Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are some of today’s most well-known virtual assistants. All are female, and all elicit an image of an assistant who is not just a woman, but a woman people can boss around, flirt with, and act inappropriately toward. Compound that with portrayals in the media and it all starts to feel like a big step backward rather than one toward the future. “If we want the computers to behave differently, we have to actually pay attention to how we build them so we don’t just create mirrors of what society does,” says Rada Milhacea, professor of computer science.
Related Posts
