Future Tense Newsletter: I Just Yelled at Alexa

While I was making dinner, I yelled at Alexa. But the recipe was a little complicated, and I kept having to repeat myself to get the damn Amazon Echo to turn off the timer. And when I used my computer communication voice to ask it to play NPR One so I could catch up on the news--it had been a whole eight or nine minutes since I had checked in with the world--it tried three times to instead play "The Austin 100: A SXSW Mix From NPR Music." I feel a little bad about it, remembering Rachel Withers' (very persuasive!) 2018 piece for Future Tense about why she won't date men who are rude to Alexa: It matters how you interact with your virtual assistant, not because it has feelings or will one day murder you in your sleep for disrespecting it, but because of how it reflects on you. Alexa is not human, but we engage with her like one.