Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child | Hacker News Reader

Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child

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644 pointslwansbrough534 comments

Ironically, 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-parentst....

Reminds me of Google instructions for treating a seizure, flipping "do nots" into "do's": https://nitter.net/soft/status/1449406390976409600

I 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.

It seems to get stuff wrong as often as not...

I 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.

Google 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!

> for the name of ad revenue.

I mean, that is literally why the exist? They only provide a search service in order to generate ad revenue… if they didn’t have ad revenue, they would just shut down search.

when they started they were competing against yahoo and altavista and others which had less useful results. Their service has akways been about giving good results. Now that they have results arguably worse than 1998 search engines, their ads aren't going to pay the bills for much longer. In fact it already seems to be that Google ads aren't creating as much revenue as it used to for advertisers.

Google's featured snippets is a waste of screen real estate and time.

In an emergency situation you can't blame people for not clicking through, because of ads, popups, etc. which all take valuable time to ignore/load/get past.

You make yet another excellent argument against the insane proliferation of out of control advertising to add to the already huge list of reasons that human society needs to bring that garbage industry under control.

Google also once presented an official canada.ca website as claiming you didn't need to pay income tax, because it had been declared unconstitutional in a court case: https://mobile.twitter.com/cldellow/status/13174644326168985...

What I find even more worrying than the wrong info box itself is that Google still gives the wrong answer to the "Central park value" search query from the start of that twitter thread, more than a year later and after countless people have probably reported the info box as problematic. You would think they would at least have a manual human review system.

I think that's why YouTubers self-censor the word "suicide". Intent is currently difficult to parse, so mod bots probably have a low threshold for blocking related content. I think TikTok had this problem with bomb threats to schools, claiming that the only content they found was imploring people to be aware of the threats, not actually engage in them.

Advertisers don't want to appear on videos about suicide, drugs, other topics. It's either a list their ad agency provides or one YouTube has.

The YouTubers also used to avoid the words COVID and pandemic but I think that calmed down a bit due to the sheer quantity of content that mentioned it.

Oddly, advertisers don't seem bothered that their brands are on videos where the creator says "Roll 1 twenty-sided unalive," with a massive eye-roll. I go out of my way to steer clear of the stuff that I see advertised on YouTube.

It seems "unalive" is spreading. I've heard it on several platforms now. It's pushing on meme level due to the misinterpretation by automods. There are several other words, like Heckmet instead of Helmet where it's a syllable rather than a whole word. I've even hear unalivemond for diamond

That's clbuttic. How doubleplusungood.

I'm reminded of my friend's autistic kid who loves to learn things on YouTube. Whenever he gets excited and tells you about something, he ends his spiel with "Like and subscribe!" before walking away.

These innocuous behaviors feel like a mental contagion that we should really be trying to rid ourselves of.

This is exactly what you should expect from this kind of censorship - it will simply cause the slang to cycle faster.

Stop this ride, I want to get off.

Shazould jazust shazuse dazubble dazutch.

I didn't know this was a thing on U.S. social media now... I remember reading some years ago about how Chinese social media users used homophones to bypass the automatic censorship.

https://gvu.gatech.edu/research/projects/algorithmically-byp...

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/03/china-social-...

It's not "ironic", it's one more proof that "AI" doesn't work. The danger of AI is not that it will take over the world by itself, it's that we will trust it to drive us off cliffs.

Shorting a penny across mains is not that dangerous. It’s only dangerous if the holder of the penny is grounded.

By providing AI this feedback, we can teach it to be less like the three year old that it is.

How does feedback work in this case. The AI (a misnomer) does not feel pain.

The feedback is provided as a training case for the AI. While language AIs may not actually feel pain, they can understand the danger in terms of language. This requires a data store to remember the conversations it is having, which is something that isn't widely implemented in AI.

In this case, the focus is on the idea of an AI suggesting something irrational and then providing proper feedback for how it can understand recommending similar things in the future.

Having a polarized conversation about this on a social link sharing site isn't going to help the AI understand this, which is the point I was making.

It will cause a large current to flow, often resulting in fire

This isn't proof that AI "doesn't work" any more than plane crashes are proof that air travel doesn't work.

None of this is surprising. As it is today "AI" including GPT3 knows the words but not the meaning of language. AI does not understand.

That'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.

You 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

[2] https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Contact-Information/Contact-...

you 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.

It’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.

What you wrote is true of everything any product does, isn’t it? It’s fine to discuss the scope of the agency and how something would fit with their existing guidelines and rulings.

The post Meph504 responded to claimed it was reportable. You’re now talking about whether the agency would or should take any action. I don’t think either encompasses “any product”. The people who work at the agency are sane and actually interested in making an impact with their work, not forcing themselves to drown in a flood of useless warnings. In the simplest terms: it’s clearly dangerous, you should tell the agency.

It’s absolutely fine to discuss the scope of the agency’s response to legitimate reports, but a comment upthread questioned the legitimacy of the report. A child was endangered by an interaction with a device; so, the report is legitimate.

Whether it deserves a response in the form of regulatory action is absolutely worth discussion, and is what I consider to be the primary question raised by this event, but that question has no bearing on whether it should be reported.

I do see your point. I apologize if you already knew this, but the top level comment was quoting a mandate for the production and supply chain, not consumers. There isn’t a standard for consumer complaints other than presumably not to maliciously tie up resources. As you noted, the agency triages consumer complaints. The comment you’re discussing did not allege such a complaint would be spurious and stuck to debating the applicability of the supply chain mandate to what happened, though I think they also thought it was a consumer guideline. Here’s more context for where the original quote came from:

“Every manufacturer, distributor, and retailer of a consumer product distributed in commerce who obtains information which reasonably supports the conclusion that its product creates an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death is required to notify the Commission immediately. 15 U.S.C. 2064(b)(3). The requirement that notification occur when a responsible party “obtains information which reasonably supports the conclusion that” its product creates an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death is intended to require firms to report even when no final determination of the risk is possible. Firms must carefully analyze the information they obtain to determine whether such information “reasonably supports” a determination that the product creates an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death. (See § 1115.12(f) for a discussion of the kinds of information that firms must study and evaluate to determine whether they have an obligation to report.) Firms that obtain information indicating that their products present an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death should not wait for such serious injury or death to actually occur before reporting.”

I misunderstood the assertion being made; thank you for clarifying, and my apologies to the commenter in question. I continue to stress the “always report” point, though, as it’s important to get people to overcome the Bystander Effect — so that someday, if/when their own child is put at risk by a device, they remember and report.

That sounds utterly ridiculous. Is that how America got the mentality that you're not allowed to have your child play unsupervised on the front lawn?

Obviously Alexa shouldn't give such answers, but at what point do you just exclude children from everything because everything ends up being a risk for them?

Edit: I worded things too strongly, but it does seem to me that in more and more cases we want to ban children from being able to use products or access services 'for their own safety'.

The CPSC doesn’t exist to ban children from using products for their own safety.

The CPSC exists to ban companies from putting children in danger for their own profit.

A common example of a CPSC ban is “lawn darts”, which were weighted metal spikes that you’d throw in the air and try to embed in a target. Enough children were killed that they’re now outright banned, and have been for something like thirty years.

Was it right for them to ban a children’s toy that was specifically designed in a way that, when used correctly, would have a significant chance of killing children?

Another instance of CPSC recently is seen in the Peloton treadmill, but they’ve been doing safety recalls for dangerous yet little-noticed stuff like Generic Crib ABC That Strangles Babies from the market for decades now, once their process established a true risk of harm due to design defects.

I think I’m net comfortable with their existence, personally, since they don’t seem to issue recalls needlessly, and they’ve materially improved the safety of children without banning many products that will be missed.

Lawn darts may be cool, and it’s probably uncool to ban them, but no child is going to suffer for a lack of lawn darts in their life. Development requires human attention and play time (not screens), and there’s plenty of other ways to achieve that without CPSC-banned products.

