>“Plausible” does not mean “not literally impossible”. It means something is reasonably possible. Your scenario is not reasonably possible. It is exceedingly un

>“Plausible” does not mean “not literally impossible”. It means something is reasonably possible. Your scenario is not reasonably possible. It is exceedingly unlikely. "Plausible" means it reasonably could happen, yes. It doesn't necessarily have to mean that it's expected to happen in the immediate term (unless that's the pre-existing context to the discussion). I don't believe conditions are such that it will happen right now. But that doesn't put it into the realm of mere theory, the things that make you say "I mean, sure, that's possible" behind rolling eyes. Given the correct political conditions, I would venture that these eventualities are not just plausible, but downright expected. Maybe not the black bag, but certainly monitoring, penalization, enforced re-education (which portends black bagging). >You clearly don’t believe in the plausibility of these scenarios or you would not have three Echos in your house. Most of us do a lot of things that we know we really shouldn't do out of convenience, habit, etc. I don't think it's likely that I'd get picked up for anything that my kids end up telling my Echo, at least not at this juncture, which is why I still have them. If my religious or political beliefs were more fringe, or if the ground continues to crumble such that they become fringe by virtue of the cliff of acceptable discourse growing ever-shorter, then I would certainly consider it unsafe to let the children have access to the Echo. We monitor it now, but it's in a place where they can talk to it if they want. Wouldn't be that way if I thought we had something to worry about. It's true that the archived recordings could also be used against us, but I think that we're moderate enough that there'd be too many other more worrisome targets to pursue first. Of course, you never really know. Should things get this way, I would probably still keep one of the listeners hooked up in some room that is rarely used for conversation and feed it information that the bosses would be happy about. Maybe I would say "Echo, please tell me about all of Jeff Bezos's accomplishments." In a more realistic climate where Bezos doesn't cross over into overt dictatorship, it may be smart to do this alternately with various political figures, so that I can cherry-pick proof of early admiration for whichever political figure wins and implements the dystopian future. This would be much smarter than just unplugging the device and having the line go dead, especially if they correlate the date the feed went dead with a specific political event.