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> You don’t need an artificially intelligent robot to tell you about the weather every day. Just look outside or watch the local news or even look at your phone
by xyzzy_plugh 9y ago
> You don’t need an artificially intelligent robot to tell you about the weather every day. Just look outside or watch the local news or even look at your phone.
I stopped reading here. This is FUD, or scaremongering, or something.
The truth is the reason the Echo family (and others) have seen such success is because they approach the virtual assistant problem from, in my opinion a novel and underutilized, place: the home appliance.
Sure I can pull out my phone (or is it charging on the nightstand?) to check the weather, but I can ask my Echo while I'm tying my shoes and by the time I'm done grab a jacket if necessary. It's so natural.
I have bought Echo dots as gifts for family and friends -- there seems to be a 50/50 split between the primary use being for music or home automation. It's far less kludgier than using a phone to turn your lights on and off. What if you have guests?
Lastly, when I travel I find myself missing the utility of being able to simply ask a question in the middle of another task, hands free. I've heard that some hotels are installing Echos, I think that's great.
Overall I think they're a great value add to my life -- I could buy a new phone for almost a thousand bucks and I barely get any noticeable improvement (and the improvements are usually along the lines of things actually working the way they are supposed to).
For $30, an Echo is a steal.
- naturalgradient 9y agoWhat about the larger cost to the environment? Is it worth having rare earth minerals mined by literal slaves in Africa and China? Is it worth the energy associated with transporting the resources, processing them, assembling the device and delivering it to you? All for the convenience of not pulling out your phone while you are tying your shoes? I do not understand this uncritical consumption. $30 may be 'a steal', but think about whom you are stealing from.
- sethhochberg 9y agoThat seems like something of a defeatist argument, considering everything from the phone the person would be pulling out of their pocket to the pants the pocket is in to the shoes that are being tied to the door they're getting ready to walk out of was probably, in some form, produced by an unfair labor market or a company who has a less-than-stellar environmental record. Removing a single consumer electronic device from your life isn't going to impact those global markets - they're problems best tackled at a different scale.
- Teichopsia 9y agothey're problems best tackled at a different scale. I'm curious. Which way?
- Odin78 9y agoI'm not sethhochberg, but if I had to guess: Government regulations.
- naturalgradient 9y ago'Removing a single consumer electronic device from your life isn't going to impact those global markets' <- Indeed it will not. Only if society begins viewing owning and using resources differently (which will happen eventually once certain resources get scarce), change will happen. This is why I am so pessimistic about humanity. It's an outrageous opinion to sacrifice even a bit of convenience for not using resources. I see the angry downvotes pouring in on my previous post because (unsurprisingly) people get angry at having their consumerist lifestyle criticised.
- euyyn 9y agoFor the record, I downvoted you and am not angry at all about your posts.
- naturalgradient 9y agoAnd how is this contributing to the debate?
- Teichopsia 9y agoIf you were to cite verifiable sources I would say this is a fair point.
- naturalgradient 9y agohttps://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Teardown/33953 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Teardown/33953 Hardware teardown of an early generation echo. Worst, all of this is electronic waste in a few years. We all do this and just by design, smartphones and laptops are not made to last. We accumulate such a staggering about of waste considering the energy/resources used to produce this. The larger problem is that technology enables us to consume more, so I don't see how technology can ever solve the problem unless a serious shift in perception happens.
- iak8god 9y agoI'd guess Teichopsia was more interested in sources about slave labor, energy costs, and environmental impact. E.g. [https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-what-we-die-for-child-slaves-made-your-phone-battery https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-is-what-we-die-for-child-... | This Is What We Die For: Child Slaves Made Your Phone Battery]
- jack6e 9y agoGreat article a few years ago from the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-...
- apple4ever 9y agoYes, yes it is.
- libria 9y ago> For $30, an Echo is a steal. For an extra $5 they'll throw in a smart plug https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KWEAH1K https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KWEAH1K
- vanadium 9y agoGot this deal a week and some change back, along with a separate two-pack to dip my toes into home automation. The TP-Link smart plugs will work in full concert only about 75% of the time; it's Home => Kasa, then an Alexa => Kasa integration. "Ok Alexa, turn off/on the Living Room" gives me hilarious permutations of which of the three light up, are delayed, need to be asked again, etc. I've done enough wireless network testing locally to know it isn't network strength getting in the way. It was a nice toe-dip and I'll probably keep messing with the idea of home automation...but I am really not impressed with the lack of responsiveness and consistency. Probably going to shift gears more to localized automation next without involving the cloud.
- dpeck 9y agoUgh, these things still aren't stateful enough to hit eventual consistency? Thats not much different than the X10 stuff I was playing with more than a decade ago. I had a few outdoor lights that controlled from a computer and serial adapter and just had to blast whatever command I wanted several times and hoped it worked.
- vanadium 9y agoMy wife nearly jettisoned the smart plugs after 5x attempting to get them all to turn on at once. Worse, sometimes a command will hang, leaving two lights on and the other one just randomly lights up a few minutes later. The eTekcity 1Tx/5Rx remote outlets running on (I'm pretty certain) 433.92Mhz that these TP-Link smart plugs replaced work every single time. (Going back to those is sounding better, now that I think about it.)
- coupdejarnac 9y agoAs a counterpoint, it seems like everyone under 30 years old does not know how to drive anywhere without navigation assistance. People aren't learning how to read a map. Whenever I am in the car with someone else I have to direct them where to go. If you use devices or software to do everything for you, you do not develop any intuition for how things work or where things are.
