IS SIRI SEXIST?
Amazon's female-voiced Alexa may be, but poor Siri at least has the option of being a man if you choose.
In fact, according to Saniye Gülser Corat, director for gender equality of Unesco, the voice doesn't have to conform to either gender as we have the technology to create human-like gender-neutral voices.
Essentially, she posits that we're generating a mindset, especially with younger users, that enforces the idea that it's OK to order women to do our bidding - that they have to listen to us and are therefore the lesser gender.
She says that this is symptomatic of a much larger problem in tech: that not enough different voices are at the table when these kinds of decisions are being made.
"We really need to look into diversity and inclusion in the tech industry itself. [There are] only 17.5% of women in the overall tech industry; less than 10% of women in AI, only 5% of CEOs of tech companies are women; and there are very few women on the boards of these companies. So these are the places to start making changes because the more diversity we have the better our products. It's also good for business," says Gülser Corat.
SHOULD WE BREAK UP BIG TECH COMPANIES?
Donald Trump calls her "the person who hates America the most". Moderator Laurie Segall called her "the woman Silicon Valley fears most". Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, has recently taken up the mantle of "executive vice-president for a Europe fit for the digital age".
In her new role she has even more power to slap the wrists of tech giants like Facebook and Google for their monolithic abuse of power. But, asked if these massive companies should be broken up into more manageable, bite-sized pieces, she questioned what the definition of manageable is.
"You know the story of the [mythological] creature where when you chop off one head two come up in its place? There's a risk that if we don't solve the problem, we'll just have more problems that arise out of the current ones, and they'll get out of control,"she said.
I am more aligned with the thinking that when you become that big you get a special responsibility because you are de facto the rule-setter in the market that you own. We can be much more precise in what that entails."
IS YOUR DATA EVEN YOURS ANYMORE?
American Edward Snowden doesn't believe so. He dialled in from Russia to talk about surveillance and why he blew the whistle about the National Security Agency's information-gathering practices. He also thinks that companies and governments are abusing their access to us, while still keeping within the realms of the law.
Often giving away our data is an act that we knowingly agree to with a click in the tick box of a document when we visit a site or download an app. We've reached a point, he said, at which just by sitting and listening to him talk, with our phones in our pockets overhearing everything, we are telling companies and governments far more than we realise.
"Data isn't harmless. Data isn't abstract when it's about people, and almost all the data being collected today is about people. It is not data that's being exploited, it's people who are being exploited. It is not data and networks that are being influenced and manipulated, it is you."
