I don't remember the last time I've been so creeped out by a technology as I was by Google duplex, an artificial intelligence that can make phone calls on your behalf, booking salon appointments or restaurant reservations and pretending to be human.

One could probably criticise that it's unethical not to disclose that a machine is on the other end of the line, that we exploit employees of small businesses as involuntary robot nannies at no charge, that this technology will be deployed and used regardless of any consequences, or our blind faith in technology. But it's none of that.

The reason why I am creeped out is this:

The fathers of personal computing, most importantly Doug Engelbart, dreamed about making humans better with the help of computers, to assist rather than replace humans, to augment humans with computers. What we increasingly see however is a trend of using humans to augment computers.

We should be better than this.