For all our literary and cinematic imaginings about the future – flying cars, robot helpers, clone armies, pre-crime – it seems the reality, when it gets here, is always more mundane. Self-driving Ubers. Drones delivering Amazon parcels. And the new chattering class: AI-driven personal assistants, eavesdropping on our every word. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s (nameless, perhaps soulless) Google Assistant are compliant fembots ready to take orders at any moment – ideally from a human, but also, it seems, from each other.
There are numerous YouTube videos documenting interactions gone awry, including several attempts at creating an endless loop of “conversation” between the voice assistants. That’s one way to distract them from collecting your data. This is only the beginning, however – Amazon executives have said they want the devices to be able to “speak” to each other properly in the future, so that Alexa can give Siri instructions, and vice versa. Soon they won’t need us at all.