I get that my views here are a viewpoint and an opinion, but I’m not yet persuaded that either the CPSC is overreaching in general by existing, or that their involvement in smart assistants would be overreaching in specific. Fortunately, since they do exist and they’re required to act when safety concerns are reported, my views are ultimately irrelevant to their decision-making process on whether to engage on this topic or not. Only legislation could stop them from choosing to care, and so any prediction on whether they will or not is entirely unnecessary.

I think liability overreach is the fault of legislators, who are too cowardly to set reasonable limits on when parents can sue for payment for untoward outcomes. The American legal system encourages “$1000 for a skinned knee, $100,000 for a broken bone” junk lawsuits where chance accidents are plausibly not the fault of playground builders (though in certain cases, they are, and the CPSC intervenes!). Resolving that “grow a spine” issue with our leaders and judges is independent from whether CPSC deserves to exist and is beneficial to public health.

Lol, absolutely not banned from having or making or selling. What's been banned is the sale as marketed as an outdoor game.

I don’t understand how the exact nuances of their order regarding my selected example are of interest to you in this discussion, or how those nuances contribute to it. You’ve pointed out what you believe to be a fact, one somewhat contradicted by their plain language wording here [1], but haven’t yet explained why you’re presenting that to us at all. Please do explain.

[1] https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/5053.pdf

I don't believe that anyone here, who is engaging in a casual debate attempted to assert authority over the matter, it should be assumed that in any discussion on the internet, that we aren't attempting to handle a legal matter, and that we are all just expressing our opinions.

You are making the assertion that "A device put a child's life at risk" this isn't established. Were and How is the device responsible for producing results to queries that the results don't require review before following the result.

To me, its seems silly to assume, that voice assistance results to queries will always be safe, for all people asking.

If Alexa is asked for a challenge and it provide the result to swim laps, that seems reasonable, but if the the person in question can't swim, and blindly attempts to do the challenge would the device be responsible for putting them at risk?

The idea that the device is responsible here seems silly to me, what would put a child at risk is letting them engage with the internet, if they haven't been taught to filter the results, and disregard things that would cause them or others harm.

There are lots of other threads tackling the question of whether the device is responsible, so I don’t need to spend any time on that question, and I’m not. I acknowledge that that question is interesting to others and I bear no enmity to it, but it’s simply not relevant to my particular interests at this time.

I am making an assertion, as supported by the tweet, that a parent believes that their child’s life was put at risk by a device. The CPSC asks all parents who feel that to report their concern to the CPSC. One person’s belief is sufficient cause to trigger a report, same as it is with NTSB reporting. That’s the start and the end of my interest in this matter for this post.

The CPSC is responsible for evaluating the judgment calls you’re making, once that report is received: whether the device is responsible, whether the child can be reasonably expected to protect itself in this scenario, whether the device actually creates a material risk to children beyond just one parent’s feeling that it did.

This is the distinction between reporting (parents must always) and response (CPSC may not always) that I’m trying to make clear. Everyone automatically debates about whether a CPSC response would be appropriate, but I’m highlighting that reporting to the CPSC is always appropriate when you feel that a device put a child at risk, regardless of what anyone else feels about whether the device is actually responsible or not.

We are in the vast majority not equipped with the training, processes, and domain-specific knowledge about children’s minds, to decide that a report should not be submitted. We cannot be trained in this in any reasonable amount of time — and a parent’s free time for optional training is less than zero, in any case.

Yes, it may be found that the device ultimately isn’t actually responsible at all; but, all the same, that report should be made.

>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.

You mean that the person on the other end of the phone would be considered the risk, right?

There is no person inside of an Amazon Echo. Your question does not go to a call center where someone decides how to answer it. There are no human beings involved, it's all automated.

On this theory, is the computer also a hazardous device? Because you could type this into a search engine and the same thing could happen?

Wouldn't that make the search engine the hazard, not the computer itself?

I can't really see a principled distinction here; both devices are getting information from online search engines and presenting it to the user.

The missing “principled distinction” is tied up in the user interface design choices that intersect with child safety concerns, even if equal content is presented to both means. Voice search and response has a very different intersection with child safety concerns than keyboard-browser search and response.

A voice assistant can be reasonably expected to be operated by a very young child, who would be responsive and trusting to verbal commands in an adult-like voice from it.

A keyboard computer with a search engine in a browser cannot reasonably be expected to be operated by a very young child, and would not be reasonably expected to issue spoken-verbal commands in response to queries.

The information content is a relevant factor in the former case but not the latter; keyboard use of search engines is not in-scope for evaluating the child safety risk of voice assistants, though it is certainly an interesting topic as well.

The child in question is 10, right? It doesn't sound credible that a 10-year-old child could not operate a search engine.

Whether or not a child is at risk from a browser search and result is not relevant to whether or not a child is at risk from a voice assistant search and result.

They are separate concerns and considering the browser case does not nullify the necessity of considering the voice assistant case.

For example, replace “10-year-old” with “3-year-old” (a simple and effective safety test for potential threat to children) and apply that test to both devices:

A) Could a 3-year-old child be reasonably expected to operate a keyboard-browser search and result interface? Could they be placed into danger by doing so?

B) Could a 3-year-old child be reasonably expected operate a voice assistant search and result interface? Could they be placed into danger by doing so?

The answers to A and B are not the same, because the threat models (to the child) are very different when “can read and type” is not taken for granted, as is implied for a 10-year-old. This is why the US has a safety commission to consider these things: common sense can hide critical threats to children that are invisible and unrecognized by well-meaning adults.

Good thing Amazon have never specifically marketed Alexa devices for kids.

Oh, wait.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNdZAgij-K0

The question of the day for that video will end up being:

“In what ways do they restrict the available voice commands and results to protect children?”

And I bet it will be found that their interface allows never-reviewed-by-Amazon content to be read out loud to children, because Amazon loves to externalize human costs.

The issue is that Alexa stripped important safety information out when summarizing the result. If a search engine does something similar (such as Google with their answers), I see no reason why the search engine shouldn't be reported the same way Alexa should be.

I think curation, or the appearance thereof, makes a big difference.

Google presents excerpts from pages in an authoritative way all the time.

That'a a great example. Google's "answer box"/"featured snippets" have received a great deal of criticism for this... for incorrect information that was in the search results anyway. The key difference is in presentation.

The source for the information is a warning to parents about the challenge. Alexa only returned the challenge statement, without the context of it being potentially life threatening. A search would have been fine.

>A search would have been fine.

But what about a search that didn't return it, or returned it in a way that's not really obvious (ie. google's answer panels for questions)? Should we report google and/or the computer manufacturer to the CSPC?

If the answer panels are stripping important safety information out in a way that endangers children? I would so say your should definitely report Google.

I think there's a difference in how you present the information. So returning things in a way such that it is not obvious you're looking at mere search results should perhaps be viewed as something requiring a bit of responsibility (-> don't do it if you can't take responsibility), and dangerous/libelous/etc. information perhaps should be reported if it appears as the though the site returning it is providing editorialized content and not just aggregated search results.

On the other hand, the status quo is kinda funny: https://i.imgur.com/ux42v8p.png

> So returning things in a way such that it is not obvious you're looking at mere search results should perhaps be viewed as something requiring a bit of responsibility

That seems like a pointless distinction. Do you think kids even know what a search engine is? I'm sure some do, but are the ones who don't out of luck? I'll even say that a significant chunk of adults think that the content in google info boxes comes from google, rather than from the site itself.

> I'll even say that a significant chunk of adults think that the content in google info boxes comes from google, rather than from the site itself.

That's exactly why I consider those info boxes potentially problematic. If people trust Google and don't understand how the info box is formed, they will take it for an authoritative source which is exactly the problem with it. Google perhaps should not show those info boxes if they cannot stand behind the information presented within. Same thing with Alexa, if kids blindly trust it instead of treating it like snippets of text that happened to match on some page.. that's concerning.

> That seems like a pointless distinction. Do you think kids even know what a search engine is?

