Smart speakers provide a powerful complement to smartphones in this regard. Humanoid robots seem creepy to us, and the more closely they’re designed to mimic us, the creepier they are. Although they may not look like the robots we envisioned, smart speakers do have antecedents in our cultural fantasy life. Whether real or fictional, robots hold a mirror up to society. If Rosie and her kin embodied a 20th-century yearning for domestic order and familial bliss, smart speakers symbolize our own, more self-absorbed time.

Source: New York Times September 09, 2017 18:22 UTC