Consider the following fictitious review of the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project:
Consider the following fictitious review of the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project:
Humankind, it seems, has for a long time been fascinated with the idea of machines that can mimic the human capabilities of thought, intuition, creativity, problem-solving, and communication. From the chess-playing Mechanical Turk of the 18th century (which was actually a clever and elaborate ruse) through the ELIZA computerized “psychotherapist” in the 1960s and any number of sci-fi franchises and Saturday-morning cartoons, history has no shortage of intelligent machines, real or imagined.
Humans have a curious habit of talking to inanimate objects. As children, we talk to stuffed animals and other toys. (Sometimes, we answer for them.) This carries into adulthood; we talk to plants, cars, televisions, kitchen appliances, computers, rocks... Sometimes we chastise them when they misbehave.
When Amazon’s Echo product line first appeared in 2014, its user interface was all about—nay, only about—voice commands to and responses from the device’s natural-language processing personality (known in Amazon’s parlance as an “intelligent personal assistant”) called Alexa.
