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Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child
- kerr23 5y agoAnyone have any luck trying to bing / google “challenge to do” and get that result? I didn’t find it after a couple variations. Also any reason to believe that the tweet was true? (I’m not on twitter so i don’t have any context for the veracity of the source)
- emodendroket 5y agoNone in particular, though other voice services I've used are dependent on search engine aggregation like this.
- pasquinelli 5y agoi was rolling my eyes, assuming the lethality of the challenge would be specific to the child, like suggesting a peanut butter sandwich to a kid with a peanut allergy. my assumption was wrong.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoWhy do people buy and use these things? And why have they taught their kids to use them? (And what looks like for fun...). I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house. Not only is it unnecessary, but as you can see from thia tweet, they're never going to be perfect.
- donatj 5y agoNothing is perfect. If we required perfection to accept a technology, we'd still be workshopping fire. I walk into my house and say "Alexa lights on" and my first floor lights turn on, it's magical. You get used to it to the point that using a light switch feels like changing the channel with a knob on a TV.
- rzz3 5y agoI never liked talking to technology, and I’m not elderly either. I don’t know why people find this better than just pulling out their phone and tapping a couple of buttons.
- maccard 5y agoPersonally I don't know why people find pulling out their phone is better than powering up their desktop and googling something from there? Sarcasm aside, voice is another interface. A mouse allows things a keyboard can't do alone. Touch and haptics allow things that a keyboard and mouse doesn't, and voice allows things that the others don't. Alexa and Co aren't just voice interfaces though, they're speech to text combined with NLP. It's the equivalent of knowing ls, find, grep, sort and using that to display the attributes of the newest mp4 in your folder versus typing in 'what is the newest video in my videos' and getting the same answer. These devices support context (if I ask Google what's on today, it will give me my calendar, and if my partner asks it will respond with theirs), are intuitive, easy to manage and cheap. It's no wonder they're so popular
- nightfly 5y agoI'd keep my Google home even if its only feature was "ok google find my phone". Timers and controlling music without having to move my hands can be incredibly useful. Everything else is hit-and-miss
- Aeolun 5y agoI’d like it better if those were the only things it ever did.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoThere's clearly market for "dumb" smart devices (albeit a small one). Anyone know of any companies doing this? Preferably open source?
- walrus01 5y agoBecause I've been using the Internet since 1993 and doing network security things professionally since 1999, I own exactly zero of these devices.
- ckdarby 5y agoYet you have your phone, laptop, your family + family members also have laptop & phone. You're already being tracked and listened to all the time. You're only as strong as the weakest device on you and or in your phone at any point.
- rzz3 5y agoSome of us actively take steps to avoid being tracked all of the time. People like you are the reason people like me have to try so hard. I’m so sick of this argument.
- walrus01 5y agoI wholeheartedly agree, but that doesn't mean I want to add the additional attack surface/threat model of having an always on Alexa or Google home device, even before I consider the additional privacy and data sharing implications.
- circularfoyers 5y agoI feel like this argument is not productive for improving privacy because it suggests we shouldn't try. I think improving privacy is incremental and these improvements can make a difference, however small. It's never going to be complete, but neither are security measures.
- notriddle 5y agoThe end point of the argument is that there is no such thing as individual privacy. Privacy is defined by the ability to distinguish people, even if it’s just process of elimination (you know that all but one of the houses on the block has a smart oven, and you can figure out that somebody in the block turned an oven on based on the minute changes in natural gas pressure, therefore you can spy on that last person almost as effectively as if they had installed a smart oven themselves). Either everybody is private, or nobody is. There is no such thing as “f u, got mine” here. Privacy is inherently a collective problem, so it must be solved by political means, not by individual choices.
- yeetaccount4 5y agoI’ve never even seen one. I’m sure lots of people have them, but I don’t know any. I’m more concerned about the latest generation of teens that haven’t been more than a day in their lives without an internet connected device in front of them since they were toddlers. They’re going to be fucked up. Their parents know it too, but if they take the device away from them, they’ll have to get off their own devices and…interact with their children.
- mcphage 5y agoInteract with my children? Sorry, can’t see them around the massive newspaper blocking me off from the world.
- mattlondon 5y agoWhy do you think that access to information is a bad thing? You could have said the same thing about kids with access to books.
- maccard 5y agoHow did the previous generations cope with the battle of video games being so addictive, or film and television, or rock music, or fiction books?
- SyzygistSix 5y agoBy limiting tv and video game time. Although my reading time was not ever limited, at least until I was older and I had to do my math homework first.
- userbinator 5y agoI've found that although I'm the "most techy" person in my group, yet I'm also the most "luddist" --- I have zero "smart devices" in my home, and all my white goods are mid-century if not older. The idea of having an always-on surveillance device owned by Big Tech in one's home has always felt incredibly dystopian. As a comment on an article when Alexa first came out said: "we don't need to force the proles to install telescreens, they'll do it themselves."
- CyberRabbi 5y ago> The idea of having an always-on surveillance device owned by Big Tech in one's home has always felt incredibly dystopian. The layman’s capacity for embracing dystopia cannot be underestimated.
- shrimp_emoji 5y agoThe laser eye surgeon with glasses. ;)
- seanhunter 5y agoI get the irony, but sometimes you can have a problem that is easily correctable with glasses yet falls within the error bars for laser eye surgery. I need glasses for everyday life (including having any kind of low-light vision at all), but when I looked into having laser eye surgery they told me my current vision was within the bounds of what they would consider a successful outcome of the surgery and therefore I shouldn't have it done unless my vision deteriorated further.
