Assistant or Master: Envisioning the User Autonomy Implications of Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistants (VA) such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant are becoming increasingly popular. Recent literature has argued that VAs may raise ethical concerns for users’ autonomy. However, there is a lack of frameworks which can unite the wide range of autonomy concerns discussed in literature, as well as help designers envision the ethical implications of emerging VA technologies. This paper argues that designers and policymakers need to be sensitive to the ethical side of the future of virtual assistants, and systematic frameworks are required to aid their moral imagination. The paper proposes a framework to help designers imagine potential ethical concerns pertaining to users’ autonomy. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed framework by showing how existing ethical concerns can be situated within the framework. We also use the framework to imagine ethical concerns with emerging VA technologies. The proposed framework can aid in systematic identification of autonomy related ethical concerns within human computer interactions.