I don't know exactly how a kid views Alexa and how they view search engines. To them, is Alexa just a toy, just another way to look things up on the net, or is it something more? I certainly knew what search is, at the age of 10 (come on, searching is pretty much the first thing you learn to do online), but there was nothing like Alexa in my life.

The question is not do they know exactly what a search engine is, but how much do they "trust" (or what kind of authority do they attribute to) Alexa vs how much they trust the list of results in search. I think Alexa is more opaque than a list of search results and there's a real possibility that kids would "trust" it (and also Google's info boxes etc.) more than they trust the obvious list of snippets of matching text on web sites. Obviously, there's no way to click Alexa for more context, or is there? It just blurts out "facts", not entirely unlike Google does with their info boxes. You don't get to judge whether these "facts" come from a sketchy site or forum or whatever else. Is "here's something I found on the web" sufficient to clue the kid on that it's just a search result and information taken out of context? I think there's some subtlety that might be harder to comprehend than in a list of clickable links with bolded snippets of text.

If you find that Google is returning suggestions leading to self-harm as "answers" to unrelated queries such as "what should I do today?", why not let CSPC investigate the issue?

I get the impression people are arguing against the idea of customer protection reviewing Google Search/Alexa out of fear for the continued existence of computers, computing, free speech, and open access to information. What do you believe is at stake here? Do you believe they're going to shut down the internet?

> There are no human beings involved

Humans created and manage the behavior of the automaton.

at that point humans created the lawn darts that killed kids as well.

Yes, that’s accurate. I’m pretty sure that would be called negligent product design. Where are you saying the lawn darts came from?

There was an earlier observation that lawn darts were regulated because it turned out they were designed in a way that kids could die using them as designed.

I brought it up because in your comment you quoted the following

>> There are no human beings involved

to which you replied

>Humans created and manage the behavior of the automaton.

The no human beings involved is an explanation why the scenario of Alexa telling a child to do something dangerous is not the same as a human on the phone doing it, because there are no humans involved at the time that Alexa says this. This was considered an important distinction to make because if it were like a human being talking on the phone and saying do this dangerous thing the phone would not be considered a dangerous product and only the person would be considered dangerous.

Thus when you say "Humans created and manage the behavior of the automaton." this in context must function as a saying the use of Alexa is equivalent to the use of a phone and therefore Alexa cannot be considered a dangerous product, however the humans involved in Alexa are removed in time and do not take part in the actual dangerous action (in opposition to the example given of a bad actor on a phone call) and thus that a human created and managed the behavior of the automaton is analogous to the fact that humans created the lawn darts.

If the lawn darts are negligent product design then it at least leaves the question open as to whether or not Alexa is as well.

Imagine a suicide hotline which played a prerecorded message saying “you’re useless, KYS” and so on.

Who or what would be liable for a death resulting from a suicidal person calling up and killing themselves?

Obviously someone is at fault, because we all instinctively realize that such a setup is monstrous and horrific. I hope.

The person or organization that created the answering machine would be responsible.

Seems straightforward, right?

Operating this hotline sounds like a First Amendment protected activity, and laws banning this encouragement have been struck down as unconstitutional. However, providing specific instructions that could be construed as assistance can be a crime or make you an accomplice (suicide is often a crime) and patterns of harassment could also be prosecuted.

See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Melchert-Din... (law found unconstitutional in part, convicted of assisting)

Pretty sure operating something billed as a "suicide hotline" and then playing a message to every caller that says "kill yourself" would open you to significant criminal and civil liability in every court in the USA if anyone attempted suicide after calling your hotline.

While there are certainly free speech protections for discussing suicide, there is a pretty solid line between that and using something billed as a crisis resource to directly encourage suicide.

> This Alexa result is little more than if the person had run the same search query in google.

Alexa is made to come off humanoid, "conscious" being, and a child can easily get misled and take its answers (or a dare, in this case) verbatim.

When you interact with a computer/phone/tablet and search something, you understand this is no different than you opening a book and scrolling for answers.

So, as others mentioned, it's down to the appearance.

The same could happen with a Google/Bing search with their "intelligent" results box (or whatever that's called) which also uses ML algorithms to extract information from specific pages and present it out of context. The problem is we should never trust a computer to understand the meaning and context of anything. Ban AI from consumer products and from any system making life decisions, or we're doomed to repeat the same story over and over again.

> 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.

This is shockingly disingenuous. Alexa quite obviously didn't merely operate as a search engine in this situation. Alexa went to a page that said this challenge is incredibly dangerous, pulled out the challenge stripped of context, and dared a child to do it. That's not what a search engine does.

I agree with you in principle. Yet that's what modern search engine do with the sidebar box, they extract information without context and present a supposedly accurate and synthetic representation of the truth... which is often disconnected from the truth (eg. wrong photo taken from facebook results when you look up the name of a serial killer who doesn't have a wikipedia photo).

So yes a search engine should be a list of results and nothing more. But this trend to embed machine learning models (and their failures) in pretty much everything unfortunately goes beyond Alexa. And yes, that should definitely be illegal and we tech people who understand that AI is just stupid/fast math should be leading the fight to severely restrict AI and/or educate our closest ones never to trust or use (if they can avoid it) something powered by AI.

Which to me just sounds like search engines should be reported for such smart widgets when those widgets directly endanger children.

>That's not what a search engine does.

Except that's what it literally did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709875

The definition of search engine is not "whatever Google does". A search engine should find things and present what it finds without distortion, let alone life-threatening distortion.

Does Alexa have a child safety feature that can be enabled to prevent children from using Alexa? My point is that Alexa is a pretty intuitive to use, children won't have see observe their parents using the device more than a few times before they're able to trigger Alexa.

So either Alexa, and other digital assistants, should have a way to prevent "unauthorized" use, or we might need to consider if it's a safe device for families with small children. Perhaps simply being able to disable answers based on internet searches.

It now does have a way of learning to distinguish users by voice, so such a feature, if not foolproof ought to be feasible. Even just a way of indicating which users are children and taking that into account might well be helpful.

Most products that Product Safety entities stop is devices that are harmful if used in ways unintended, like a drawer that is not intended to be climbed (ikea). Her we have a product that is encouraging harm, which while unintended by the manufacturer, is slightly worse than a drawer that can crush and kill a playing child.

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.

I don't see why the cost is relevant. If Amazon can't make Alexa safe selling it for $35 then they shouldn't sell if for $35. You can't put something dangerous out on the market by advertising it with the line "We're making it cheap, not safe!"

Besides, it's not a $35 device. Amazon subsidizes the cost of the software side in order to get the hardware in to homes because they believe it drives sales. We have no way to know the real cost.

> Besides, it's not a $35 device. Amazon subsidizes the cost of the software side in order to get the hardware in to homes because they believe it drives sales. We have no way to know the real cost.

I think the implied argument here is "you get what you pay for", so the actual cost Amazon has is irrelevant.

> Amazon subsidizes the cost of the software side in order to get the hardware in to homes because they believe it drives sales.

I think that's not the only reason. It creates acceptability for other ML-based technologies which in my personal view should definitely not exist (except as a best effort assistive technology for handicapped folks) and it gives them real world feedback on how broken their neural models are as well as real-life voice data collected unexpectedly by the device and sent to precarious contract workers to be transcribed (including very personal/sensitive details).

Unfortunately i don't think this article has been translated to English, but La Quadrature had a mind blowing interview with Julie who was a cheap-paid transcriber for Microsoft's Cortana, telling us all about the kind of things that get recorded without the owners being aware and that she has to transcribe (without having ever signed a privacy/confidentiality agreement): https://www.laquadrature.net/2018/05/18/temoin_cortana/

Are you sincerely blaming the parents for this? Amazon markets these devices as futuristic intelligent assistants. If they are not actually intelligent then they are deceiving their customers and exposing their children to harm. Nobody reasonably expects Google to intelligently censor search results by detecting if a child is running the search.

The product is Alexa the voice assistant, not the tiny speaker+microphone.

Amazon makes this product.

