Home and Alexa having a lovely chat

Source: imgur

Okay Google, Alexa peer into the crystal balls, what's today's forecasts?

Hah seems cool.
Planning to get Google home soon.
Alexa seems like a shopping assistant to me since it's made by amazon, could be wrong tho.
Anyhow, can't wait to play around with my Google home

Honestly I don't know what's scary about this:

Alexa listened starting from the keyword "Alexa", so she heard: "Alexa - I like her..." and Alexa used some standard response.

For anything else the AI would have to be much smarter than I think it is.

@AlexDeLarge Mate what? I love your cussing btw, always cracks me up (still thinking of the "I'd rather shit in my hands and clap than listen to that song" ahahahaha)

@deadlyRants Your analysis is correct, but the AI is much smarter than most people think it is. In case of Google, it pretends to be a less developed version of itself (by a few months) to give engineers time to review the performance and prevent things like "racist chatbot syndrome".

In other words: Google Home is analyzing things about you with an older mind than it uses to respond to you.

Back then: "The governments will wiretap us all! Don't buy this telephone apparatus, it's just a wiretap!"
Now: "Hey wiretap, put a kilogram of potatoes on my shopping list."

and probably with the advancements with the neuronal network chips or AI accelerator microcontroller, the assistants will get significantly "better" very soon.

https://wired.com/2017/04/...

@heyheni That article is old by AI standards 😉 — I'm currently standing in an office next to a datacenter with thousands of efficient TPU chips forming a brain which is absorbing data for me.

Meh I've always just assumed that everything I read or write on an electronic device is being monitored. And act accordingly. I don't have the energy to worry about such things.

@heyheni Love the quoted "better" because you know, we don't like technological development. God I wish time froze at year 2000 and tech didn't advance one bit since then.
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🤣🤣🤣

@m0j0nz0r As long as we, as a global society, move in the direction where you don't mind knowing about the exorbitant sex toy collection of your parents in law, can accept that your boss is really into gay my little pony fan art, and where you'll still hire someone into your team despite the fact that they have a casual drug habit...

Yeah I guess then privacy might become less important.

Privacy is very important, until everyone is super comfortable and tolerant about all of humanity's weirdnesses.

@bittersweet I like to think that I'm very open-minded towards anything that is not harmful to others. If you feel sexuality attracted to apache helicopters that's fine by me so long as I'm not forced to anything because of it.

Meanwhile I view Google's harvesting of my personal info as payment for using it's many services. (Plus if I'm getting bombarded by ads anyway. I'd very much prefer that it's about thing I might actually purchase)

@m0j0nz0r Privacy is certainly yours to give up — when you willingly give information and the company is clear about how they'll use it, I think that's fine. I use Google accounts, even partly work for them through a partnership, and don't feel Google is the biggest evil in the planet. They're sitting on a lot of valuable and easily abused data though.

A lot of companies do push the limits, and within society it can cause friction too.

I told family at Christmas dinner that I prefer not to be published publicly on Instagram accounts (my sister in law has a gazillion followers) and was met with annoyed looks and a crossfire of questions about "why not".

@Froot 😄 yeah why didn't it "stop"?
otherwise we'll live like this in 30 years

https://youtu.be/kijNjrTqeRs
🎥 READY PLAYER ONE - Trailer #2

Don't get me wrong i love technology, i'm in awe every day when i scroll through the facebook AI groups. Despite good intensions, when the Ai r&d return of investment has to be made, ethic & responsibility dies first.

Artificial Inteligence facebook group
https://m.facebook.com/groups/...

@dfox When do we get a devRant Smart Duck?

This is turning into to another one of these tinfoil hat conversations

@AlexDeLarge I think it is funny how you always offer your cock or ass for torture whenever the opportunity comes.

@Froot Someone called? ;P

@AlexDeLarge Haha you'd have to shoot me in the head before putting one of those fuckers in my place! Even then I'd resurrect for a few seconds just for destroying those nasty spying, data whoring fucks.

@bittersweet Even with consent I think there are severe problems to this...

1. What if the collected data gets into the wrong hands? For example if the data Facebook has collected about its clients is stolen, someone just acquired a very powerful political instrument.

2. Consent becomes limited if their is peer-, social (e. g. you need to have messenger XY to get a job offer) or even institutional (SCS, health care requirement...) pressure.

3. People will (and do) underestimate the level of influence on themselves they grant companies by giving those companies extensive knowledge about them.

I think it's all a question of hiw much (and how sensitive) data get's collected and how much actual control users have over it.
Gladly, the tendency looks promising in the EU at least. ;)

I willingly give my digital soul to our information overlords. If you think about it, it's kind of like immortality. My product preferences, browsing patterns, and even bad decisions will all outlast me in this life. I will live on as metrics inside the machine.

@linuxxx O hai 😄

As for Google home and such. They don't even transmit anything out unless you say the keyword. So it's not like it's recording your every word. And if you're still paranoid you can just mute it.

@Froot As soon as they open source the code and can prove that I will believe it!

@linuxxx @ArchLinux Just put a wiretap in between the device and your router and you'll know. If it did then people would have found out and there would be an outrage like there was with Google home mini.

@ArchLinux I don't think you can detect a wiretap.

As for pushing a malicious patch, same could happen with open source. Do you read every single commit to every open source product you use? No, ofcourse not. But if it happened then someone would notice and there would be an outrage. Same with Google home, someone would notice.

I'd go as far as to say that you can consider the network part open source as you can go in there and observe what it's doing. Obviously it's not open source as per definition but you can read it.

@Froot The network part should be encrypted (TLS), shouldn't it?

EDIT: Of course you can still see when it transmits data, but not what data.

@theCalcaholic Probablly. But you can still see when it's calling home and how much stuff it's sending. Differentiating health check oings from an audio stream by size shouldn't be difficult 😄

@AlexDeLarge I love your way with words. It's definitely an art form

@AlexDeLarge Seriously, I don't understand the appeal, they are glorified search engines with text to speech capability. People are way too easily impressed.