It's absurd to me that someone would wire up "every room in their house" with internet connected microphones (in a technology that is still in it's infancy!) and then claim you felt like your privacy was "invaded". At best, it's a Trojan Horse, but the naivety here is astounding. Of course your Echo shouldn't send out private conversations, and it looks like a legitimate bug occurred. But man, the buy-now think-later mindset some people have is worrying.
You literally carry an audio & video recording device with a GPS chip and multiple wireless attack vectors on you for nearly every waking hour of your life.
I don't. I use my phone less and less. And I disable location every chance I get, leave it at home when I go out, on my desk when I step away, it stopped inhabiting my pocket, stays in the other room when I am concentrating, etc. I don't trust my phone, but occasionally it's useful. Why is this hard for people?
Of course I do. But that's not my point. They wallpapered their house with Echos! And now they are 'shocked'. When I get home, my phone usually gets tossed on a charger in my room, and forgotten about (while checking for messages every once in a while). And my phones sole purpose, while capable of it, is not to listen to everything I say and interpret voice commands. I never use Siri, and I would be 'shocked' at this point if it sent out a message, that I didn't intend, without alerting me. It's a older, tested technology (in my opinion).
I'm not surprised that my GPS capable phone knows where I am at all times. I wouldn't be surprised if my Echo recorded my voice and sent a message to someone. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some major bugs yet to be addressed in the software for the Echo. I guess this is a little harsh, but my sympathies are somewhat lost on these people. Not their fault for what happened, but they did take a risk.
"A husband and wife in the privacy of their home have conversations that they're not expecting to be sent to someone (in) their address book,"
But I don't use that function on my phone. And it's not the main purpose of the device. And it's been around longer than Alexa. That's my point. Not the same thing.
I immediately assumed, upon reading the title, that this was some sort of Facebook Addiction group, rather than addiction groups on Facebook. I live a pretty shielded life as far as knowing/seeing legitimate drug addicts, but I found it interesting that I know many people who would definitely benefit from Facebook/social media addiction therapy. Probably communicating over email.
You could spin it even more, calling it an “outreach program”! Yeah, that term has come to be industry standard for “I want something from you, so I am going to now insert myself into your life until I manipulate you into giving it to me”.
My problem with the innovations mentioned in the article lie mainly in the ‘predictive text’ emails from the google presentation. Such a small, minutely helpful feature, and yet like the author mentions could lead to an even more technologically led “groupthink” society, where machines determine our current cliches, which no one will break from. Anyways, I get that big innovations really come as several small innovations, but who out there is imagining the future of this technology, as some were imagining the smartphone or tablet a decade before it’s advent? I have yet to read anything by anyone who has a vision for the next big AI innovation, no matter how moonshot-y
I guess I’ll never know what drives people to talk about the creators and maintainers of the tools they use in such a negative way. Especially given how little they actually know about them! It also strikes me that the moderators of r/python could be doing more to curb the personal attacks.
I’ve found that, much like reddit, it’s best experienced by tailoring your feed to what you actually want to see. In my case, I unfollowed all posts from anyone I don’t actually care about, and removed my interests section entirely (fan pages and such contributed at least 50% of the spam on my feed - random sports autoplay videos are not what I’m looking for when i go on facebook). Facebook is a tool for making sure I’m not out of the loop with my actual friends. I don’t need to keep up to date with some person from my calculus class halfway across the country - and if i do run into them again, i can simply ask.
The problem is that most of the individuals invited to a meeting are not needed, they know they're not needed, and they've got other things that they are needed for.
Agreed. Just because someone HAS to give their input in a conversation for an item to move forward, does not mean they need to be pulled away from their work for 1+ hours. Meetings really should be broken up into two roles: brainstormers, who are truly the people working their way through the item, and "expert witnesses" who can provide key details or contributions as necessary, through slack like you said.