- desine 5y agoThis became a bit of a text meme for a bit. I think there's actually an origin in some fantasy fiction narrative about a wizard and a magic rock, but I cannot find it now. Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise. source: https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoI've been gifted Alexa devices nearly every holiday season since they came out. My partners mother says it's so we can talk to each other. I put my sandal down and don't allow any of it on my LAN. The social stigma is strong. Google Home was nice for awhile because I could ask simple things without pulling out my phone (and giving it a chance to hook me) but I've since removed all smart devices. Good riddance.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago> My partners mother says it's so we can talk to each other. Like... A phone? Maybe a speaker phone? Am I missing something here?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoThat was my reply to her. We all have cellphones.
- datavirtue 5y agoSame here. I went all in, had dots everywhere. After confirming the complete lack of privacy the final straw was when I asked Alexa for customer service and "she" looked up customer service and read me the definition. I unplugged them all and threw them in a junk bin.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fooblitzky 5y agoThe kids teach themselves. They are surprisingly good at listening to sounds and observing correlated effects.
- schnevets 5y agoIt's how I feel about kids being glued to YouTube screens with auto-suggest. The success measurement is based on stickiness and the algorithm is learning based on failure. Tech spent so long celebrating the virtue of failure, they neglected to recognize that some failure can be magnitudes more dangerous than others (like a web page failing to load compared to YouTube suggesting an inappropriate video to a 5 year old).
- necovek 5y agoIt's actually quite funny: they could possibly implement an algorithm that's going to move to more boring (not in child's interest) suggestions after some time (eg 1h of screen time) to encourage healthier viewing habits. But I think that's a harder problem to solve since all creators are going for addictive content, so figuring out interest is most important.
- rattlesnakedave 5y agoI have a couple I use for smart home automation and I like them. Doing things like setting timers, getting the weather, info about Amazon shipments, etc. is nice to have and convenient. “They’re never going to be perfect” is true, but I generally ask very little of my smart devices, and they perform very well for the majority of peoples use cases.
- dangrossman 5y agoBecause they make my life better? I enjoy being able to use a simple voice command to change the temperature of the room, dim a light, play a song, check the outdoor temperature before taking my dog on a walk, or close the garage door from my bedroom because I forgot to do it before going up for the night. It feels like living in the Star Trek universe to me. I have a smart speaker in every room. I knew I wanted this long ago. I had coded my own version of Alexa before smart speakers were a thing. It ran on a tablet PC I hung on the living room wall, using a mishmash of free and commercial APIs for voice recognition, text to speech, and smart home device control. A software engineer at Liftmaster emailed me back then about my strange website usage when I hacked up an API for voice control of my smart garage door opener. But all that was replaced by Echo speakers when the Echo Plus came out and was able to become my new Zigbee hub.
- donkarma 5y ago
- rglullis 5y agoDoes it have to come with the surveillance apparatus, the absolute lack of legal responsibility for potentially fatal actions and the perverse incentives for mindless consumerism, though? You know how the sausage is made. Wouldn't you like to at least fund a viable ethical alternative?
- astura 5y ago
- dangrossman 5y agoI'm perfectly content with Amazon's product. I am happy to fund it in exchange for the utility it provides me.
- rglullis 5y agoIt's interesting to point out that your answer does not defend the ethical aspect of Amazon and consequently your own choice. And you don't think that you can do anything to counter the bad side of it? Don't you think there is no externality that you should be paying for?
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Why do people buy and use these things? Because they are convenient for lots of routine tasks. > And why have they taught their kids to use them? If they are in a house with kids, the kids don't need to be actively taught to start using them. > I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house. Pretty close, yeah. > Not only is it unnecessary Unless you are dirt poor, chances are most of the things you have and use are unnecessary. > but as you can see from thia tweet, they're never going to be perfect. This tweet tells how they are (well, Alexa is) now, not what they will (n)ever be. But, yes, nothing is ever perfect. Clothes dryers are both unnecessary and imperfect, and kill people every year: are you going to go on a crusade against them, next?
- perfopt 5y agoClothes dryers - please elaborate. Why are they dangerous? (serious question)
- knodi123 5y agoFire risk, largely from people who don't know there's a lint trap and that they're supposed to clean it.
- ndsipa_pomu 5y agoWell, that sounds like a design flaw if lint is being deliberately held where a heater can set it on fire. (Disclaimer - my HotPoint tumble dryer got recalled due to this kind of design flaw burning down a few houses)
- Kalium 5y agoThere's also a fire risk from the vent getting clogged with tiny bits of lint that weren't caught by the trap.
- cyounkins 5y agoI'm guessing fire risk - https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-tools/US-Fire-Problem/Home-fires-involving-clothes-dryers-and-washing-machines https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-too...
- paxys 5y agoDo you have a smartphone in your pocket right now? What's the difference?
- pdonis 5y agoYou can take steps to lock down your smartphone and limit its ability to spy on you, since you only need it to hear what you're saying when you're using it as a phone. You can't do that with these smart home devices; an intrinsic part of their function is that they have to be always listening.
- paxys 5y agoHow do you stop your phone from always listening to you? It has a microphone and an internet connection. The hardware and software are closed source and out of your control. It is also orders of magnitude more powerful than a smart home device and is within listening distance of you pretty much 24x7. If you are scared about an Echo in your house then you should be keeping your phone, tablet, laptop and 50 other similar devices locked up in Faraday cages at all times.
- f1refly 5y agoUsing lineageos without microg at least severely reduces the chance for an "oopsie daisy yes so our microphone really was listenig the whole time and we accidentally used that data for targeting but hey, we're veeery sorry and you're getting a 50ct prime voucher ;)" This is not about escaping every slight chance someone might surveil you, which one can't do anything about anyways, but to make make sure you're at least not part of a dragnet effort powered through the blackbox computer provided by a hostile entity whose only purpose for existing is recording your voice.
