pill) into sexual contenders. But the suffix can also highlight more innocuous online trends, such as fibre-maxxing or sleep-maxxing.

Voicepilled, said Beekhuizen, makes voice-to-text sound exclusive, and therefore more exciting than saying, “Oh, I’m really into speech-to-text right now and really like how well it functions.”

“Maybe the older, more scary associations of pilled have faded a little bit – that’s a very common linguistic process,” Beekhuizen added.

Scott Talan, a professor of communication at American University, also cautions against reading too much subtext into the pilled suffix. Technology, he explained, alters many words, giving them new meanings. After all these years, some may use the pill suffix and not associate it with incel culture or even The Matrix. They might take it more literally.

“Most of us take pills almost every day, either because the doctor said so or we think it will help our health,” Talan said. He notes that pills, like technologies, offer both positives and negatives.

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But can this new, watered-down version of pill really be detached from its more extremist origins? The American Dialect Society referenced “Luigi-pilled” when it named Luigi – as in Mangione, the man charged with killing UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive – its 2024 political word of the year. This again marries violence to a particular world view. Even the red pill subreddit, walled off since 2018, continues to be active. For all its pop-culture variations, pilled never quite left the extremist medicine cabinet.

Perhaps there’s a relevant message in the recent sci-fi comedy, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. The title, also a play on gaming culture, follows a prophet-like protagonist from the future warning of the world’s eventual demise due to AI. In the film, tech-addicted teenagers turn into violent hive minds that attack the moment you try to pull them from their trance.

The most sinister thing about the film is that it shows how AI technology could kill humanity not with a bang, but with a slow, enticing pull, sucking us in until reality slips away. It’s a satirical reminder that not every technology or ideology needs to be swallowed whole.

Leah Eichler, a self-proclaimed word nerd, writes regularly about our evolving use of language.