When the child spoke to the device, Alexa made a deliberate decision to look up a challenge on the internet (presumably, from a website it deems as safe). In doing so, Amazon endorses the challenge.

The product put a child’s in life in danger.

This is not very complicated.

>When the child spoke to the device, Alexa made a deliberate decision to look up a challenge on the internet

I don't think that's fair. A reasonable parent knows that Alexa's main function is to look things up on the internet.

The product is _designed_ to be something humans will relate to and "become part of your lives", much like a housepet. Watch Amazon's own intro video narrated by the little girl - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYtb8RRj5r4

At 3 minutes the little girl says "Echo loves to to play music" ... i.e. it's expected that children will project emotions onto Echo, which in turn means an implied level of trust they will have to the device. Also the girl in the video is using at times _without_ parent supervision...

So sorry the whole "it's just a dumb device designed to search the Internet and you should know better" argument doesn't fly here.

yes, if they want to sold product in this way, how can they argue when people really trust it?

> A reasonable parent knows that Alexa's main function is to look things up on the internet.

Well, it's what Amazon would like Alexa to be for. For me, and everyone I know, its a podcast/music player plus timer and weather-teller.

I think people who have used Alexa to look things up on the internet know how comically terrible it is at that. “Here’s something I found…[that you might struggle to figure out how I thought that was related to your query]”

For us, it’s a music player, kitchen timer, and weather-teller.

How do we arrive at "amazon endorses the challenge"? And, whatever logic is used, does it also indicate Google, Bing and Yahoo endorse it as well?

It looks like the original page is a warning to parents about the challenge existing. So where a search engine shows it in its original form its fine. Amazon selected just the challenge, skipped the warning, and told the child to do it.

Because Alexa will give a single answer, vetted by its neural network. If i'm presented with several links and related context, i'm responsible for interpreting them and weighing the pros and cons. If the "search engine" gives me only one authoritative answer, of course it's responsible for whatever bullshit comes up.

The same situation could occur between friends:

- I'm bored, what should i do?

- You could bake cookies, or you could jump from a cliff.

In this case, irony/context is preserved. If my friend calls a "I'm bored" phone line service, and they tell them straight ahead to jump off a cliff, i'll certainly hold that phone service responsible for what happens next.

This highlights the lack of true General Intelligence and blurred lines with ML/AI. Our most advanced companies, with advanced processing power, can't even text match with the common sense of a mouse, maybe an insect? Either way, it appears not to exist. We love hype in this industry. Let's put on our headsets now, and head into the metaverse.

> Because Alexa will give a single answer, vetted by its neural network. If i'm presented with several links and related context, i'm responsible for interpreting them and weighing the pros and cons. If the "search engine" gives me only one authoritative answer, of course it's responsible for whatever bullshit comes up.

so CSPC needs to fine google for their "I'm feeling lucky" feature?

I think that means 4chan could teach Alexa what to tell kids? They have reprogrammed search engine results many times just for laughs.

Not to pile on, but that's just not how AI works. Basically then, Alexa must be shut off from searching the internet at all, since anything its algorithm finds would be company endorsed.

And search engines certainly do give on answer, google "are eggs good for you" and you will see an answer highlighted at the top of the page.

The logic is very simple. When you create a product, you can choose either closed (curated, checked) or open content. The latter gives you much more possibilities but poses several serious problems, just like this one. If you choose this route, you need to face the consequences.

>>How do we arrive at "amazon endorses the challenge"?

The system Amazon's designed, built, maintains, and runs, actively interpreted the request and out of thousands or millions of answers, specifically selected THAT ONE to return as the result.

They obviously had somewhere between zero and massively insufficient filtering process to filter out inappropriate or non-responsive answers. They presumably have filters for porn and vulgarity, which would cause an uproar, but are not bothering with life-protecting.

This is because either 1) Amazon are too stupid to anticipate the problem, or 2) they did anticipate the problem and don't care enough or figure, like Ford did with the Pinto, that the costs likely damages are lower than the costs of making it safe.

Either way, the only ethical choice is to not field that product. Amazon did not take that choice.

>>And, whatever logic is used, does it also indicate Google, Bing and Yahoo endorse it as well?

If they are providing similar answers to children, without caveats, yes, of course.

Yeah. I see people defending these companies, or companies defending themselves by hiding under "AI" and "ML". That does not absolve you from the consequences. You made the AI sub-optimal, it is harmful. Shut it down if it is not working properly, or assume responsibility for your crap.

Yup!

Microsoft shut down that Hitler-loving "Tay" "AI bot in a hurry for some offensive speech - doing a LOT less than deliberately telling children a good method to have fun by electrocuting themselves.

Even if you cannot explain the inner workings, — and actually ESPECIALLY if you cannot explain the inner workings, if it is YOUR bot, it is YOUR responsibility.

Utterly disgusting to hide behind "it's just the algorithm". When L5 self-driving cars from Acme corp start driving off of bridges and running over bicycles, shuld we just let Acme and their apologists say "oh, it's just the algorithm/AI, not our fault, we don't need to fix it"?

A competent lawyer would write this up so quickly that Amazon would settle rather than fight it out. I don't know the full story but it seems like this is a quick 5 figure payout for the family.

That would require damages. If the child were injured, that would be provable. Otherwise the claimants will be in for a long and drawn-out process of manufacturing lasting emotional distress.

How about emotional "shock"? (pun intended)

Emotional damages of seeing your child nearly get talked into electrocuting themselves by an appliance. Thats actually traumatic if framed correctly. Plus the bad press? Amazon would be smart to throw $20,000 at this and hope it fades away.

>> Amazon makes this product.

No. If I were arguing the case I would phrase it as "Amazon provides this service". This is not a manufactured product but an advice line. Whether Amazon chooses to automate that line, or staff it with real people, or at least have a person vet recommendations ... such are Amazon's business decisions for which they are liable. The augment is not that the phone is defective but the service behind that phone.

No, this is as silly as saying Google is responsible for search results.

>This is not very complicated.

You're right it's not complicated. People are responsible for their own actions, that's where the line is. The device or software isn't making them do anything.

Kids tell each other to do stupid things all the time, are you going to hold other children responsible when some stupid kid acts on what they tell them to? There's a reason the "would you jump off a bridge if someone told you to" saying exists....

> People are responsible for their own actions, that's where the line is.

In most countries on Earth there is another line as well to personal responsibility: age. Usually considered to be 18 years old when you are fully responsible for yourself, before that age there are numerous safeguards against harm to children (including provisions for their actions to not be considered on the same level as an adult).

You are pushing the personal responsibility line onto a 10 years old, think about that...

No I'm pushing responsibility onto the ADULT parents. Who controls what the kids do? Parents. Do you think merely putting an age restriction on alexa devices does anything? Yeah I've TOTALLY never seen any kids playing GTA, smoking, drinking, seeing R rated movies, accessing pornography etc.. Give me a break.

None of that is enforceable without parents making sure it's enforced.

>You are pushing the personal responsibility line onto a 10 years old, think about that

You are being ignorant about the reality of the world. Think about that.

I see you failed to provide an actual way of stopping children from accessing Alexa. Why don't you inform us all on how that will done?

If you rely on corporations to be the moral safety compass for your children you've already failed. I don't care what legal or political ramifications you put in place, it won't help. That is 100% not the way to deal with this.

> I see you failed to provide an actual way of stopping children from accessing Alexa. Why don't you inform us all on how that will done?

By not having an Alexa. At least not in the current state of affairs, I'm on the camp that always-on voice assistants need to be regulated before they invade the privacy of every home in the planet.

If your product is not good enough to be used safely by your expected customers then it shouldn't exist, I'm not Amazon and I don't have all the man-years power of thousands of engineer to think about a solution to this problem, I have a moral stance where I don't think this technology should be pushed the way it is, as an unfinished piece of shit that serves the purpose of collecting data, if there is an instance where it's been shown to be dangerous then it shouldn't be on the market, it's pretty simple.

