The word Alexa is no longer exclusively a moniker but now the name of Amazon’s trusty digital assistant. These digital machines popping up in households across the world at such a rapid pace. In fact, there will be as many assistant bots as people on the planet by 2021.
The companies (Amazon and Google lead the pack) are pushing these products hard and people are buying up tens of millions of them. Regardless of the nagging privacy concerns in the back of our minds, is Alexa always listening to me? Maybe, but either way, people are hooked. But what does this mean for our future?
According to The Atlantic, “The ramifications of this shift are likely to be wide and profound. Human history is a by-product of human inventions. New tools—wheels, plows, PCs—usher in new economic and social orders.” It is not yet clear what shifts will occur but Alexa has a power that machines before her never really had: the ability to coherently speak. We aren’t communicating through them but with them, which can make people converse with them as if they have a consciousness.
This feeling of like-mindedness between humans and a piece of everyday technology has never been a part of our world like this before. “For the moment, these machines remain at the dawn of their potential, as likely to botch your request as they are to fulfill it. But as smart-speaker sales soar, computing power is also expanding exponentially. Within our lifetimes, these devices will likely become much more adroit conversationalists. By the time they do, they will have fully insinuated themselves into our lives.”
But for now, our Alexas sit on our kitchen counters waiting on our beckon call. What do you think the future looks like for the digital assistant?