It is in our human nature to be vulnerable to anyone, or anything, that seems to understand us better than we do ourselves. In fact, we may be even more vulnerable to algorithms we know to be mindless than we are to real persons, because we are more easily lulled into a false sense of security. We pretend Alexa is a person because we are not used to conversing with machines – the experience would otherwise be embarrassing or uncanny. But the fact that we know Alexa is not a person is how we come to terms with its intense knowledge of us, which would otherwise be off puttingly creepy or scary.
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