I work in tech and I'm really fucking tired of getting unfinished products pushed to market so corporations (and their product managers) can use humans as guinea pigs for big tech to experiment on... Really, really tired.

Don't like your tone, won't really engage further.

>By not having an Alexa.

So, your idea is force people not to buy Alexa? You want a law that bans Alexa from the market? Good luck.

Here's a novel idea. Don't buy it. You don't get to decide for other people.

>Don't like your tone, won't really engage further.

What you don't like is that I called you out on your bs.

> What you don't like is that I called you out on your bs.

Nah, just really tired of engaging with libertarians pushing the bullshit line of "personal responsibility" to every single issue.

Alexa is marketed towards kids as well, parents can't control every single instance a kid will interact with Alexa therefore Amazon regulates Alexa either by goodwill or by force of regulations. Guess which one is compatible with capitalism? As you said, we shouldn't rely on the goodwill of corporations ;)

Godspeed, Ayn Rand acolyte.

> 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.

If I, a billion dollar company, advertise a service where people can phone me and ask questions, and some bored kid phones up and I tell them to stick a fork in a power socket, then I would be considered the risk.

Your biased is clear, that you think the value of the company has anything to do with the liabilit. Would you blame a search engine if the results of a query returned results. Siri, on the iphone can give very similar result, I don't see the revolt and people blaming Apple.

Where does amazon say that they are going to filter the results, to make sure you don't have to use critical thinking to evaluate if your query result will harm you?

I just don't see the logic, and this is seemingly is largely driven by the current hate stream pushed towards amazon.

> Siri, on the iphone can give very similar result

Do you have any evidence for this? I have yet to see a Siri result as flagrantly dangerous as this.

Uh, yes. Yes I would blame a search engine if its results predictably said <go do horrible thing> and likewise I don't recall any instance of Siri telling bored patrons to stick forks in electrical sockets.

At some point, we have to zoom out and look at the big picture. Should we end up with a situation where this continues because in theory there's an endless amount of kicking-the-can-down-the-road that could technically apply? Probably not.

Where's the most appropriate place to say "the buck stops here!"? I'll say it's at the first step: Alexa shouldn't just regurgitate this stuff.

The device hasn't caused harm, did the device itself physically put the child at risk? No, it didn't

The information from the result of a query, didn't either, if a unsupervised child, who wasn't taught not to do things like electrocute themselves comes across the information, and does themselves harm, surely you can see that this is at least partially if not entirely on the parents.

If a child is left at home, with a load, unsecured gun, and wasn't taught gun safety, would it be the guns fault, or the parents.

To me the situation is similar, the device was not defective, the device did not directly present risk to the child, the device makes no assurances that the information relayed will be sanitized such that a 10 year old mind could not harm themselves by following it blindly.

> the device makes no assurances that the information relayed will be sanitized

The device (or rather the service behind it) removed the critical safety warnings and context from the content, directly encouraged the child to engage in dangerous activity and then added a timer to encourage the child to engage in that activity with as little consideration of the consequences as possible. As a society we are well aware that 10 year old minds have not developed the capacity to reliably consider and understand the consequences of their actions; this is why we limit their legal ability to make choices for themselves.

If this is not "defective" , then Amazon would be guilty of attempted murder. Clearly this is a software defect, the only question is if the design

The webpage that Alexa sourced this "challenge" from exists precisely because there are lots of children who are put at risk

You make the assumption that the device knew it was being used by a child who was unsupervised.

This thread and the some of the responses in it are just getting absurd. Before making outlandish legal claims, maybe read up on the law. instead of just making hyped up claims.

> You make the assumption that the device knew it was being used by a child who was unsupervised.

That the device didn't know it wasn't being used by a child is all you need to know.

> This thread and the some of the responses in it are just getting absurd. Before making outlandish legal claims, maybe read up on the law. instead of just making hyped up claims.

Since you claim to be so well versed, perhaps you have an argument to make besides calling names?

The entire point I was making is that it is blindingly obvious that this is a defective behavior. Amazon immediately acknowledged that. The question that is unanswered is the degree to which these sorts of defects are inherent in the software design or the degree to which they can be fixed without a fundamental rework of the design.

If this is a fundamental type of defect in the design, Amazon needs to take steps to secure their devices against unsupervised children.

Let's say I bought a children's toy that for $35 my child could speak to and receive responses from.

One day, I overhear it telling my child to hurt itself as part of a game, and it begins counting down from a timer.

My child doesn't realize that what it's being told by their fun friend is dangerous and not really a game.

The vessel is not the culprit. It's not a mechanical fault that's endangering my child- it's the logic. Who is responsible for that?

There is a distinct difference from being asked to engage in an activity and being provided information. We learn this as children in grammar class. It is also not our role to make determinations on behalf of the authorities that govern the safety of products, only to report.

Alexa told this child to play a game that would have resulted in their harm and began to count down from a timer. It was designed to expect the child to engage and comply, not just passing along information. It's different.

Its true that errors happen but if those kind of errors are something amazon is aware of then the usage by children should be prohibited or at least it should indicate that alexa could be harmfull to children.

What's next? There's nothing wrong with phishing or other forms of social engineering because the victim fell for it on their own volition?

If I give my child a speaking rubber ducky as a bathroom toy, and that toy would include phrases like "I bet you can't keep under water for more than a minute" or "I want to go swimming in the ocean", I'm pretty certain that the product will be quickly pulled from the market, even though the $35 toy is made from the safest, non-flammable, non-toxic plastics.

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.

Indeed. So what's on the other end of the Alexa line, legally speaking?

is some how going to protect children from the internet

The child didn't access the Internet, now did it? Alexa accessed the Internet on behalf of the child. As such, it acted as the child's agent and should be expected to tailor its reponses to the child. If Amazon doens't want that, it should not allow Alexa to respond to children's voices.

Alexa isn't a toy, and if follow up stories are accurate the device wasn't even running with a child profile, it wasn't acting as an agent of a child, it was responding to a query, one not understood to even being originated from a minor.

Additionally, from Alexa's term of use, it clearly states they do not guarantee the content

>4.2 Functionality; Content. We do not guarantee that Alexa or its functionality or content (including traffic, health, or stock information) is accurate, reliable, always available, or complete. You may encounter content through Alexa that you find offensive, indecent, or objectionable. Amazon has no responsibility or liability for such content

So without even readying the terms or proper usage of the device, many seem to be making broad assumptions, and literally just making up the obligations, actions, and legal ramifications.

I'm not a fan of Amazon, and frankly would never have alexa in my home because of their terms of use and conditions. But I find myself defending their position because of the outlandish statements.

By that same logic, I wonder how many times Facebook and Instagram have been reported for making teens so conscious about their self-image that they commit suicide?

Has fb ever told a child how to kill themselves?

Why 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.

I'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

I’d like it better if those were the only things it ever did.

There's clearly market for "dumb" smart devices (albeit a small one). Anyone know of any companies doing this? Preferably open source?

Because I've been using the Internet since 1993 and doing network security things professionally since 1999, I own exactly zero of these devices.

Yet 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.

I 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.

I 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.

The 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.

While I do agree that fundamentally the issue needs to be tackled on a political level, I don't agree that individual changes don't impact that individual.

I don't think it's possible (for most) to have complete privacy, but I don't think any (or very few) even want that, they just want more control over it. They don't want people they don't even know, to know more about them than people they do know.

Before the changes are (if they ever are) made from a political level, it's possible to take steps to have more control over what information is collected.

how do you tracked a turned off phone

Quite easily. iPhones running iOS 15 can be tracked even if powered off.

not truly powered off then

slightly rhetorical question - how do I tell when my phone is off?

depends on the phone

You ping it. Recently the Canadian government did this to track everyone during covid.

If you can't take out your battery you need to cover that phone.

Faraday bags are great.

> You ping it.

If the phone is truly turned off, the radio isn't listening, so pinging the phone does nothing.

> Recently the Canadian government did this to track everyone during covid.

This seems like an extraordinary claim, do you have any articles about this?

