Monica Lam: Privacy in the age of virtual assistants

Can we reap the benefits of artificial intelligence while also protecting our personal information? From scheduling appointments to setting the thermostat to ordering pizza, virtual assistants are growing more commonplace by the day. Stanford professor Monica Lam says they will only become more entrenched as their capabilities grow and their voice-recognition skills become more accurate. Such developments are welcomed by many who rely upon Alexa and Siri and other virtual assistants. But it is also troubling to those, like Lam, who worry that privacy concerns and lack of competition put too much power in the hands of a few companies. Lam is an advocate for a more open approach. “If there is no open competition, then you are kind of stuck with whatever these platforms provide for you,” she tells host Russ Altman in the latest episode of The Future of Everything radio show from Sirius XM. Lam thinks a lot about the future of privacy. She says we can have both the AI and privacy at the same time, but first she’d like more options in the marketplace and for those who dominate the market to be less insular than they are today. What’s needed is an “infrastructure of privacy” that returns control of data to the rightful owners: the users who created it in the first place. The key to that, she says, is choice. Tune in to this episode of The Future of Everything to hear more about how Lam’s open-source effort to develop and share virtual assistant technology is keeping user privacy at the forefront. You can listen to The Future of Everything on iTunes, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.