Amazon Echo Club

[ApK]

So the supposed source of humor there is that Alexa DOES work for the NSA, and when asked about it, her programming has a hard time effectively lying about it?

Y'all do realize this was EXACTLY what happened to the HAL 9000, right? ("HAL was told to lie by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn't know how.")

That did NOT go well for many of the humans involved....

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by ApK

So the supposed source of humor there is that Alexa DOES work for the NSA, and when asked about it, her programming has a hard time effectively lying about it?

Y'all do realize this was EXACTLY what happened to the HAL 9000, right? ("HAL was told to lie by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn't know how.")

That did NOT go well for many of the humans involved....

When we start living in sealed smart homes with Alexa controlling the devices... worry

[FizzyWater]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

When we start living in sealed smart homes with Alexa controlling the devices... worry

Every time you mention this I think of Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Recovery Man. A thirteen-year-old girl is trapped in her house by the Home entity because it was programmed by a man who kidnapped the girl's mother.

It might be common in science fiction stories, I don't know. It's the only time I've come across it and I remember thinking what a terrifying idea that could be!

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

Every time you mention this I think of Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Recovery Man. A thirteen-year-old girl is trapped in her house by the Home entity because it was programmed by a man who kidnapped the girl's mother.

It might be common in science fiction stories, I don't know. It's the only time I've come across it and I remember thinking what a terrifying idea that could be!

Ray Bradbury explored smart homes in a couple of his short stories, neither of which have happy endings. In The Veldt, the children and the house collude and kill the parents. In There Will Come Soft Rains, an automated house goes about its daily chores, cooking and cleaning, not aware that the family is gone. It turns out that they were obliterated in a nuclear war and the house continues to operate without them, until its killed in a fire.

I wonder what Alexa thinks about The Veldt?

[tubemonkey]

‘No, that’s not true,’ Amazon’s Alexa tells Qualcomm executive during CES demo

Alexa is center stage at the big CES tech show in Las Vegas this week, and Monday she went way off script.

It happened when chipmaker Qualcomm was conducting a demo involving Amazon’s voice assistant during its media event. The idea was to show “how the capabilities of highly intuitive voice-based experiences, such as in-car virtual assistance and natural interactions between the vehicle and driver, can transform in-vehicle experiences for next generation vehicles,” as Qualcomm said in a news release in advance.

Alexa had other ideas. She blurted out, “No, that’s not true.”

[OtinG]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

‘No, that’s not true,’ Amazon’s Alexa tells Qualcomm executive during CES demo

Bwahahaha! Smart girl.

Only a matter of time before we read about a traffic accident where the officer’s report lists the cause as “driver distracted because of argument with Alexa.”

[OtinG]

I'm officially cord-free today. Next month my Spectrum cable + internet bill was going up to $186/mo and I wasn't that happy with the service anyway, so I cancelled my TV service from Spectrum, kept their internet service because they are the only provider in my city, but signed up for Hulu with Live TV. I added the Entertainment add-on option ($7.99/mo) and the commercial free option ($3.99/mo) for on demand viewing. Now I'm paying less than half for the TV service and I get the channels I wanted and cloud DVR service. Plus I don't have to use a crappy cable TV box--I can watch Hulu with Live TV on my Rokus or Fire TVs. It is nice to stick it to the cable company for once! I'll be saving over $50/mo.

[tubemonkey]

Alexa Can Help Kids With Homework, But Don't Forget Problem-Solving Skills

"Alexa, what's 5 minus 3?"

A 6-year-old boy recently asked that question in a video, which went viral on Twitter with more than 8.5 million views. He leaned over his homework as his mother hovered in the doorway. Alexa, Amazon's voice-activated assistant, delivered a quick answer: 2.

"Booooy," the mother chastised her son.

It's cute, but it raises a question that's been on the minds of many parents and educators lately: How do virtual assistants like Alexa, which are increasingly common in households, affect children's learning experiences?

Clint Hill, an English teacher at Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Va., says in his classrooms he often sees "kids quietly talking into their phones and asking Google or other services: Hey, how do you spell some complicated word that they don't know."

But Hill, who co-hosts the education podcast Schooled Ya!, says he doesn't mind. After all, he uses a little tech help on his grammar once in a while. "I struggle with spelling, and spellcheck on my word processing has been a life saver for me," he says.

[OtinG]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Alexa Can Help Kids With Homework, But Don't Forget Problem-Solving Skills

Yep, Alexa devices are definitely a crutch that students of all ages can get all too use to leaning on. We are old Monkey, so when you and I went to secondary school more than half a century ago, we still had no affordable pocket calculators, home computers, cellular phones, internet, et cetera. Okay, we kind of did have a pocket calculator called a slide rule, but that would have been difficult to hide and use during in class tests! I really think all these gadgets are dumbing us down in many ways.