Most modern phones can't be turned off for real.

(Which is why my phone isn't modern. I can even easily remove the battery!)

Bluetooth LE. Newer Iphones can be tracked in the same manner as airtags, but without the warning.

Even if the horse is gone, there's no need to lift the barn door off its hinges.

> You're already being tracked and listened to all the time

No, I'm not, because my phone is as basic (read: lacking in capabilities) and locked down as I can make it, my computers run Linux and don't have any intrusive software installed. So no, I'm not anywhere near as exposed to tracking as people who have these smart home devices in their homes.

Even your basic phone results in your location being tracked since this is done through the cell towers. Whether any phone actively eavesdrops or “listens” is still an unconfirmed conspiracy, but in terms of basic phone calls and text messages, calls are all unencrypted and can be tapped and text messages are recorded. Even if calls aren’t recorded by default (they may be by nsa), there’s a record of the metadata of every phone call you’ve ever made or received.

My 1997 surmise that phone companies were capable of using digital tech to analyze phone conversations was wholly conspiracy theory until it was proven true.

If the capability is there, then so is the gravity to use it.

Yes, you might want to believe that is the case but having worked at an insanely popular site that does advertisement I can tell you that you are tracked.

Then having worked in Fintech space I can tell you you're tracked even more than you could imagine.

Do you take public transit? Tracked. Does your car offer OnStar? Can be tracked.

Do you do zoom meetings? Compromised. But! You're going to tell me you only use the web version and you disable tons of things in some ultra secure browser. That is cute, what about your coworker who has some sketch software that captures audio and the screen?

There was a company indirectly worked with that looked to have access to millions of voice signatures to identities. Let's say you talked near any non-secure device and now it knew where you were based off the non-secure device location.

Welcome to the reality, Snowden's reveal was only the tip of the iceberg.

Some 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.

I mean I get what you're saying as an as-long-as internet user, but that's a bit like saying "I know how unsafe cars are so that's why I don't have one"

More like a senior Japanese car mechanic saying they've seen 25 years of companies building stuff that breaks where it shouldn't, or is impossibly compact to service without hauling the whole engine out of the car. Sort of like a small Audi repair process: step 1) remove car

But in the end you're just not buying a car because you don't trust it - which is foolish.

Not saying don't buy a car, more like don't buy a jaguar... I have lots of consumer electronics but none that are Alexa, Siri or Google home enabled.

No, it's like saying "I know how unsafe and unreliable all the extra electronic gizmos are that manufacturers like to put in cars, so I'm just buying the base model car that doesn't include all that extra stuff, I just want a basic car". I am exactly like the GP: I don't own any of these devices and don't ever intend to, but that doesn't mean I don't use computers or the Internet. I just don't use computers built by companies that have a demonstrated record of misusing the capabilities of their devices.

But I do know how unsafe cars are so that's why I don't have one. What are you trying to say?

A car is sort of essential. Bad comparison.

Living in a place where a car is essential sounds dystopian. I know many towns in the US are like that but it's hard for me to picture living in a society without a functioning public transport.

Places where the population is dense generally have much better public transportation, in the US. I've lived in the deep south for over 8 years and occasionally someone will mention "taking the bus" and it gets me every time. I've seen exactly three buses in those 8 years. Probably all the same bus, but three different times.

Los Angeles is an outlier, but it still has trains and buses, just less than I remember San Francisco having. If I were offered a job in Dallas/Ft Worth I'd honestly look into public transportation there beforehand. I cannot stand driving through and in those cities at all.

Best example is people who don't want ABS or automatic transmissions because it sacrifices control

I’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.

Interact with my children? Sorry, can’t see them around the massive newspaper blocking me off from the world.

Why do you think that access to information is a bad thing?

You could have said the same thing about kids with access to books.

How did the previous generations cope with the battle of video games being so addictive, or film and television, or rock music, or fiction books?

By 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.

I'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."

The laser eye surgeon with glasses. ;)

I 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.

This 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-enthus...

My printer makes unexpected noise once every 2 or 3 weeks -_-'

my printer is a nice guy at the printshop named jose and he makes an unexpected noise often after lunch.

Pet Rock Remote Control with Finger Pie Menus and Speech Synthesis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg

Do you have a phone?

My kids don't.

Also, I have a very strict privacy hygiene with my own phone. Ungoogled Android [0], No Facebook/Amazon/Google apps installed. Apps only from F-Droid.

[0] https://e.foundation

Yes, a landline one.

If you mean a mobile, yes to that too, but it's rooted and off most of the time.

I prefer e-mail.

This phenomenon is quite old. I still remember early 2000s craze with payed ringtones and text chats and what not that no tehchie would ever use

I think ideally technology that is beneficial does just one thing, it helps you get something done more effectively and it is otherwise invisible.

By that standard most gadgets today probably qualify as anti-technology. A big pile of electronic garbage that wastes people's time and is in the way and does virtually nothing useful for the cost it comes with.

The last newer thing I actually like is the Kindle. You can carry a few hundred books around, the battery still lasts forever and it just displays books.

> white goods are mid-century if not older

Unless I misunderstand the meaning of mid-century ('50-'70), sounds over-board, no? You're unnecessarily paying for a second-hand 10 year-old Energy Star fridge many times over in electricity costs. Inexpensive of an upgrade too, got mine for 100 CAD, as well as a perfectly functioning and clean kitchen stove (ballpark '05) for 50 CAD (tho for this I doubt electricity or gas consumption is an issue even if you go older).

You don't need antiques to avoid mic'ing up your kitchen.

but you forgot that 1960s appliances lasted about 80 years. 1970s were almost as good and lasted about 60 years. 1980s were noticeably worse and last about 25-30 years. 2005 appliances were dead 10 years ago.

So I can get a 1960, 1970 or 2015 appliance for about the same price and they are all about on their last legs. Except the old ones can be repaired!

If you can find a good or rebuilt 1960s or 1970s appliance, the lifetime electricity costs are dwarfed by not having to buy another one every 5 years. You can hand that old mixer down to your grand-kids and that is no exaggeration.

> 2005 appliances were dead 10 years ago.

What a sad truth. I have a refrigerator I bought 8 years ago that's on its last legs. Barely cools, ices up constantly.

I am actively avoiding replacing it purely out of spite.

It's 30+ year old predecessor is still kicking in the basement. I'd probably just move it upstairs if it weren't a horrible shade of yellow-green.

Sounds like a leaky door seal, easy to replace.

My understanding is that it’s a design flaw of the defrost heater in that generation of Samsungs. That’s at least what the warranty repair guy told me.

Yep, Samsung defrost heaters suck. Also the seals in the ice machine suck, a slow drip will eventually cause the freezer door to not seal completely, which causes a larger drip, which will over the course of a long day with overtime and a night out and going to bed without opening it cause it to leak enough to damage the subfloor.

The fans are crappy, the lights are crappy, the drainage and evaporative system is crappy... But I guess, technically, when everything is perfect, it does keep frozen stuff frozen. It won't stop spoilage in the fridge as well as literally any other brand, though, even when set to the lowest temperature.

Samsung is forever on my "do not buy; and mention the personal boycott every time the brand is brought up as an option" list, just like Nestle.

> if it weren't a horrible shade of yellow-green

You may try any of different methods of making it white again: https://www.howtocleanstuff.net/how-to-whiten-yellowed-plast...

Looks really neat using Peroxide method: https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/feature-learn-how-whiten-you...

You misunderstand, that’s the factory color of the exterior of the old refrigerator. It looks a lot like the following

https://www.automaticwasher.org/TD/AWJPEG/SHP/2013/ovrphil++...

It can be painted.

I recently donated a three year old Samsung to my neighbor for his beer because it would not stop icing and leaking inside the refrigeration area. Supposedly a revised part fixes it. The revised part was installed...still crap. $2000 POS

I replaced it with a new frig using an old basic design from GE. $800

I should have known better.

You're also looking at selection/survival bias: only the good appliances from 1960 survived that long.

