Star Trek’s vision of a voice interface to computing was and remains incredibly compelling. So much to the extent that about three years ago, Amazon included “Computer” as a wake word to the Echo so that we can pretend to talk to the first mass-market voice assistant as if we’re on a spaceship in the 24th century.
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I don’t think it’s going to be necessarily a problem within the next five to ten, fifteen, to maybe even twenty years. But my perspective on it has always been, because I am more philosophically focused in these things, why not try to address the issues before they arrive? Why not try to think about these questions before they become problems that we have to fix?
I’m here by way of atonement, because I used to be a real jerk about fandom, and I used to make fun of them, and think they were wasting their time. And then I had this kinda life-changing come-to-Jesus moment that I want to talk to you about and this really weird artifact that got produced partly because of me, and it’s completely changed my thinking. And as I’ve gotten to know fandom and really like them, I’ve come to believe that they kind of represent a future and a model for what communities are like on the Internet when you have actual people using machines to talk to one another rather than this kind of invented sense of what social life and social networks are supposed to be like, the way we’ve engineered them.