Perhaps you were unnerved by Silicon Valley cheering Google's startlingly convincing and conversant simulation of a human voice—you know they don't really give a damn about online fakery and abuse, so you know they won't give a damn what ends this tech is put to.
The reality is that it probably won't work well, at first, because of something else that's hard to see coming: if humans don't know they're talking to robots, they won't talk in a way robots will understand (as we tend to do with Siri and other voice assistants). It'll be creepily amusing if we all find ourselves talking robotically for the benefit of machines we believe are human. Maybe we'll become swiftly inoculated against The Voice, attuned to its little shibboleths and flaws--no Voight-Kampff test necessary, at least for now. We'll just be angrier than ever and hang up at the first sign of Robocaller 2.0, just as we generally do now -- at least until it becomes so pervasive we have no choice.
Mr. Bandwagon's edit of Google's demo is perfect, an artifact that escaped the near future's mercifullly unequal distribution.
