Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Terrifyingly Convenient

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 43 posts

Re: Terrifyingly Convenient

#21

Post by eli_gottlieb »

BatFastard wrote: post #18
futureiswithus wrote: post #14

I always had imagined this convinient future to be about an intelligence that lived within my home and not a remote server farm. That way everyone had their own personal AI that grew with you and not connected to any others. There was no big brother since it wasnt centralized. Why cant a startup be formed to make this real?

So you can get voice recognition at home, but you end up losing updates, new features, and ability to interoperate with other services. Cloud based services make it so that one person doesn't have to carry this load themselves.

Can't I get those things from `sudo apt-get upgrade`?

Re: Terrifyingly Convenient

#22

Post by Animats »

In your car, OnStar listens to you. That was the first widely deployed "always listening" system of that type. On January 1, 2014, GM changed their privacy policy to allow them to use any info about what your vehicle is doing, including where it is, for marketing purposes.[1]

At home, Echo listens to you. Amazon's is vague about how much they listen to.[2]

And, of course, there's the XBox 360. It sees you when you're sleeping. It knows when you're awake. It knows if you've been bad or good.

You'll never be alone again.

[1] https://www2.onstar.com/web/portal/privacy

[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/forums/ref=cs_hc_g_tv...

Re: Terrifyingly Convenient

#23

Post by GuiA »

Animats wrote: post #22

In your car, OnStar listens to you. That was the first widely deployed "always listening" system of that type. On January 1, 2014, GM changed their privacy policy to allow them to use any info about what your vehicle is doing, including where it is, for marketing purposes.[1] At home, Echo listens to you. Amazon's is vague about how much they listen to.[2] And, of course, there's the XBox 360. It sees you when you're…

> You'll never be alone again

Or, if this bothers you, you can choose to avoid the hedonistic treadmill altogether and not outfit your house with an Alexa, a Kinect, and countless other mostly useless devices that people lived happily without 10 years ago.

Re: Terrifyingly Convenient

#24

Post by lallysingh »

aftbit wrote: post #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 experi…

> As long as technology users broadly continue to sacrifice security, privacy, and choice for basic convenience, these sorts of issues will continue occurring.

(Note: I'm not attacking or critiquing your comment, just attempting to show another scope) I'll point out that the same argument applies for living in a city vs a suburb vs out in the country. It's a very very old dynamic, and sometimes people get ensnared, and we have to be careful. For example, countries where you need an exit visa to leave.

But like the meatspace equivalent, there's likely to be different situations simultaneously for different populations. With an ebb and flow between them and between more or less free choice.

Re: Terrifyingly Convenient

#25

Post by peterjancelis »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #21
BatFastard wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can get voice recognition at home, but you end up losing updates, new features, and ability to interoperate with other services. Cloud based services make it so that one person doesn't have to carry this load themselves.

Can't I get those things from `sudo apt-get upgrade`?

Having mass market B2C customers do this is a customer support nightmare.

Re: Terrifyingly Convenient

#26

Post by venomsnake »

Animats wrote: post #22

In your car, OnStar listens to you. That was the first widely deployed "always listening" system of that type. On January 1, 2014, GM changed their privacy policy to allow them to use any info about what your vehicle is doing, including where it is, for marketing purposes.[1] At home, Echo listens to you. Amazon's is vague about how much they listen to.[2] And, of course, there's the XBox 360. It sees you when you're…

Soldering iron solves a lot of "convenient features"

Re: Terrifyingly Convenient

#27

Post by rodgerd »

GuiA wrote: post #23
Animats wrote: post #22

In your car, OnStar listens to you. That was the first widely deployed "always listening" system of that type. On January 1, 2014, GM changed their privacy policy to allow them to use any info about what your vehicle is doing, including where it is, for marketing purposes.[1] At home, Echo listens to you. Amazon's is vague about how much they listen to.[2] And, of course, there's the XBox 360. It sees you when you're…

> You'll never be alone again Or, if this bothers you, you can choose to avoid the hedonistic treadmill altogether and not outfit your house with an Alexa, a Kinect, and countless other mostly useless devices that people lived happily without 10 years ago.

The problem with this nice theory is you'll be getting it whether you want it or not. As revenue comes in from the sureillance society, manufacturers will (and alrewady are) crammin the functionality into devices. You, as a customer will have no choice: sooner or later you'll need a new fridge, and a spy fridge will be your only option.

Re: Terrifyingly Convenient

#28

Post by greenyoda »

yjisawesome wrote: post #16
futureiswithus wrote: post #14

I always had imagined this convinient future to be about an intelligence that lived within my home and not a remote server farm. That way everyone had their own personal AI that grew with you and not connected to any others. There was no big brother since it wasnt centralized. Why cant a startup be formed to make this real?

So what you are suggesting this trend will be perfect as long as we control like keeping private home network? What a novel idea!!! However, in order for startup to be interested, this idea gotta have some commercial potential aka profitable. How do make this idea profitable though?

Not all innovation comes from startups. There are probably lots of people who would be interested in working on a free, open source AI system if someone were to organize such a project. It would be interesting to see who the "Linus Torvalds of AI" will turn out to be.

Re: Terrifyingly Convenient

#29

Post by greenyoda »

massysett wrote: post #10
jveld wrote: post #7

Enough 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…

"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."

If I visit a friend who has an Echo in their home, I'm having my conversation listened to without my consent.

Re: Terrifyingly Convenient

#30

Post by Godel_unicode »

futureiswithus wrote: post #17
rorykoehler wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good AI requires huge amounts of data, like you would find on a server farm.

a single person produces enough data in my mind to train an AI for him or her. We just need to apply existing algorithms to the problem. We just need a lot of data to make a generic AI that works for all. Which isnt the case for the above proposal

The problem isn't the algorithms, the problem is the labeled training sets which those algorithms need to create models.

Also, to recommend news stories a la Google Now you need to scrape an appreciable portion of the Internet and extract features to score against your model.

Post reply on HN