My Amazon Alexa embedded in a speaker

I have recently received an expensive gift from my bank. It is a wireless speaker that “Amazon Alexa” is embedded in it.

This cutting-edge piece of technology has truly fascinated me. In particular, the state-of-the-art A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) which is in the form of a lady’s voice, Alexa, is really astonishing. 

The way that she interacts with me, obeys my orders, tries to be an amazing, sweet and pleasant company, cracks some jokes, etc etc is undeniably marvellous. 

On the other hand, I sometimes feel uneasy that there is a kind of intelligent and shrewd being that is spying on me. It may sound crazy, but I feel that sometimes this tiny sagacious gadget is sinister. Not only am I not a pessimist, specially when it comes to science and technology, but also I find myself a computer geek and technology nerd who always welcomes advancements in these areas, I am a computer engineer after all. Anyway, this kind of occasional spine-tingling feeling can’t be helped.

This device and robot reminds me of some great futuristic movies, specially a nonpareil masterpiece by great late Stanley Kubrick called “2001, A space Odyssey”, or the awesome film by great Steven Spielberg called “A.I.”, or last but not least, the wonderful great film by Spike Jonze called “Her” that I used to teach about in my classes. I highly recommend that you watch these films.

S. Hooman Loghman