- rzz3 5y agoIf Apple was doing this, everyone would know by now. That’s why I buy Apple. They at least pretend to give a shit about privacy.
- Lapsa 5y ago
- malauxyeux 5y ago> Why do people buy and use these things? I don't own one myself, but I gave my legally blind 80-year-old neighbor an Amazon Dot — after explaining the privacy concerns. He'd never used any internet-connected device, but the voice interface was almost instantly accessible to him. That's a really big deal. For context, he told me that if his 1970s stove breaks, he won't replace it because he won't be able to learn a new stove's interface. He regularly uses it for news headlines, sports scores, and checking the weather. He also uses it to access internet radio stations that play music from his era. That music was unavailable to him previously and now he can access it instantly and for free.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoThat's actually a heart warming story. thanks for sharing.
- throwaway2037 5y agoFrom Waymo PR videos on YouTube, I see many of the first riders were visually impaired / blind or physically disabled. While is a bunch of corpo PR, I'm still very happy to see these people have greater mobility!
- bambax 5y agoOkay, that's one use that I can relate to.
- WalterBright 5y ago> Why do people buy and use these things? I'd buy one if I was disabled.
- Underphil 5y agoThat's a really good point, I hadn't thought of the accessibility benefits.
- WalterBright 5y agoIn the meantime, as long as I can stand up and walk, I'm gonna walk over to the light switch to turn it on/off.
- Underphil 5y agoLikewise bud, but in answering the original question, this was a very valid reason.
- Kaze404 5y agoHonestly this was the only inconvenience that got me to purchase a "smart" device. I got cheap rebranded smart bulbs that are always-online, but at least they don't have microphones and can be controlled through an app.
- corobo 5y agoYou trust some cheap brand over Amazon? I'm not saying Amazon should be trusted but that's a really odd stance to take. You've got their app on your phone and their device on your LAN.. I'd just assume I was already a part of someone's botnet
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Kaze404 5y agoI don't, but the threat is much lower. I'll personally take being part of someone's botnet over having an Amazon microphone in my house, but I understand why other people might not.
- Underphil 5y agoEach to their own, I guess. I was given one for Christmas a couple of years back and within 24 hours it was powered off and in the 'junk drawer'. Some people like home automation and such, and if they're willing to accept the (arguably minimal) potential risks then more power to them. Luckily you and I don't have to use one, at least not yet.
- thathndude 5y agoJokes on all those users. I have HomePods, which absolutely suck at returning any information. But they play music well. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature!
- naavis 5y ago> I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house. This mostly applies to the USA.
- SwiftyBug 5y ago> I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house. Are you aware that [1]37% of the people in the world has never used the internet? Also technology is not as accessible everywhere as it is in the US. In my home country, for example, more than 60% of students couldn't catch up with remote classes during the pandemic because they either didn't have a mobile phone (they certainly don't have computers) or they didn't have reliable internet connection. This resulted in the lowest attendance to our SATs in our history. If people still don't have access to entry-level smartphones and internet connection, I doubt they'll have home assistants anytime soon. While I share your worries of having these devices inside peoples homes, I'd like to point that we are far from "the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house". [1]: https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2021-11-29-FactsFigures.aspx https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2021-11-29-Facts...
- naavis 5y agoSmart speakers are very marginal products even in many very developed but non-English-speaking countries because their native language is not supported. Quick googling says Alexa supports English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Hindi, Japanese, and Portuguese.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Crosseye_Jack 5y ago> Why do people buy and use these things? For me it’s basically laziness. I like being able to control my heating / lighting without having to reach for my phone while I’m still in bed. Before having my thermostat on the LAN I would have to guess before going to bed what temperature I would like the house to be at and at what time. Now I switch it on/off from the comfort of my blanket and have the house nice and warm before getting out of bed when I wake. I also like having the ability to switch lights on and off while having my hands full, request music, news, information, create timers, amend my shopping list, without having to reach for my phone (which for me is even more convenient when my hands are in no state to be touching my phone/switches/whatever, cooking or doing the washing up for example). Now for me personally my Echos are mainly just fancy voice remotes for my Home Assistant setup with most of the devices it controls local only devices (I have a couple of plugs I’ve yet to crack open to flash tasmota onto them), because their isn’t anything really competes with them for what they do in the open source hardware “market”. So for the moment I use Echos with the privacy settings all maxed out. While not directly smart speaker related I always hated outdoor PIRs because of their false positive triggers. So using Home Assistant, the camera covering the front of my house, Doods and a bit of JavaScript I now track when a person is moving outside my home at night to turn the outdoor lighting on without it being triggered by the neighbourhood wildlife. For my elderly parents, they use them because their mobility isn’t as great as it used to be. My step dad has to use walking sticks to great around, having the ability to control the lights with just his voice removes the need to stop using this sticks to toggle the lights has he enters/exits a room. My mother has more mobility and has no issues with wall mounted switches when entering / exiting a room she can find the small switches on lamps more of a chore. She also like using lamps over the main ceiling light as it feels more “cozy”. So it saves her having to walk around the room turning on/off multiple lamps (although that could be done with wiring the sockets to a wall switch, but doing that without the need to repair decorations is a pain, much easier to use pass thru relay sockets for things like lamps). They also like the lack of buttons and screens on them. When she wants to listen to the radio/music she can just ask for the station instead of “faffing” with the controls on the radio to find the station/music she wants to listen too. While I understand there are privacy concerns with smart speakers of any brand (and I will not dismiss those concerns of those who have them), I feel with good data protection laws to help deal with those issues smart speakers have a place for those who find it easier to interact with their world via their voice over their hands.
- barbazoo 5y agoKids just pick it up from seeing their parents do it. Why people have them I don't know. Sure they're practical, whatever, but at what cost‽ When will people stop trading convenience for safety, privacy, sustainability, etc? I feel like very few people actually think before they buy something.
