Terrifyingly Convenient
slate.com
Terrifyingly Convenient
1–10 of 43 posts
Re: Terrifyingly Convenient
#2Protonet Zoe is a crowd funded Echo competitor that claims to perform local-only voice recognition with some open-source code based on CoreOS, http://readwrite.com/2016/04/07/zoe-smart-home-hub-amazon-ec... & http://experimental-platform.github.io
Re: Terrifyingly Convenient
#3The most interesting thing from my POV was the existence of http://x.ai/
Re: Terrifyingly Convenient
#4As far as the fiction can envision the techno future and human AI interaction, one of the more interesting books for me was SNUFF by Victor Pelevin. In it the main character is a freelancer drone camera operator living with a humanoid as a partner, tweaking her settings and getting very emotionally and sexually involved with her. And the devise is so human like and autonomous, that it eventually runs away from the owner leaving him with huge debt still unpaid.
Re: Terrifyingly Convenient
#5Y'know, I have a terribly powerful desktop always running at my home; I'd love to be able to load a container on it which does all this processing locally.
Re: Terrifyingly Convenient
#6Is there a (comparative) overview of all the tasks smart agents can do?
Re: Terrifyingly Convenient
#7Enough with the 'woe humanity the machines are coming' pieces. After ten years of facebook, and three years of snowden leaks, I have a hard time finding sympathy for people who purchase 'smart' (read data gathering) devices from large conglomerates before considering the privacy implications. The cards are on the table; we all know what the terms of this kind of convenience are. If you're concerned for your privacy, then stop opting in for fucks sake. You've just voted with your dollars for a future of ubiquitous, autonomous surveillance. Again. Knowingly. The ignorance card is utter bullshit at this point.
The 'inevitable' future bewailed by these types of articles is only inevitable because this kind of 'shiny! buynow thinklater' mentality. To paraphrase Sartre, "we have the surveillance state we deserve."
If you're comfortable with the tradeoffs, I have no beef. I'm not saying that people shouldn't buy these things if they want them. And they are cool, wantable things. But it's 2016. You can have your thing or your soapbox. Both are respectable choices. But you can only have one.
Re: Terrifyingly Convenient
#8"When I Google “kinkajou,” I get a list of websites, ranked according to an algorithm that takes into account all sorts of factors that correlate with relevance and authority. I choose the information source I prefer, then visit its website directly—an experience that could help to further shade or inform my impression of its trustworthiness."
While the Google experience is certainly more direct than the Alexa experience, you're still allowing Google to filter and order your search results. Check out the "filter bubble" if you haven't heard of it before.
The HN title, "Terrifyingly Convenient", hits the problem on the head. As long as technology users broadly continue to sacrifice security, privacy, and choice for basic convenience, these sorts of issues will continue occurring. There's a potentially very dark future ahead of us where all of our choices are made by entrenched mega-corporations who see us as nothing but a source of revenue.
"CONSUME!"
Re: Terrifyingly Convenient
#9"When I Google “kinkajou,” I get a list of websites, ranked according to an algorithm that takes into account all sorts of factors that correlate with relevance and authority. I choose the information source I prefer, then visit its website directly—an experience that could help to further shade or inform my impression of its trustworthiness." While the Google experience is certainly more direct than the Alexa experi…
> There's a potentially very dark future ahead of us where all of our choices are made by entrenched mega-corporations who see us as nothing but a source of revenue.
How about corporations who see us as nothing but a source of data, not even as customers? http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-d... & https://vimeo.com/110222526
"While advertisers have been the dominant buyers in the early history of this new kind of marketplace, there is no substantive reason why such markets should be limited to this group. The already visible trend is that any actor with an interest in monetizing probabilistic information about our behavior and/or influencing future behavior can pay to play in a marketplace where the behavioral fortunes of individuals, groups, bodies, and things are told and sold. This is how in our own lifetimes we observe capitalism shifting under our gaze: once profits from products and services, then profits from speculation, and now profits from surveillance."
Re: Terrifyingly Convenient
#10Enough with the 'woe humanity the machines are coming' pieces. After ten years of facebook, and three years of snowden leaks, I have a hard time finding sympathy for people who purchase 'smart' (read data gathering ) devices from large conglomerates before considering the privacy implications. The cards are on the table; we all know what the terms of this kind of convenience are. If you're concerned for your privacy,…
I agree with you on the people who buy these things, but I think a more interesting question is how they affect the people who do not buy them.
Facebook is similar. I don't care one whit about Facebook users who complain that the company is using their information and that they have no privacy. That's what you signed up for, duh. More interesting is that Facebook amasses a lot of information even about people who do not use the service.
Right now the Echo is only listening inside of homes, so logically you can figure there's not much risk of third-party harm here. But this gets more tricky if these things start listening in public spaces, or if they're on phones...suppose the pizza delivery guy gets a cell phone that listens all the time, and it hears something interesting while the pizza man is at your door.