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posted by
martyb
on Tuesday May 15 2018, @12:17PM
from the increased-interest-in-the-names-Blexa,-Clexa,-and-Dlexa dept.
from the increased-interest-in-the-names-Blexa,-Clexa,-and-Dlexa dept.
'Alexa' has become a less popular baby name since Amazon launched Echo
Amazon started widely selling its Echo speaker, voiced by the Star Trek-inspired personal assistant Alexa, in 2015. That year, 6,050 baby girls in the United States were named Alexa, or 311 for every 100,000 female babies born.
Since then, the name has declined in popularity 33 percent, according to new data from the Social Security Administration crunched by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen. Last year, just 3,883 baby girls were named Alexa.
Nobody wants to name their baby after their digital slave.
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"Alexa" Baby Name Falls in Popularity Since Release of Amazon's Smart Speakers
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Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped.
-- Groucho Marx's last words
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @04:01PM (6 children)
I get the fact that to be a cool non-conformist you need to piss on these devices, I really do get that, but I am curious what the bigger picture is supposed to be here. We are now at the point, which 20 years ago seemed immensely challenging, that we've achieved one of the "cool" Star Trek technologies, namely talking and interacting with a computer using natural language. Getting here has involved using an enormous amount of computational power, advanced algorithms, and the availability of massive amount of training data. We now have this technology which we are now supposed to shun. Are we supposed to reject this technology outright? What is the acceptable alternative, one that doesn't send information back to a private cloud? If I ask one of these devices to make a dinner reservation for me, or to order me pizza delivery, how is it supposed to do that without sending any of my personal information around? Where is the Open Source version of this, does it require me to set up a many-node computational farm in my basement to operate?
I've never heard any one articulate an acceptable alternate, nor explain how that would work.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Gaaark on Tuesday May 15 2018, @04:12PM
Mycroft.ai
Help them...Make it better.
Working.... affirmative!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by captain normal on Tuesday May 15 2018, @04:57PM (1 child)
The difference is that the machines in Star Trek weren't mining data in order to sell you something you don't need or trying to control your life in other ways. Of course that was science fiction, not real life, and the show was broken up in segments in order to run advertising. So maybe the whole of the Star Trek series was controlled by the Ferengi.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Tuesday May 15 2018, @06:05PM
Additionally--importantly--in Star Trek you spoke to your (personal|ship's) computer, it recognized your voice, parsed it, and gave you the appropriate response.
It *did not* act as a dumb terminal that simply sent the waveforms to a megacorp on some contracted planet that then accessed your big brother file, updated it, and then sent back some sort of response for the ship's computer to parrot to you.
You never saw "Computer, scan decks three through six for intruders." "Sorry, no connection to MegaCorp[tm] servers. Please check your subspace connection."
That would not have been acceptable on Star Trek and it shouldn't be acceptable now. Personal computers (and even tablets and cell phones) are powerful enough to run voice recognition, parsers, and speech algorithms. That's where all the processing should happen that doesn't require sharing data.
Sure, "Make me a dinner reservation" requires sharing some data, but "Put my jazz playlist on repeat" certainly doesn't. And it's insane to send that sort of command to MegaCorp[tm] servers so they can log the request.
FTFS:
If you think *you* are the master and *the device* is the slave, you do not understand what is going on.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday May 15 2018, @05:42PM (1 child)
Another responder already said it, but I'll say it again: in Star Trek, this technology was genuinely useful to its human masters, and was under their control. It wasn't under the control of some giant for-profit corporation that was really using it for some nefarious purpose (namely, selling you shit you don't need, and gathering as much data on you as possible for that purpose).
If someone comes up with open-source technology like this and you can just run it on your own systems for your own purposes, and not needlessly share your private data with some faceless corporations, then great! But this isn't that.
How would an open-source version work? I don't know. But fundamentally, the nay-sayers are questioning whether the benefits are worth the costs. You point out the benefits, but you ignore the costs. The other thing to consider here is lock-in and monopolization: even if this technology works great, we're handing power to only one or a few large corporations who are nearing monopoly status (in particular markets), or at least oligopoly status. That usually doesn't end well for consumers: it's hard to do anything differently, it's hard to make a new service that competes, and these companies having all this data on everyone doesn't bode well, as it's just too easy to abuse this power or for someone else to abuse it (hackers who access the data, as we've seen *many* times already when hackers get access to peoples' financial data).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 16 2018, @09:09AM
Star Trek didn't have cameras in most areas of the ships (even in TNG->Voyager era!) and while sensors could pick up general lifesign readings, without a communicator badge on, they couldn't identify a specific individual among the people on the ship, allowing them to wander freely unobstructed unless they were entering a secure area requiring an access code.
If you replace their communicator/badges with a cell phone, you basically have what we do today. Only third parties are in charge of your device, rather than like in Trek where a badge had to be enabled by a touch to allow either sending or receiving of audio and was not remotely activateable in almost all circumstances (there might have been a few alien species where that happened, but not the federation itself.)
Maybe a crowd sourced comparison of each Star Trek show, its technology and comparison to the modern equivalent of the technology is in order to compare empowerment of the individual or group to enslavement of the individual or group. I am sure current society and trek society each have pros and cons that would make excellent reading material... or an excellent exclusive soylent news article.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday May 15 2018, @06:50PM
There it is.
You could use an open source implementation that runs on your computer, like Mycroft [wikipedia.org]. You could allow your digital assistant (running on your computer) to access Internet resources and databases on your terms, and also provide information for it to use locally, such as a downloaded offline copy of Wikipedia (no need to keep the images and video, and storing it locally on an SSD will allow it to be read faster).
If you do want to use a digital assistant run remotely by Google, Amazon, etc., maybe you could use it only a device in which you know that you control access to the microphone. So you use a desktop application rather than a smart speaker, and you turn your microphone on before using it, and off when you're done.
In the future, digital assistants could become a lot more useful. Machine learning hardware, including GPUs or more customized options like TPUs, could be used locally to accelerate the digital assistant. You won't have the full power of the "cloud", but it's not clear that you will need it. Google and others are trying to move AI functions on to the devices themselves to reduce latency, something they are calling "edge computing" [soylentnews.org]. But that doesn't mean it's not spying on you. So use AI on your own terms.
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