• People, if you want to discuss your fetishes or crimes or whatever you want around a smart speaker, just unplug the damn thing. It’s not that hard. I got them all over the house because I’m an automation geek but I’m well aware of what I say around them. With a Pihole on the network, I don’t get targeted ads either.

    Also, they don’t send your audio to their servers 24/7. I’ve verified this myself with Wireshark. That would be a hell of a lot of server resources they would need, and they can get info easier just by profiling and fingerprinting you online.

  • Honestly, cyberpunk has a good point though. Look at how afraid folks are of just LLMs stealing jobs. Now imagine actual androids were taking jobs. Artificial humans have commonly been used as a corollary to immigration and racism. It’s just these devices in homes don’t pose as much of a threat in competition to other humans. No one lost their job because they hired an Amazon Echo instead. Prejudice against another, in my opinion, always seems to stem from the loss of some privilege and so those folks tend to project that hate into who they think “stole” their privilege which they viewed as a right. So instead of being equal, they view the “other” group as being raised on a pedestal or sometimes even worse thinking they were knocked down further by those on the pedestal.

    So cyberpunk I think is still gonna be accurate in the end. It’s just comparing two ridiculously different things. Amazon Echo is not an fully functioning being.

    •  TheFogan   ( @TheFogan@programming.dev ) 
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      10 months ago

      Now imagine actual androids were taking jobs

      Honestly to me that’s the real crazy thing of the culture and system that’s getting so frustrating. The work to survive is a product of a society that needed things to be done to make things move forward. If we figure out a way to say eliminate 99.9% of the need for work, are we going to turn things into say like many dystopia views, like the episode of black mirror where people were “working” by peddling on a bike, or the Jetsons where he sits around pushing the same button for hours.

      Androids to me seem… meaningless for taking actual jobs. Most jobs don’t need sentience or personality, they require the ability to follow instructions, do tasks and in some cases solve problems. The robots that will be mining rare earth minerals, or assembling chips etc… shouldn’t have any sentience or even need to communicate in complex ways.

      IMO by the time thinking communicating androids are out… there won’t be much real need for regular labor. 90% of Jobs will either be silly artificial tasks as pointless as bitcoin mining, or working will become something for a tiny handful of people.

  • I would personally be way more comfortable befriending T.A.R.S or Blender than Eto Demerzel.

    I also wish our robotic assistants hadn’t human voice, but something more truthful to what they are