You Shouldn't Fear Amazon's Alexa

No two cultural touchstones better illustrate our diametrically opposed feelings about voice systems. Star Trek's always listening, ever-helpful Computer represents the highest ideal of a digital assistant, while Orwell's Telescreen, with its "Big Brother is watching" messages, was emblematic of our darkest fears. With each passing year and digital assistant breakthrough, we vacillate wildly between these two perspectives. Bloomberg recently reported that Amazon was employing thousands of humans to comb through utterances and transcribe what we say to Amazon's Echo-based voice assistant. The revelation broke an unspoken agreement between Amazon and the millions of Echo and Alexa-enabled device owners who assumed that only algorithms, not humans in a back office somewhere, would be analyzing our words for meaning.