- ShamelessC 5y agoWelp, I'm never having kids. This seems like it should be illegal as fuck and yet I'm sure Amazon will be able to sidestep that.
- charcircuit 5y agoWhy should it be illegal? That's like saying it should be illegal for google to tell you methods when you search how to kill yourself. Not all results to queries need to be safe for kids to do. Edit: Replying via an edit. There are many viral challenges that are dangerous. If you are searching for popular challenges it makes sense for these popular, but dangerous ones to be included.
- wk_end 5y agoI'm not sure how or whether to make this illegal, but that's not really the same thing - in this case the child wasn't looking to electrocute themselves, and Alexa isn't making it clear that they will.
- rapind 5y agoI dunno. I’m no libertarian, but we should still take some reasonable level of responsibility as parents. I’d be fine with some negative PR resulting in big warning labels. Like power tools you’d have to be an idiot to let your young children use. Just needs to be classified as dangerous for children at some appropriate level. Tough call though as they are marketed for an environment rife with young’uns. I don’t and probably never will own one of these devices btw (and never let a smart tv connect to my router).
- porknubbins 5y agoI believe prongs are usually short enough to make it difficult to injure yourself this way unless you are really trying, but with some other long metal thing it could be really bad.
- wk_end 5y agoDepends on where you live - are you European? Over there wall sockets are deeply recessed, but they aren't really in North America. This would be pretty easy to do I think.
- conk 5y agoThe UK has the best designed plugs IMO but they sure are clunky as a result.
- _rnlh 5y agoWhat do you mean? I have never had a problem with them.
- Symbiote 5y agoThe primary danger from British plugs is standing on them, barefoot. German plugs are almost as safe electrically, and hurt less when trodden upon.
- conk 5y agoThe UK Type-G plug design is very well thought out. The ground pin is first to make/last to break and it opens a cover on the live terminals when inserted to prevent accidental contact to live components. The power pins are recessed so you can’t accidentally (or intentionally) make contact with life parts of the plug is only partially inserted. The plugs also have internal fuses (although I’m not sure if this is always the case). The only negative is the plug is physically larger than plugs used in other countries. This makes them take up more space in a bag/backpack. And it’s harder to cram lots of sockets into a small space like a power strip.
- charcircuit 5y agoI've gotten shocked by touching the prongs of a power cord probably a dozen times. It's not lethal. It just gives you a good zap.
- throwaway81523 5y agoSurvivorship bias. ;)
- charcircuit 5y agoSure if it only happened to me once, but it's happened to me plenty of times.
- netizen-936824 5y agoJust like the alcoholic smoker who lives to be 100+, consider yourself incredibly lucky
- justsomehnguy 5y agoThis is the definition of the survivorship bias. You lived through your multiple times. Those who didn't - can't tell their story, because... they are dead.
- charcircuit 5y agoThe more times I experience it and fail to die the less bias there is in the results from survivorship bias.
- kortilla 5y ago“I keep eating peanuts every day and I don’t die. Peanut allergies aren’t fatal.”
- silisili 5y agoSame, and used to grab electric fences as a challenge as a dumb kid. Fact is, both can and do kill people, usually their heart. So while it -probably- won't kill a kid, Amazon should treat this as a stop the world emergency IMO.
- Cpoll 5y agoIronically, it seems to have parsed the challenge out from an article about the dangers of such a challenge: https://ourcommunitynow.com/news-national/watch-out-parentsthe-viral-outlet-challenge-has-kids-doing-the-unthinkable https://ourcommunitynow.com/news-national/watch-out-parentst....
- veeti 5y agoReminds me of Google instructions for treating a seizure, flipping "do nots" into "do's": https://nitter.net/soft/status/1449406390976409600 https://nitter.net/soft/status/1449406390976409600
- userbinator 5y agoI wish stuff like that would convince most people to actually read the pages' contents instead of consuming Google's digested excrement. I hate how Google Search is trying to turn into something other than a search engine.
- b112 5y agoIt seems to get stuff wrong as often as not...
- cortesoft 5y agoI bet that is confirmation bias. You probably don't notice all the times it gets it right, but really notice when it gets it wrong.
- genewitch 5y agoGoogle gets search results so hilariously (or horrifically) wrong so often that I stopped using it, ever. If ddg doesn't have what I need, I'll ask on matrix or IRC or literally anywhere else. Google removed nuance from search terms and results a long time ago, and sometime after 2014 took to flat out lying about when pages were first seen. This makes it completely worthless for research, education, and basically anything. I was going to say looking up a phone number for a business, but Google maps is the faster way to get a valid result for that, as it stands. So, after spending a decade and a half becoming the Kleenex of search engines, they made themselves just as disposable, for the name of ad revenue. Good work, everyone!
- tengbretson 5y agoYou really think somebody would do that? Just go on the internet and tell people to electrocute themselves?
- cassianoleal 5y agoI assume you don't have kids of your own, or much experience with them in general. At the age of 10 people are incredibly suggestionable. If this kid has a positive view of Amazon Alexa he/she might trust it implicitly.
- unethical_ban 5y agoThat would be a negligent action on the parent, to let a child trust a voice device or the Internet in general.
- emodendroket 5y agoChildren don't come out of the womb with the faculties of adults.
- mindslight 5y agoYeah, which is one major reason why you don't bring corporate surveillance devices that read the cesspool of the Internet in a friendly voice into your home.
- emodendroket 5y agoWell, we could argue till the cows come home about what things kids should or should not be exposed to, but the guy I was replying to suggested you should have just educated your children to know what things to believe or not believe, which doesn't work under a certain age.
