(Photo by Andrew Matthews/PA Images via Getty Images) The UK government today announced that Amazon Alexa can now give people medical advice. The proposal is simple enough: You ask one of Amazon’s Echo devices a question ("how do I treat a migraine?" or "What are the symptoms of flu?") and Alexa will access the website of the National Health Service to come up with an answer. On the surface, this is beneficial: Amazon has reportedly sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices, all of which could help visually impaired , elderly, and disabled people get health information. But it’s also more serious than setting a timer or asking for the weather. If Alexa surfaces bad information, and people act on that data, nobody wins. Not So Automatic While the notion of using a smart speaker to answer medical questions is a novel one, it’s not the first time the UK […]