Oracles of the countertop

I have an article in today’s New York Times about how domestic robots, which we always expected would resemble ourselves, have instead arrived in the form of chatbot-powered smart speakers. The shift from the Jetsons’ embodied Rosie to Amazon’s disembodied Alexa says something important about our times, I suggest. The piece begins:

From the moment we humans first imagined having mechanical servants at our beck and call, we’ve assumed they would be constructed in our own image. Outfitted wit...