- kllrnohj 9y agoThere's a difference between being able to read a map and having memorized a map. I read maps all the time, be it google maps or even the maps in video games. But I rely entirely on navigation to get places because memorizing a map is not something I find value in. I don't think that's a bad thing, either. This is how thousands of years of social progress happened. We stopped learning how to use sun dials. We stopped learning how to use a sextant. These were replaced by superior implementations and the world moved on to bigger & better things.
- dpark 9y ago> People aren't learning how to read a map. So what? If relying on GPS navigation erodes ability to read a map, doesn't relying on a map also erode ability to navigate by intuition or ability to follow verbal navigation instructions? I actually agree with the claim the heavy use of GPS navigation erodes ability to navigate successfully without it, though I have only anecdotal evidence of this. My own ability to navigate definitely seems to have declined when I started relying on GPS nav frequently, first Garmin/TomTom and now Google maps. But so what? Overall I'm significantly more efficient at navigating now overall. Net net it's a gain, which is the very promise of technology. (Almost) No one laments the decline in ability to type on a manual typewriter that has come from the rise of general purpose computing or the decline in ability to use an abacus or sliderule that has come from the creation of calculators. The loss of these skills is far outweighed by the benefits.
- sliverstorm 9y agoNot to take the bait & segue too much, but maps have been a core part of navigation for centuries upon centuries, and they generally teach & augment your own ability to navigate rather than navigate for you. No one misses the technical skill to use a sextant, typewriter, or sliderule. Those things are in a sense just drudgery. But if you lose the ability to navigate, compose, or do math in the process, that's a different story.
- Supernaut 9y ago> It's far less kludgier than using a phone to turn your lights on and off. Why can't you just stand up and, you know, flick the light switch? This kind of nonsense puts me in mind of "Wall-E". Fat, inert humans being hauled around on hovercrafts, their every need tended to by a watchful panoply of machines. If someone in my family gives me an Echo/Alexa/whatever, it's going in the trash.
- tjr225 9y agoAgreed, but mostly imo because the light switch works fine as it is. I believe smart lights solve a problem that doesn't really exist. Of course this stuff could be really helpful for people with disabilities, however.
- copperx 9y agoHome automation is a life changer for the disabled, frail, and the chronically ill. For that reason alone they are worthy of development. If lazy people are the driver and primary market for these technologies, so be it, as far as I am concerned.
- escapologybb 9y agoThis. I'm quadriplegic and the Amazon Echo has revolutionised my life for the better, I made a big full comment on the other thread on this topic on the front page right now so I won't repeat myself. But I'm a pretty good reason for these devices to exist. Obviously they need more privacy controls, but so far they have been a unalloyed good for me.
- madamelic 9y ago>Why can't you just stand up and, you know, flick the light switch? Because it is more efficient to yell at Alexa "Turn off the bathroom lights" than stand up, walk to the bathroom and turn them off. Or better yet, having all your lights and things turning on as you walk in the door. Or having Alexa wake you up by turning on your lights slowly. Or baking something and telling Alexa to set a timer. No more having to type into Google "20 minute timer" then remembering to keep that tab open and your sound on.
- JohnJamesRambo 9y agoYep, I don't have time to look at my phone, go to a website etc. always, or want to. I spend enough time looking at screens all day and night. It is nice to be doing something else and ask Alexa with my voice, which is doing nothing at the moment, what the weather is, the price of bitcoin is, to play Mozart, etc.
- vermontdevil 9y agoWeather... I live in the midwest. Looking out the window tlls me absolutely nothing. There could be a line of storm coming towards me with potential cells of tornados. But that's maybe 30 to 50 miles away while it's sunny and nice outside. Most of the Echo use among my family is music. They just want something they can stream and listen as background noise. Sometimes they use it as a radio station. Nothing more beyond that.
- BlackjackCF 9y agoYup! This is exactly what I've been thinking. Are we really going to fearmonger about HomePods, Echos, and Google Homes when we have a microphone on our laptops/cellphones?
- gav 9y agoThere's a quote from Douglas Adams - "Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things"; in the decade and a half or so since he wrote that, things seem to have moved even faster, and now I would possibly restate that to twenty-five. Recently I've been reconsidering my outlook on new things, and though I dismissed Alexa as a fad, I now own two Dots, a couple of Hue bulbs, and some smart outlets. They solved some basic issues really well: - No ceiling light in the living room, which is my apartment's entry, "Alexa, turn on floor lamp", beats walking across the room in the dark to find the foot switch - My bedroom lights didn't have a dimmer, being able to say "Alexa, set bedroom to 35%" - I have Sonos in most rooms, so I like to leave music for the dogs when I leave the house, "Alexa, play jazz music in living room", beats using the app on my phone - "Alexa, what's the news?" to get five minutes of news from NPR in the morning is more enjoyable than looking at my phone Anyway, my point is that a small investment resulted in me having some tech that, though minor, does improve my life. And this re-evaluating new things idea makes me feel less like an old curmudgeon (of thirty-eight).
- codazoda 9y agoI'd like to add that I'm over 40 years old and I just purchased a bunch of these devices for my home. I'll have an Echo in at least 4 rooms. It will be connected to my garage doors, some of my lights, my thermostat and we'll use them to play music. I don't think they are "against the natural order of things". They have some privacy problems but they also have the potential to change our lives in small ways that are valuable.