This Robot Knows How to Trick You

People might lie about who they are online, but robots can easily be much more deceptive

Robots like Amazon’s Echo are becoming increasingly popular. But they’re relatively new guests in our homes, and we’re not always sure how they’ll behave. There’s been lots of anxiety about Echo working like a covert spy that listens to everything we say. And yet the device only starts recording after users wake it with a trigger word, Amazon doesn’t share customer-identifiable information with third parties, and users can permanently delete what Echo records. People even thought Alexa — the cloud-based voice service Echo uses — could call the police to report domestic abuse, even though that wasn’t possible.

What causes the panic? Well, devices like Echo are vulnerable to hacks and reidentification and have unresolved First Amendment issues, and their capabilities are subject to change. Indeed, nobody can guarantee that future Amazon products won’t “record all the time.”

There is, however, a fundamental reason why we find products like Echo troubling: The robots are wholly other. They listen like machines, not like human beings. They remember information like machines, not like human beings. And they share information like machines, not like human beings. We can’t accurately size up an…