On December 15, 1791, when the U.S. government passed the first amendment and guaranteed freedom of speech, legislators were not thinking about Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant.
The question now is: Should they have been?
People enjoy rights such as free speech in the United State and other countries around the world, and corporations are legally considered people for many purposes. But what about agents, smart digital assistants, and robots? As the field of artificial intelligence continues to grow and engineers pair it with natural language processing, we are increasingly seeing a voice-first future computer interface driven by intelligent assistants.
And that matters, because where AI is answering, AI had to be listening. And when AI listens, sometimes it hears sensitive material.