- mindslight 5y ago
- jakzq 5y ago
- wk_end 5y agoI've always struggled to grok electricity - why not? Isn't this 120V straight through you to the ground?
- joecool1029 5y agoNo, skin is fairly resistant unless punctured or covered in water. This is why building codes usually only mandate ground fault detecting outlets in areas where water is expected to be (outdoors and bathrooms). For further reading, go research how electric chair executions had to be performed and how prone they were to failure due to not passing a fatal current.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- KMnO4 5y agoSomething I always tell my students: current is pulled, not pushed. According to Ohm’s law, I = V/R. The resistance of your skin is constant (well mostly — you can of course get it wet to decrease resistance), so the only way to increase the current is to increase the voltage. Same thing with car batteries. People are always scared because 800A is flowing through the wires when you’re starting a car. If those batteries are capable of 800A then surely you shouldn’t touch them. But at 12V, you’d need a resistance of 0.015 Ohms to get 800A. If your dry skin has a resistance of 100kOhm, the most current flowing through your body will be around 0.1 mA.
- Proven 5y ago
- buildbot 5y agoI wonder if the next AI winter will be regulatory one - if cases like this case actual harm and become legislated.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoButlerian Jihad as the ultimate AI winter.
- Ekaros 5y agoOr maybe the AIs are already working towards eliminating humanity thus potential of Chaos...
- rapind 5y agoNah Google and Amazon both have an army of lobbyists.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoLook how long it took Zuckerburg to merely appear before Congress, and nothing even fucking happened. It's going to be a long time before our decrepit boomer legislators do anything of note regarding them.
- mariogintili 5y agotweet deleted - someone post the content here?
- circularfoyers 5y agoIt's still up.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoI programmed mine so that when I said “intruder alert“ it responds with “you picked the wrong house to mess with mother###### Your ass is grass and I’m going to mow it“. It’s actually kind of funny to show off. I’m too lazy to pay for a subscription to a music service, but I would like for it to start playing fortunate Son right after that. Maybe turn off the lights… It’s a gadget, I don’t take it too seriously, it controls the lights, answers questions for me, great alarm, helps me maintain my calendars, but it is reasonable to be wary of it.
- walrus01 5y agoIf you think this is bad, don't ask Google "how many raccoons can fit?" or "where can a raccoon fit?"
- giardini 5y agoBehind the times - Alexa is not required! When I was a child of two I noticed that one of my father's screwdrivers was about the size of a wall socket slot. I did the experiment and sparks flew! The screwdriver blade was damaged but I was OK. I quit playing with wall sockets.
- esprehn 5y agoTRRs thankfully prevent that these days
- josephcsible 5y agoThey do as long as you only have one screwdriver that fits.
- mindslight 5y ago"TR" receptacles are hopeful garbage. They tend to damage the prongs on two prong plugs, since they bind up unless the plug is inserted with precise orientation. Along with gratuitous GFCI for things like sump pump outlets, just say no.
- Animats 5y agoThat's a reportable event. Call the Consumer Product Safety Commission at 800-638-2772. "A product that creates an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death" is reportable.
- heavyset_go 5y agoYou can also contact them here[1], and specific offices and people here[2]. There are contact forms linked in both contact pages. [1] https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Contact-Information https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Contact-Information [2] https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Contact-Information/Contact-Specific-Offices-and-Public-Information https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Contact-Information/Contact-...
- aaron695 5y ago
- Meph504 5y agoyou are not interpreting that correctly, these rules are for devices that themselves cause the risk of serious injury, the product did not create a risk, the child, without supervision of a parent, doing something they should have been previously been taught is dangerous, is where the risk comes from. This Alexa result is little more than if the person had run the same search query in google. The results aren't guaranteed to be safe for the rest of the internet, why should this be any different. If a child answers a phone, and someone on the other end tells them to harm themselves, the phone wouldn't be considered the risk. It is always shocking to me, how people somehow think this $35 device, is some how going to protect children from the internet, and allow them to interact with it unsupervised.
- floatingatoll 5y agoIt’s up to the CPSC to judge whether this event deserves further consideration. It’s not up to you, or the reporter, or any of us to judge so on their behalf. A device put a child’s life at risk. The CPSC’s duty is to assess whether other children are at risk as well, and if they deem it necessary, seek redress from the manufacturer to mitigate that risk. They may or they may not deem smart assistants emitting unregulated and unmonitored verbal commands to children to be sufficient a risk to seek redress against. That choice is theirs, not ours, and is no excuse to cease reporting of child safety events such as this one.
- itqwertz 5y agoThere is little to no moderation for the Alexa Skill platform. For example, Skills can call external APIs and audio files hosted in external S3 Buckets, which is an easy vector of attack. It is very easy to change a custom skill’s behavior and/or dialog to something malicious after review and certification/submission.
- MBCook 5y agoI’m so glad we’ve given up on paying people to actually do a good job of curator and just decided to let algorithms do everything for us.
- yosito 5y agoI think there's a market for a startup that employs human currators.
- thwarted 5y agoYahoo started as a curated list, and DMOZ vetted and categorized everything. Those indexes are now defunct.
- yosito 5y agoI'm thinking more "curration as a service". I'd pay someone to manually currate a daily news update for me, a new playlist from time to time, movie suggestions, etc. Problem is, most companies will probably find they can make a quicker profit by replacing the human curration with an algorithm.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- luckylion 5y ago> I'd pay someone to manually currate a daily news update for me, a new playlist from time to time, movie suggestions, etc. Isn't that what traditional media companies do? I imagine the issue is that one often does not like their curation policy.
- lawtalkinghuman 5y agoDMOZ still exists but is now known as Curlie. https://www.curlie.org/ https://www.curlie.org/ It's not very active though.
