Terrifyingly Convenient

We're largely there already; it's just not obvious because it's incredibly ingrained in our culture. We've been there. One aspect of brands selling people an 'identity' (think apple or more profoundly, rolls royce). That's the consumer culture everyone hears so much about.

Companies have larger weight in American government than people do. Lobbyists and campaign contributions go a long way. Aaron Schwartz became dedicated to campaign finance reform for precisely this reason.

Part of the problem (and part of the solution to that problem) is that large scale companies must always optimize for money. They can care about certain things more, but still must optimize for money. Sometimes this benefits the general public, but sometimes it works against them too.

Decoupling industry from politics may be a good idea; we can give more weight to what is good for people than what is good for companies. Although politicians like Trump make me think that might not be ideal either :P.

You seem to believe that everybody somehow knows the consequences of "opting in". Does everyone have a CS degree in your universe?

> we all know what the terms of this kind of convenience are

Most people have no idea whatsoever what those terms are. Even among technical crowds I still find people assuming that humans are required for various tasks that have been automated for a long time. I seriously don't understand why you think people understand the "terms" of what big data and machine learning are doing to their data. Even simple things like the fact that cell phones give away your location can be a new concept for people that have only considered them telephones.

And why should most people have a realistic understanding of this stuff? The computer industry has been over-promising and dressing up their products since the transistor was invented. We have decades of services that dissemble as their business model, convincing people that their data is "private".

> 'smart' (read data gathering) devices

Why should anybody think that their TV is surveilling them. It wasn't long ago that saying your TV was spying on you could lead to a schizophrenia diagnosis. Nobody reads the legalese and manual for a TV before they bought it, understood it, and choose to trade their data. They bought a TV that advertised voice activation or some other feature. There is no reason for most people to think surveillance would be involved.

> stop opting in

While some people have started to realized how this stuff really works, the common response is to feel trapped without options. It will take time - decades - to properly educate the general public.

> The ignorance card is utter bullshit at this point.

Look at how many people here on HN that still think "anonymized" data cannot be correlated back to real their real identity. If people that understand terms like "hashing" and "INNER JOIN" are still figuring this out, the general public doesn't have a chance.

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

I think the premise of the writer's concern is that people who would otherwise be doing more critical reading (looking seriously at the source of the information they're getting, exploring different sources, etc.) are just going to accept what's spoonfed to them. I don't think that's valid, because I think people are using Alexa only for very casual research - the equivalent of reading the box at the top of a Google query or the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article, or pulling a reference book off a shelf and reading a few sentences, in other words, cases where you wouldn't be doing much critical reading anyway. Voice interfaces don't make a lot of sense for doing serious research, it takes a long time to read text out loud, you can't skim, or skip things, etc. They're great for things like getting a definition of a dictionary word without looking up from your book, or settling a bet about the population of Ireland.