Alexa, are you acting in my best interest?

recently, I attended a conference where one of the points of discussion was the disruption within the world of finance through new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, or AI. One of the panellists said she worries about the influence that Amazon’s (in) famous virtual assistant, Alexa, might have on her children. She questioned whether we can actually know what motives and morals ‘she’ has been programmed with. Can we trust the voice-controlled device sitting on our kitchen counter to keep our best interests at heart?

Alexa is an example of natural language processing, which is one form of AI. Although the exact definition of AI is still a point of contention, it usually involves the use of self-learning systems