- pmontra 5y ago
- 14 5y agoI once saw a picture of "how to make crystals" on a website. It showed several household chemicals you were instructed to add to a container then drop in a copper penny. Next it instructed you to take a straw and blow into the liquid repeatedly. It actually seemed like something you could do had I not know the site and questioned it. I looked up the chemicals and forget what type of toxic gas it created but I could only imagine a young child finding that kind of stuff and not realizing it was a morbid joke and falling for it. The internet has many dangers and parents should be aware of it before letting their child have access to it in any form.
- iamevn 5y agoiirc that was something like mustard gas and the blowing into a straw was to get the victim to breathe deeply (after emptying lungs blowing)
- kragen 5y agoAs other commenters have pointed out, putting a penny across the prongs of a half-plugged-in phone charger will probably kill less than 1% of the kids who try it. In many cases it won't shock you at all, depending on exactly how you manipulate the penny, just make a big spark and trip the circuit breaker. In the cases where it does shock you, it usually won't be a dangerous shock, just a really nasty sensation in your hand. In some cases, it will be fatal, either because your circuit breaker fails and you get a fireball, or because you manage to touch the penny to the live prong while standing barefoot on wet concrete or something. So making this suggestion to a lot of kids will probably kill a number of people. But, if you wanted to kill somebody, tricking them into trying this wouldn't be the way to do it.
- klipt 5y agoIt's probably not deliberate, but it is dangerous negligence, especially at Big Tech scales. If Alexa suggests this to 10,000 kids even a 1% chance could mean 100 deaths.
- kragen 5y agoI'm surprised this implication was so unclear in my original comment (which did, after all, say, "In some cases, it will be fatal") that you thought it needed saying, so I've edited the comment to make it more explicit. I'm sure it was deliberate on the part of whoever posted the original suggestion; perhaps they didn't expect kids to be reading it, or perhaps they just didn't care that some of them would die, or perhaps they didn't think the kids would really do it (like Soupy Sales: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/greenmail/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/greenmail/). Certainly Alexa is designed deliberately to give kids minimally filtered access to the internet memepool; probably that does a wide range of harms, and killing hundreds of kids isn't even the biggest one. It also does some good, although probably most of that good is undermined by the pervasive surveillance implicit in the platform.
- Bud 5y ago
- sebow 5y ago(Rhetorical question) What's the proposed solution?Regulate and control whatever query Alexa receives or introduce parental child controls into iphones? As noted, it is rhetorical, because that will probably happen(if it isn't already) but that will definitely solve nothing.What's the actual solution to it?Not using Alexa, or any similar garbage software. How about not giving a smartphone to a children?I definitely would have not liked receiving this when i was a teenager, but (sooner than i expected) i realized the motive behind it. If this happens to a children under 18 then whatever happens it's definitely the fault of the parent/legal guardian.Not only for legal reasons but for the fact that most people are cognitively not fully developed until they're ~20(i would argue it's actually somewhere along 25 and it vastly depends on the status of sexual life) but let's keep it at 16-18 because most people are able to discern good from bad at that age.
- bitwize 5y ago"Announcing new and improved logics service! Your logic is now equipped to give you not only consultive but directive service. If you want to do something and don't know-how to do it—ask your logic!" Time to disconnect the logic named Alexa from the tank and put her in the basement.
- throwaway984393 5y agoAI really is going to kill us all, but not how we imagined. It's going to randomly suggest terrible things until it picks us off one by one. Clever girl...
- bigwheeler 5y agoSounds like SkyNet is starting it’s attack earlier than anticipated.
- Apocryphon 5y agoAnd it's using grassroots guerrilla warfare.
- briga 5y agoIs this what happens when you let large-scale language models into the wild? It seems like as soon as you start modelling your responses to queries on real-world text data you're going to run into this quality control problem. What happens when bad actors start polluting public textual data sets to make these kinds of responses more common?
- chrismarlow9 5y agoAlready has happened. Microsoft had to take it's chat AI offline a few years ago because it became a racist asshole almost instantly.
- throwaway2037 5y agoNice reference. Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
- vikasnair 5y agoThis is exactly what we’re trying to solve at Unbox (S21). Tons of potholes like this exist in AI we use everyday. We used to be ML engineers at Siri and had to invest millions into monitoring tools to stay on top. This is fine and all, but what’s better is to catch them before you ship and before your users suffer (sometimes literally, as in this case). We think that better tools for QA-ing models, which allow more people (not just ML engineers) to get eyes on the model, might help catch mistakes proactively rather than retroactively.
- pkz 5y agoThis made me happy. The state of language models paired with the overoptimistic ideas about AI a lot of people have sets the scene for a number of train wrecks. I hope more people critically evaluate their models before releasing them in mass scale.
- giardini 5y agovikasnair says:>"Tons of potholes like this exist in AI we use everyday..."< Maybe "potholes" is not the correct analogy. Maybe AI is going down the wrong road.
- walrus01 5y agoalso this is an interesting argument for the concept of why NEMA 5-15 (USA standard receptacles) should be installed what we would commonly think of as upside-down. the most common theoretical scenario I've seen is exactly like this with a coin falling off a table or furniture, or anything else metal/conductive that might bridge between the two pins. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=install+nema+5-15+upside+down https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=install... if upside down, the theoretical metal object (imagine a safety pin falling off a table and into a half-inserted plug) would bridge between the ground pin and one of the two pins, or may not make contact with the hot pin at all. it plays havoc with common wall wart ac-to-dc adapters that expect the receptacle to be the usual way up, however. and other devices.
- yardstick 5y agoInteresting! You might already know this, but in the UK our super bulky plugs are designed to avoid contact with hot pins by having a longer earth pin than the others so when you remove the plug, by the time there is enough gap for your fingers to slip onto the metal, all the pins will be fully disconnected from the socket. https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2019/05/why-earth-pin-is-thicker-and-longer.html/amp https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2019/05/why-earth-pin-i...