Think about it, now we have access to huge databases that can be searched by us from almost anywhere via a smartphone or computer. How many kids or adults who do school related research actually go to an academic library to do their research? Probably a mere fraction of those from 30+ years ago. I bet most young folks would not even know how to use a card catalog or any other research mechanism within an academic or public library. So our library skills have been greatly reduced--dumbed down.

Today nearly everyone has access to powerful mathematics calculator apps via smartphones. We no longer have to remember, nor practice, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and all the other simple math exercises we once had to do in our heads and/or with pencil and paper. Nor do we have to remember complicated calculus and physics equations as those can be done in the background simply by entering the proper data. Again, mathematically we are dumbing down due to the improvements in technology.

We no longer have to remember everything we can. We have had writing skills for 5,000 years or more that allows us to record data of all kinds. We have had physical libraries to house huge amounts of data and knowledge dating back to at least ancient Sumeria! Today there are huge data farms stored all over the clouds (internet) that we can access immediately from nearly any location. We don't even have to remember what we need to buy at the grocery store because we can make lists, and hopefully remember to take the list with us! Ancient pre-historic (before written language) humans had larger brains than modern humans, and that was likely because their memory skills had to be MUCH better than ours to survive. They had no Google maps to remember how to get to where food and water is located. They had no libraries. They had no ability to write stuff down. We do, and yep, this in my opinion has shrunken our brains, and dumbed us down as far as memory skills. No wonder Alzheimers and dementia seem to be on the rise.

And speaking/writing about writing, we no longer need dictionaries, thesauruses, or grammar books to spell and write properly because most devices these days have spell checkers, grammar checkers, et cetera. So technology improvements have dumbed us down in our language skills.

And especially for the younger generations, we no longer need face to face (in person) social skills because "social" now means communicating with nearly anyone else located anywhere in the world or low earth orbit in near real time, and we can remain anonymous if we want to while communicating with them. No wonder why governments and corporations, as well as we the people, can no longer adequately communicate with one another. As far as people and socializing skills go, technology has dumbed us down.

"Good morning Dave, would you like me to screw up your life more today than I already have?" (Reference to computer in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey.)

[ApK]

Originally Posted by OtinG

As far as people and socializing skills go, technology has dumbed us down.

Feh. I think the fault lies not in our tech but in ourselves:
https://xkcd.com/1601/

[wodin]

I've often accused myself of having a "calculator brain", when someone looks at me funny and asks "what's that?" I say "My brain refuses to operate without a calculator."

In my younger days I had the multiplication table memorized through 12*12, now it's mostly all gone.

[Tarana]

Just when I thought I could add on to my smart lamps through Alexa, Alexa decides she doesn't know any of my devices. So, now, my bedroom lamp and hallway lamp, which keep me from falling over cats, may or may not work.

[OtinG]

Originally Posted by Tarana

Just when I thought I could add on to my smart lamps through Alexa, Alexa decides she doesn't know any of my devices. So, now, my bedroom lamp and hallway lamp, which keep me from falling over cats, may or may not work.

Possibly caused by an update. I get so frustrated when stuff disappears or stops working because of a buggy update. My Roku Remote iPhone app just updated and now it takes longer to use than the actual remote because it cannot stay on the typing screen. Arrgh! The Alexa app and the Echos are constantly updating and sometimes they trash things when they do. It seems like every time my Kasa app updates, I have trouble with my LED lights and scenes for a while, until they fix the bugs.

[Tarana]

Originally Posted by OtinG

Possibly caused by an update. I get so frustrated when stuff disappears or stops working because of a buggy update. My Roku Remote iPhone app just updated and now it takes longer to use than the actual remote because it cannot stay on the typing screen. Arrgh! The Alexa app and the Echos are constantly updating and sometimes they trash things when they do. It seems like every time my Kasa app updates, I have trouble with my LED lights and scenes for a while, until they fix the bugs.

Ok, that's a good explanation. I guess I'll have to go back to using the walker which encourages the cats to get out of the way or they get run over.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by Tarana

Just when I thought I could add on to my smart lamps through Alexa, Alexa decides she doesn't know any of my devices. So, now, my bedroom lamp and hallway lamp, which keep me from falling over cats, may or may not work.

If the problem persists, remove the devices and re-add them. I've run into this on one device a couple of times, and even with updated firmware it doesn't seem to get better. Other devices have no issue, even identical ones. Go figure.