11/24/2017: Is it OK to be mean to your digital assistant?
Digital home assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google are becoming more common. eMarketer estimates the number of people using virtual assistants will grow nearly 25 percent this year. With all these new talking machines around, does it matter how we speak to it? Do we need to be polite? Does it matter if we’re mean? We pose those questions to Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University, who has thought a lot about how we treat artificial intelligence.
Digital home assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google are becoming more common. eMarketer estimates the number of people using virtual assistants will grow nearly 25 percent this year. With all these new talking machines around, does it matter how we speak to it? Do we need to be polite? Does it matter if we’re mean? We pose those questions to Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University, who has thought a lot about how we treat artificial intelligence.
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