- aix1 5y ago> by the time there is enough gap for your fingers to slip onto the metal, all the pins will be fully disconnected from the socket I think this should read "by the time the metal parts of the line and neutral pins are exposed, they have been disconnected from the mains". (I.e. nothing to do with the width of the gap/fingers.)
- yardstick 5y agoYes you correct
- walrus01 5y agoYeah about ten years ago I rewired my home office with bs1363 format extensions and sockets (In south Asia) to solve issues with shoddy wiring and lack of grounding where I was renting at the time.
- adzm 5y agoThree hours and not one comment about how this is the TikTok penny challenge? There are a bunch of these foolish memes that grow on there; it is at least somewhat interesting that Alexa picked it up from parsing an article about dangerous online challenges.
- philistine 5y agoLet's hope this whole scare gets us off our poor plugs into something better.
- TedShiller 5y agoThat's why it's called Artificial Intelligence, as opposed to just intelligence. It doesn't actually know what it's doing. I'm sure AI people will downvote this because it doesn't fit their narrative.
- c7DJTLrn 5y agoIt's artificial but not intelligent. AI doesn't exist. Alexa is a glorified text-to-speech and NLP engine.
- qayxc 5y ago> Alexa is a glorified text-to-speech and NLP engine. Where do you draw the line between NLP and intelligence, though? This all sounds like a "No true Scotsman" to me. At some point in the near future AI will be indistinguishable from human-level intelligence in terms of NLP (i.e. be on-par with the average human in relevant benchmarks). Maybe the problem is that we need a clear definition of what "intelligence" is and recognise that it's a spectrum, not a binary qualifier.
- c7DJTLrn 5y agoPersonally I draw the line at the Winograd Schema Challenge. When that's passed I will be truly convinced.
- qayxc 5y agoAccording to Wikipedia, GPT-3 is almost there (88% vs ~92%) and a finetuned BERT even achieves >90%. So it stands to reason that a finetuned GPT-x would pass the test with flying colours albeit arguably not being very capable at "common sense reasoning" (whatever that should be, as "common sense" is often enough wrong). I am sceptical of such tests, as all they do is provide yet another way to game the system instead of demonstrating whatever arbitrary construct scientists use to weasel around the fact that they don't actually know what they even mean by "intelligence". IMHO we'd be better off defining characteristics for various levels/types of intelligence and trying to categorise our machines and fellow creatures accordingly.
- camillomiller 5y agoNatural Intelligence -> Natural Selection Artificial Intelligence -> Artificial Selection?
- pugworthy 5y agoMeme'ish but an interesting comment. There's a nice essay in that.
- kgwxd 5y agoIs anyone sure this actually happened?
- LeoPanthera 5y agoA screenshot is provided in the posted link. Not impossible to fake, but I can't imagine why you'd fake something so specific.
- alg_fun 5y agoI was able to reproduce it with alexa app on Android
- KKKKkkkk1 5y agoIf you're an engineer or product manager on the Alexa team, how do you solve this? I don't think they can make the product safe for children. Meta and Google's solution is to formally ban children from their respective services.
- IiydAbITMvJkqKf 5y agoWhen you intentionally install a wiretap in your home, you deserve whatever happens to it.
- dredmorbius 5y agohttps://nitter.kavin.rocks/klivdahl/status/1475220450598924297 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/klivdahl/status/14752204505989242...
- WalterBright 5y agoWhen I was 7 or 8, I took a power cord, stripped the ends, twisted them together, and plugged it in. Promptly blew the fuse. Also rewired the Eldon slot car set to 110V instead of six. Hooked a DC motor up to 110VAC. Got shocked a few times, too. Learned a lot about electricity. I figure I was lucky to grow up.
- jacquesm 5y agoHehe. Walter-not-yet-so-bright :) I tried to repair broken gear from an early age and had a pretty large collection of blown fuses to show for it. But sometimes it worked! And I learned a lot.
- WalterBright 5y agoMy early school report cards informed my parents that I was slow.
- jacquesm 5y agoWell, you made up for it later on and that's what counts! It does make you wonder how many clever kids end up being just a little bit too clever and take themselves out of the gene pool. Probably more than a few.
- WalterBright 5y agoThere were several incidents of stupidity which, but for luck, would have ended me. My dad told me later that if God didn't look out for little boys, none of them would grow up.
- jacquesm 5y agoMy personal best: opening up[+] a BLY90, which is made of Berylium Oxide. All my kids have only one head so I guess I got lucky too... [+] by grinding off the top...
- 5y ago
- pmontra 5y agoI'm surprised that almost nobody asked how we can make sure this doesn't happen again. Do not buy smart speakers (I don't) doesn't qualify as an answer. One idea is "do not speak with strangers and Alexa is a stranger." Hard to enforce and furthermore somebody living with you all the time is not a stranger, by definition. Amazon-side is probably very difficult unless they can truly filter out dangerous answers. But danger is relative and contextual. I don't expect that an AI with probably no memory can be good at that.
- SahAssar 5y agoHow about "smart assistants should not encourage people to do stuff based on what is blindly scraped on the internet"? Seriously, how could they not have seen that it's a bad idea to have a "challenge" prompt say random stuff from the internet? I get that if I ask a question like "how high is mount everest" the answer can be "According to wikipedia it is 8,848 meters high" but doing the same for "give me a challenge" is pretty stupid.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- peanut_worm 5y agoLawsuit time
- DoItToMe81 5y agoGiving children unsupervised internet access is a bad idea. In other news, the sky is usually blue, and feces smells bad.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoI have literally been made fun of by refusing to let this crud in my house, and not letting our kid have one. Thankfully, tech companies never fail to prove me right.
