Siri and Alexa are AI built for the past
Emily Liu |
TEDxUSC
• March 2019
The ways we imagine the future are deeply influenced by the ways others have imagined the future before us –in storytelling, in media, in oral traditions. Today, it’s almost as if we don’t have to imagine anymore: we've seen amazing leaps and bounds made in technological inventions, especially in digital assistants like Siri and Alexa. In fact, from their friendly names to their personality quirks to the jokes they tell, they seem less like products and more like characters of a SciFi story. Rather than pinnacles of human ingenuity, Emily sees them as failures of imagination, and of our commitment to societal growth.