Ideas from the CBC: A Harem of Computers

Digital assistants, in your home or on your phone, are usually presented as women. While you can choose a male voice for your personal assistant, the default is usually female. In this documentary, Jill Fellows, philosophy instructor at Douglas College in British Columbia, traces the history of the feminized, non-threatening machine, from Siri and Alexa, to a chatbot invented in the 1960s named ELIZA, to the "women computers" of the 19th century.