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Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

cnbc.com

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Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#41

Post by kzrdude »

gruez wrote: post #20
coldcode wrote: post #13

When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do thi…

>Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. That doesn't seem like sound logic to me. Maybe he's just too busy to eat food that was put out at every house? You'd get pretty full by eating a cookie from every house in your neighborhood.

It's logical to test the model that was presented to him by the adults.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#42

Post by boomboomsubban »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #31
boomboomsubban wrote: post #16

Was there ever a lawsuit against GPS providers telling people to turn right into something like a lake? I couldn't immediately find one except a women who walked in the middle of a highway because that's what Google's route showed. It seems like the same ruling would apply to both, which could effect consumer GPS somewhat.

ehh an adult driving a car has the reasonable expectation of making safe decisions to avoid driving into a body of water… could I blame the GPS for slamming into the car in front of me or hitting a pedestrian? I think there’s a considerable difference from giving a child instructions to electrocute themselves… they literally don’t know better. They’re not licensed or educated.

>an adult driving a car has the reasonable expectation of making safe decisions to avoid driving into a body of water

The famous example of that happened in the middle of the night during a storm, but you can use the other common example of being told to turn the wrong way into a one way.

The two scenarios seem similar, an ai giving dangerous directions and I suspect the difference in age and experience would not effect the precedent.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#43

Post by wingmanjd »

api wrote: post #6

So I've got a new Fermi paradox solution. Once we build a large enough radio telescope we will start receiving a lot of chatter from around the universe. Buried in this will be a "high energy physics challenge" involving a powerful particle accelerator, a superconductor, and some synthetic elements with very large nuclei. After performing this challenge there will be another asteroid belt where Earth used to be, and…

So, the celestial equivalent of "Press Alt+F4 for hacks"?

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#44

Post by systemvoltage »

mmastrac wrote: post #27
annoyingnoob wrote: post #2

Can Alexa tell the age of the person behind a voice? The internet is full of questionable things, like the penny challenge, and Alexa is just voice search. Teaching your kids to use Alexa and expecting good results is the real issue here. As a parent, this looks like a parenting problem to me.

Amazon's market cap is 1.72T. If anyone can afford to push the state-of-the-art in terms of safety, they could. They just don't care to because nobody pushes them to.

I personally don't want the toxic mix of Big Corp + Gov Regulations for something like a home assistant. Literal nanny state. Micromanaging is not the answer. We need Gov regulations to break up Big Tech in general.

Just throw the goddamn device out of the window. Problem solved.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#45

Post by wazoox »

coldcode wrote: post #13

When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do thi…

I remember doing it with some rolled aluminium foil; but I knew that electricity could be dangerous, so I put a piece of scotch tape around the middle part by which I was holding it. So there was a nice flash and the power went off, but I felt nothing :)

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#47

Post by [deleted] »

mayoff wrote: post #28
gruez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. That doesn't seem like sound logic to me. Maybe he's just too busy to eat food that was put out at every house? You'd get pretty full by eating a cookie from every house in your neighborhood.

The 6-year-old in the story was presumably led to believe that Santa can visit every house in the world in one night. Logically, normal human limitations (like a finite capacity to eat cookies) do not apply to Santa.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#48

Post by salt-thrower »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #2

Can Alexa tell the age of the person behind a voice? The internet is full of questionable things, like the penny challenge, and Alexa is just voice search. Teaching your kids to use Alexa and expecting good results is the real issue here. As a parent, this looks like a parenting problem to me.

I for one wouldn't assume that "Alexa, give me a challenge to do" would be pulling from the open, uncensored internet. I would assume that Amazon had some kind of curation method that would remove the possibility of Alexa telling you to do something lethally stupid.

Further, what Alexa did is actually even worse than just reading from the open internet, because it only took the "challenge" part and stripped away the context about how dangerous it is.

This is akin to something like, "Alexa, tell me about civil rights" and it quoting Stormfront or some other hate site's take on race, without any other context about what it's reading from.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#49

Post by salt-thrower »

systemvoltage wrote: post #44
mmastrac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's market cap is 1.72T. If anyone can afford to push the state-of-the-art in terms of safety, they could. They just don't care to because nobody pushes them to.

I personally don't want the toxic mix of Big Corp + Gov Regulations for something like a home assistant. Literal nanny state. Micromanaging is not the answer. We need Gov regulations to break up Big Tech in general. Just throw the goddamn device out of the window. Problem solved.

How is that "literal nanny state?" We're talking about removing a home assistant's ability to tell you to do something lethally stupid. Basic consumer safety measures are a staple of a healthy society; just because a device is in your home doesn't exempt it from the government setting safety standards for it. If anything, the opposite is true.

Though on your last point we agree. Throwing the thing out the window is the best solution overall.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa assistant told a child to do a potentially lethal challenge

#50

Post by mmastrac »

systemvoltage wrote: post #44
mmastrac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's market cap is 1.72T. If anyone can afford to push the state-of-the-art in terms of safety, they could. They just don't care to because nobody pushes them to.

I personally don't want the toxic mix of Big Corp + Gov Regulations for something like a home assistant. Literal nanny state. Micromanaging is not the answer. We need Gov regulations to break up Big Tech in general. Just throw the goddamn device out of the window. Problem solved.

There are plenty of government regulations that work. Regulation doesn't preclude breaking them up, which I'm also in favour of.
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