
Terrifyingly Convenient - DiabloD3
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/cover_story/2016/04/alexa_cortana_and_siri_aren_t_novelties_anymore_they_re_our_terrifyingly.html
======
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](https://www2.onstar.com/web/portal/privacy)

[2]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/forums/ref=cs_hc_g_tv...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/forums/ref=cs_hc_g_tv?ie=UTF8&forumID=Fx1SKFFP8U1B6N5&cdThread=Tx26V9TT6C3TD21)

~~~
GuiA
> 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.

~~~
rodgerd
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.

~~~
dima55
That is simply not true. Maybe the latest and hipsteriest devices will all
have those features, but the market is vast and caters to all sorts of humans
and price points. You just have to care enough to make that choice as a
consumer.

~~~
r00fus
Try to buy a high-end TV without Wifi/Smart/3D useless anti-features.

It's getting harder each day.

------
walterbell
Protonet 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://readwrite.com/2016/04/07/zoe-smart-home-hub-amazon-echo-dl1/) &
[http://experimental-platform.github.io](http://experimental-
platform.github.io)

------
aftbit
"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!"

~~~
walterbell
_> 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...](http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-
debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-
capitalism-14103616.html?printPagedArticle=true) &
[https://vimeo.com/110222526](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."_

------
futureiswithus
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?

~~~
BatFastard
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.

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

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

------
tomaskazemekas
As 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.

------
wtbob
Y'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.

------
hinkley
I think this problem is on the verge of solving itself again. It'll come back
by the end of the 2020's of course, but we are at least due for a respite.

There's so much work being done on scalable server tech right now, and enough
broadband to use it. O little nudge and we'd be close to having a server
appliance that people could have in their own homes, and call from their
mobile devices.

------
mst
The most interesting thing from my POV was the existence of
[http://x.ai/](http://x.ai/)

~~~
theoh
It's a shame they didn't minimally push the boat out for sexual equality by
offering "adam" as a male alternative. Amy is (arguably) a stereotypically
girly name and given that what's being offloaded here is administrative work,
I think it looks bad to make it a female responsibility.

~~~
nkurz
The posted article suggests that they already do allow this: _Unlike some
other intelligent assistant companies, X.ai gives you the option to choose a
male name for your assistant instead: Mine is Andrew Ingram._

------
jveld
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, 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.

~~~
pdkl95
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.

~~~
hinkley
Hell, I'm the biggest cynic in most rooms, I border on diabolically clever
when the mood grabs me, and I don't have the slightest clue what the actual
consequences of opting in are.

But if the deal is too good to be true, it's only because you don't have all
the facts. Information asymmetry is the very basis for capitalism.

------
amelius
Is there a (comparative) overview of all the tasks smart agents can do?

