Ethics, efficiency, and artificial intelligence - The Boston Globe

In 2018, Google unveiled Duplex, an artificial intelligence-powered assistant that sounds eerily human-like, complete with'umms' and'ahs' that are designed to make the conversation more natural. The demo had Duplex call a salon to schedule a haircut and then call a restaurant to make a reservation. As Google's CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated, the system at Google's I/O (input/output) developer conference, the crowd cheered, hailing the technological achievement. Indeed, this represented a big leap toward developing AI voice assistants that can pass the "Turing Test," which requires machines to be able to hold conversations while being completely indistinguishable from humans. But not everyone was so enthusiastic.