How worried should we be about AI?

Touch a penny to a live electrical plug: that's what Alexa told a 10-year-old child who asked it for a challenge to do. Amazon's virtual assistant made the headlines in a bad way last month after reportedly scraping this'challenge' off TikTok and regurgitating it wholesale. Alexa's gaffe recalls Microsoft's Tay chatbot, which had to be taken down in 2016 after learning to swear and spew extremist ideology from Twitter. Almost six years separate the two incidents, and machine learning should have long since advanced beyond returning such wildly inappropriate responses. It's an important consideration now that AI has become the foundation of multiple workplace tools, especially recruitment and retention.