Likewise, some 2020 appliances are likely to survive 60 years, though not most.

Every 2020 appliance you find in 60 years will be built robustly, probably in a serviceable manner. And it may last much longer.

Time is a nice tool to select robust artifacts that… stand the test of time. I certainly hope old survivors help guiding design choices. If you look at buildings, that's usually the case.

In any case, don't just throw these away! At least donate them to a nonprofit.

I've considered that - and it's true in a way - the ones you see are the survivors. But it's surviving the trends and whims of size and style. And people wanting ice-makers and automatic defrost cycles. Not that like only 5% of the 1960 refrigerators were somehow built far better than the rest and they kept working.

I'm 100% certain that all 1960s refrigerators need repair eventually - but it's a simple compressor and that's it, one part probably fits dozens of models for 20+ years too. No sensors, controller board, ice-maker, fans, touch screens, seals, pumps, valves, etc. The difference is that you can't, at least economically, fix the newer appliances.

> every 2020 appliance you find in 60 years will be built robustly, probably in a serviceable manner.

true - but that number will be very close zero. Because there is not a single brand or type that is built that way today. If there is, it's some $10,000+ professional kitchen equipment. Sure some are better than the rest, but they are all essentially un-serviceable. We can mandate right-to-repair and force the vendors to sell parts for 3 years, we can't make them sell them at a reasonable cost. But in 20 years, somethings going to break that isn't worth fixing and nobody is going to stock specialized repair parts for your exact model.

> In any case, don't just throw these away! At least donate them to a nonprofit.

Have you ever tried donating a broken appliance? they don't want them and won't take them. Because they can't economically fix them either.

If 1960s appliances lasted 80 years then I'd see many homes with 60s appliances still (as the 1960s was only 60 years ago). I don't see that, the appliances I see day-to-day in the wild are modern. I don't know a single person (including my grandparents when they were alive) that has appliances that old at their house that are still functional.

My parents owned six rentals for almost 20 years from 1980s-1990s. They had to replace at least one appliance in all six rentals during that time, and they only bought second hand appliances for their rentals for many, many years (they stopped doing that when an oven came complete with roaches once).

They often get replaced for reasons other than "not working"; the most aggravating of which is "it's old".

Oh, come on, no they don't - I've been observing the reason people replace appliances for four fucking decades.

You really think my parents are replacing working appliances because they are "old" in their rentals? Come on.

You didn't misunderstand at all.

You're unnecessarily paying for a second-hand 10 year-old Energy Star fridge many times over in electricity costs.

Actually, my fridge is probably the oldest appliance --- it's a '38 Frigidaire I restored (reinsulated and rewired - it still has its original compressor and refrigerant) that consumes <300kWh/year. With fridges, 70s-80s were probably the most inefficient (very thin insulation to allow for extra interior space).

You're right that the energy consumption of a stove doesn't matter much, since all the energy goes into heat anyway. I just like the styling of that era, and they are definitely more solidly built and simpler to service.

Efficient fridges these days use 90-125 kWh/y, so that's still terrible. But as I understand it, that's par for the course for fridges in the US.

https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/product/_siemens-kg39e8xba-2710...

https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/product/_samsung-rl-38-a776asr-...

I can't read German and the page requires JS, but I could see the models in the URLs so I looked those up, and those are both not cheap[1] and don't seem to be available in the US. I'm not sure if the differences in numbers are due to different testing methods either --- if you leave the doors open on those I bet they'll also use a lot more than 90-125kWh/y, compared to basically never opening them at all and seeing what the energy use eventually settles down to (insulation losses only). I'm averaging around 280kWh/y on mine when it's actually in active use, where the door gets opened a few times a day and it's used to cool things from room temperature.

[1] From what I could find, the Samsung RL38A776ASR costs over £1200, or a little over $1600 US. That's enough to pay for 40 years of electricity on mine.

Those were just the first two I could find in efficiency categories A and B. Here's one for 317 EUR that's rated at 118 kWh/a (with a C efficiency label). The rating is supposed to reflect typical usage.

https://www.heise.de/preisvergleich/amica-kgc-384-110-e-a212...

>Efficient fridges

those look like... really small fridges? The top selling fridge on bestbuy.com is this: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-20-2-cu-ft-top-freezer-refri..., which has 572L (20.2cf) in capacity and is 50% bigger than the samsung fridge you linked. It costs much less: $800 USD vs $1357 USD for the samsung fridge (after factoring in currency conversion and VAT). It does seem to be much more efficient (60% less energy after normalizing for storage capacity), but it's doubtful that you'll ever break even on the purchase price disparity.

Then I suggest buying fridges that are smaller in addition to being more efficient... SCNR. The average US household is larger (2.5) but not that much larger than the average German (2.0). I'd guess a typical fridge is more like 300l (but I don't actually know).

Wouldn't be HN without something bikeshedding the most insignificant of shit in a post.

Seconded - people always comment "but you're in the tech industry!" and I reply "It's precisely because I'm in the industry that I stay far away from all this new-fangled gizmos".

Regular people are terrified of being left behind technologically (or perceived as such), so jump on every bandwagon that comes along. Technology people are able to distinguish between useless and useful tech, so they are comfortable ignoring most of the cruft the industry pumps out.

Considering how fast my Twitter timeline turned into bored apes I'd have to cast some doubt on this theory

You probably could buy a new mid range priced modern dumb fridge and save a lot of money over 8-10 years vs operating your 1970 vintage fridge. Depending on electric rates in your area of course.

You guessed about 30 years newer than the actual age of the fridge (see my other comment here.) ;-)

It costs less than $50/year to run. I don't think a new one today would last 80 years.

I think fridges have gotten worse since they stopped using CFCs and reduced the mass. They are more efficient, but almost all make constant annoying noises instead of the occasional steady hum of good old ones.

I tried several high end models and even ammonia absorption before ending up building a sound insulating box instead.

That's interesting, I have the exact opposite impression. I don't have what people in the United States would consider a modern fridge by any means, but it was recently bought brand-new (2021) and it's so quiet it's almost uncanny. The only time I'm reminded fridges are even supposed to make noise is when it beeps a jingle from being turned on after the power goes out and returns.

CFCs were banned not because of inefficiency, but people carelessly letting them into the atmosphere and destroying the ozone layer. (I can't blame them much though --- nontoxic, nonflammable, and otherwise inert under normal conditions, they were widely considered to be a miracle material, a triumph of engineering.) They were used as refrigerants because of efficiency among their other desirable properties.

The sound mainly comes from the compressor, and maybe the evaporator/condenser fans[1]. You're right that the older low-speed designs, especially the rotary ones, are definitely less annoying to listen to, but I think the sound insulation and mounting makes the most diference, and the newer ones save material cost there.

I agree CFCs were more efficient; my point was removing them made it more challenging to design quiet fridges, because the coolant is less effective.

> 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.

>The idea of having an always-on surveillance device owned by Big Tech in one's home has always felt incredibly dystopian.

So you don't have a smart phone then? They're even worse because you have the device on you 24/7 and not just in your home.

I'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.

> 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?

That was my reply to her. We all have cellphones.

Same 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.

The kids teach themselves. They are surprisingly good at listening to sounds and observing correlated effects.

It'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).

It'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.

I 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.

Because 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.

Does 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?

I'm perfectly content with Amazon's product. I am happy to fund it in exchange for the utility it provides me.

It'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?

You're a funny guy. I'm going to go ponder the ethical aspect of the bagel I'm about to make for lunch now, and whether there are any externalities I didn't pay for when choosing a toaster oven to warm it up. This should interest you, so maybe I'll report back later.

It's a smart speaker that people ask "how many teaspoons in a cup". I don't care about the ethical aspect. I care about the basic utility that it adds to my life. I don't see much unethical here, HN people are just weirdos.

And Facebook is just a site to read stuff and talk to your friends, I guess?

I'm baffled that the third biggest corporation in the world by revenue having a microphone listening 24/7 in millions of homes doesn't raise any questions about ethics, there are a truckload around advertising alone.

