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posted by martyb on Tuesday May 15 2018, @12:17PM   Printer-friendly
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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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by captain normal on Tuesday May 15 2018, @04:57PM (1 child)

    by captain normal (2205) on Tuesday May 15 2018, @04:57PM (#680095)

    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.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Tuesday May 15 2018, @06:05PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 15 2018, @06:05PM (#680118) Journal

    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.

    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:

    Nobody wants to name their baby after their digital slave.

    If you think *you* are the master and *the device* is the slave, you do not understand what is going on.