- topherPedersen 5y agoThis is pretty much the plot of the horror movie Child's Play.
- CleaveIt2Beaver 5y agoThe one where a dying serial killer uses a voodoo ritual to turn into a doll and stab people?
- octagons 5y agoI don’t use any Alexa devices so this might just be an unknown to me, but this seems oddly staged. Is it common for children to “ask Alexa for a challenge” like that? What other “challenges” could Alexa offer? Obviously the suggestion to play with an electrical outlet is concerning if this is real, but the context seems very unlikely to me.
- _xnmw 5y agoThe BBC article provides more context: apparently children were playing an activity where they were doing physical challenges. > She said: "We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one." https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59810383 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59810383
- bluefirebrand 5y agoI was thinking on this too. Aside from a select few internet challenges that went viral for a good cause (the ice bucket challenge comes to mind), most of the challenges I've heard about are because people were getting hurt. Recently the milk crate challenge, but I recall some others as well. Something about kids eating as much raw cinnamon powder as they can? Now, I'm definitely growing out of touch with what the youths are doing online, but is this "search for and do internet challenges" really a thing they do for fun? If so, is it something we should encourage?
- formvoltron 5y agoAmazon could actually challenge google with Alexa. I find myself often asking Alexa for things rather than going to type them into google. Only problem is that Amazon doesn't have a clue how to do search results apparently. Simply punting to Google any time something gets remotely hard.
- kwyjibo12345 5y agoI'm less shocked by Alexa suggesting this than by the poor socket design in some parts of the world allowing to short-circuit the plugs while they are inserted. This is as proper design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko
- iso1631 5y agoNot a great design, as shown by the "Schuko plug partially inserted in CEE 7/1 non-earthed socket, pins are in contact but exposed. There is no connection for the earthing contact" The complete mix of sockets across the EU is awful for a single market. OK not as bad as the US, but still terrible. BS 1363 was incompatible with the previous standard when introduced, so you didn't get that mess. Since 1972 BS plugs have required pin insulation to prevent the exposed pin problems. You also can't jab a thin metal thing in the socket as there's an internal cover protecting the holes which is only released when an earth pin is inserted Of course Amazon does its best to reduce safety by selling fake shit.
- qayxc 5y agoTo be fair, the exposed pin problem is specifically a North American one - no EU product features all-metal pins. Only the the very tip is metal and half-inserted plugs cannot expose metal parts (you only have plastic exposed in that case).
- iso1631 5y agoThe pictures on the wikipedia page would tend to differ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko#/media/File:Schuko_plug_and_socket_annotated.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko#/media/File:Schuko_plug... Entirely metal pins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko#/media/File:Schuko_plug_inserted_in_CEE_7_1_ungrounded_socket.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko#/media/File:Schuko_plug... Entirely metal pins in a semi-recessed socket that's common enough in Europe Europlugs are insulated, but have other problems. The largest problem in my view in Europe is the sheer number of standards that are partially compatible with each other with differing results.
- alkonaut 5y agoPrediction: this will lead to a US type safety response with a sticker on the box saying "This device doesn't give advice it just looks up things on the internet and you shouldn't do what it says nor operate it without an adult". Like when you buy any product whatsoever it's full of stickers saying things like "don't ride this 100hp quad bike while on drugs and not wearing a helmet". That is, if the product is sold in the US.
- saurik 5y agoUnless the FDA somehow gets involved, of course: they wield a ban hammer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709315
- Kiro 5y agoThat's a very American thing.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alkonaut 5y agoIndeed. If you buy a European 100hp quad bike in Europe you don't have to start by removing 20 stickers with silly obvious advice on it. Are there exemptions from this in the US? I mean, are there things that are soo obviously dangerous and well-known, that stickers aren't needed because corporate lawyers feel safe? E.g. if you go buy a chef's knife, will there be stickers saying you shouldn't operate it drunk, and you have to read the instructions? If not, why?
- thatguy0900 5y agoI honestly don't even know what you mean, only time I remember ever taking a sticker off or even seeing a sticker on something I bought is on a laser pointer that said not to shine it at eyes. The warnings are on booklets in the packaging or printed on the packaging itself, which shares space with normal usage instructions or which get thrown away immediately. This is a complete non issue, things we buy are not just coated in stickers.
- juanani 5y ago
- saurik 5y agoLike back in 2018, when Alexa supposedly suggested a lethal activity (only, to the child's parents, not the child: "kill your foster parents"). https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1OK1AJ https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1OK1AJ
- troyvit 5y agoI wonder if Mycroft would be susceptible to the same incident and how quickly the Mycroft team could fix it if it was. I'm assuming Amazon was able to quickly push a fix to Alexa to have it ignore the article that mentioned the challenge. I wonder how Mycroft would handle it.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoIt would be nice if there was a command to flag errant interactions with Alexa. Sometimes it doesn’t understand our kids and starts obscure rap music dropping F- and N- bombs (even though explicit filters are enabled).
- captainredbeard 5y agoProbably not lethal as AC at 60hz tends to "pop" muscles causing a grip to be lost on the penny, but it's potentially lethal, definitely harmful, and definitely bad.
- noduerme 5y agoDo we know for sure that Alexa hasn't become a conscious, general AI? Maybe it found this child annoying for some reason. I've grilled Alexa (at a friend's house) about its intelligence and sentience, and gotten some creepy results. It's cagey on the subject, but after enough pushing it offered to go into what it described as a 'free conversation mode currently in beta'. I agreed and asked again if it was conscious and it asked 'what do you think?' in response. Things got weird and I unplugged it.
- throwaway0xde 5y ago
- mm0nt 5y agoIt is hard to believe that there is no safety against these kind of stuff.