What if MIT's Norman and Amazon's Alexa hooked up?

If, like Rip Van Winkle, you've been asleep for the last decade and have just woken up, that flip phone you have has become super-popular among retro technologists and survivalists alike, and, oh yeah, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is either going to kill you or save you. AI is the latest in a long line of technology buzzwords that have gripped society, and if we are to believe the people at the respected technology analysts firm Gartner Inc., 2018 will be the year in which AI is truly integrated into our daily lives. As unnerving as the surreal robotics being cooked up at Boston Dynamics or the deployment of facial recognition AI in Chinese public schools may seem, this technology is a product of the human condition and as such, we are embedding our own culture within its coded DNA. Debates about AI currently focus on the notion of ethics. In the study of culture, ethics are embedded within values, and they've become an important part of the deliberations about how AI will integrate into our lives.