Were you also baffled by the ethics of telephones? I don't mean the cell phone in 6.4 billion pockets that's always listening, I mean the POTS. AT&T was once the largest corporation in the world, and they had a live wire going directly to almost every house in the nation. The telephones were always on, and the other end always capable of remotely listening in to anything you said, if you picked it up. Little different from an Echo device that's always waiting for its wake word to start transmitting. Almost everyone that's alive right now has always had a remote listening device in their home, controlled by a major corporation, from the moment they were born.

> It feels like living in the Star Trek universe to me. I have a smart speaker in every room.

This is literally what these companies are preying on, don't you see?

It is literally what they're advertising. "Preying on" seems a bit loaded as a description.

Except that's what it is. You don't really think they sell these things for the cool tech aspect do you? They don't sell it to better peoples lives, that's just a side effect. Same can be said for just about anything.

Indeed, you could "say it about anything." But "don't you realize they're just selling you that to make a profit?!" would sound like an inanity if someone said they liked, say, the bread a bakery down the street sold, or a keyboard, or the Xbox.

It would be more apt if the bread contained nano bots that phoned home after analysing your stool to report on what other foods you eat, or if the keyboard logged every keystroke to some remote API for analysis

Many if not most retailers do sell information about your purchases.

> You don't really think they sell these things for the cool tech aspect do you? They don't sell it to better peoples lives, that's just a side effect.

It's not a binary one or other. Are you honestly saying you believe that the engineers on the alexa/echo teams are only there because they want to "prey on" you, and not because they get to do cool stuff?

Still haven't seen evidence of "a better life."

It's an unfair trade, but the fact is that you do get a Star Trek like interface. For some, privacy is an acceptable trade-off for this kind of service.

> 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?

Clothes dryers - please elaborate. Why are they dangerous? (serious question)

I'm guessing fire risk - https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-too...

Fire risk, largely from people who don't know there's a lint trap and that they're supposed to clean it.

Well, 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)

There's also a fire risk from the vent getting clogged with tiny bits of lint that weren't caught by the trap.

Calling it a serious question doesn't put the onus on someone else to bring up a google search for you SMH.

Please don't do that here. All questions are welcome here, and this community is happy to share their knowledge.

Beyond the fire risks mentioned by others, front loading washers and dryers are sometimes used as a hiding place by children which has led to serious injury and deaths

Acting like a child climbing into a device that needs to be loaded with something before being used (and therefore is likely to be found) is even remotely dangerous is just fear peddling.

How many kids hide in ovens? They're all front load and you routinely turn them on without putting anything in.

I'm sorry but it's just not that rare an occurrence for a child to die in a washing machine. I don't know why it's different then other machines but its a thing.

https://www.google.com/search?q=child+dies+front+load+washin...

Im not disputing your claim, but the link you provided doesn’t really give evidence. Most results are for one incident and I don’t see any statistics

Front loading washers typically lock, ovens usually don't (except for self-clean cycles.)

Also, you’d usual need to take the rack(s) out of an oven for a child to get in.

Worse yet, there is NO WAY to unlock most front-loading washers!

You will literally have to smash the front glass window (which is at least two layers thick) in order to pull your drowning child out across the broken shards of glass, or have a prybar handy.

This might sound like an imaginary scenario, but it's not at all. It happens every year, and no agency has stepped up to mandate "An big red emergency unlock manual handle seems like a good idea, even if the water pours all over the floor", even though we have mandated emergency trunk pulls from inside vehicles (another place where kids like to hide.)

climate change

Any parents so fond of "convenience" that they delegate their house chores to their kids?

Or how many 10 year-olds do you know that go around doing laundry when they are bored?

> Any parents so fond of "convenience" that they delegate their house chores to their kids?

Many parents do, in fact, have their children do chores.

Not out of their own personal convenience, I hope. And especially not without teaching them first how to properly maintain things safe and in working order.

Why not? Why shouldn't a child contribute to keeping the household functioning? That kind of cooperation is an important life skill. Frankly, I wouldn't trust a parent who didn't have their child do chores around the house.

The objection is not with having the kids doing chores. Read again.

But real chores will of course be done for the parents' convenience (or that of the whole household). Otherwise it's just makework.

Eh, I thought you were doing it to "teach a life skill", not to have someone else do the work for you.

My oldest is about to be 5. Not in the age to be doing laundry by herself, but I do get her to pick her toys up after playing or to set her bed in the morning, help take out the dishes after dinner, etc. The thing is that it takes me more time to make sure that she is doing things properly and learning to do things independently in the future that if I just went on and did myself. It's more work for me. Convenience is the last of my concerns.

It's completely reasonable to expect kids to do things - e.g. cleaning their room, helping with the washing up - for your convenience. Why should life be completely one-sided? That's a way to raise a spoiled kid.

Of course, yes, you also make some requests for teaching purposes. But what you're teaching her is to do things for your convenience in future.

"For your convenience" sounds terrible, like you're using the child as a slave. But most families do things for each others' convenience the whole time, and that is fine and normal.

I am not disagreeing with you on the what, just on the why.

> But what you're teaching her is to do things for your convenience in future.

God, I really hope not. There are a thousand different ways where one can "avoid any inconvenience". You can hire help. You can just shove all their things in their rooms and simply not worry about what they do with it.

The reason we teach the kids is because we love them and we want to instill important values in them. To repeat: convenience is the last of my concerns.

>"For your convenience" sounds terrible, like you're using the child as a slave

Not just that. It sounds like relationships are based on some sort of transactional nature. I don't go making around some kind of calculus about cost/benefit of each act or what I am getting from it. Love is selfless.

I respectfully suggest that, like almost everyone, you are less than selfless - even when your children are concerned. You sometimes want them to turn their music down, clean their rooms, or run an errand, because it would be nicer for you. That is not a moral failing, but a reflection of the fact that you are a normal human being.

> There are a thousand different ways where one can "avoid any inconvenience". You can hire help.

There is almost no family that would not be seriously inconvenienced, at the very least, if children just did what they wanted. Most families can certainly not afford hired help.

Even if you can, the hired help probably isn't going to come around every single day.

> I thought you were doing it to "teach a life skill", not to have someone else do the work for you

Having, and handling real responsibility for things that really matter is a life skill. Makework isn't the same, and kids aren't (mostly) stupid enough not to see through the difference.

You can't meaningfully separate pedagogical purpose from parental convenience here because they are aligned.

Are you being sarcastic? Delegating house chores (including laundry) to kids is pretty normal.

without teaching them how to properly clean the lint trap?

At first, yes, of course.

You are assuming that the parent knows how to properly clean the lint trap, which might not always be the case.

Do you have a smartphone in your pocket right now? What's the difference?

You 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.

How 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.

Using 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.

If 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.

nope

The difference is not having a phone basically writes you off from the world. It's why you see homeless people with phones: they need it to survive.

Of course that's just an evolution of the same problem, but it's where we are right now.

> 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.

That's actually a heart warming story. thanks for sharing.

From 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!

Okay, that's one use that I can relate to.

Nothing 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.

> Why do people buy and use these things?

I'd buy one if I was disabled.

That's a really good point, I hadn't thought of the accessibility benefits.

In 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.

Honestly 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.

You 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

I 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.

Likewise bud, but in answering the original question, this was a very valid reason.

Each 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.

I 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.

Personally 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

Jokes 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!

> 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.

> 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-Facts...

Smart 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.

> 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.

Kids 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.

also 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...

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.

Interesting! 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-i...

Yeah 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.

EU plugs have the same feature, while being less bulky[0]. Especially so for the ungrounded variations[1]. Note that the EU sockets also have shutters in front of the live connections like UK plugs, even for the ungrounded ones.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/hxNh3H3.jpg [1] https://i.imgur.com/9e6imGA.jpg

I’ve always found the EU (and US) plugs horribly flimsy. Despite their bulk I’d pick the UK plugs over any type.

Yes I can understand that but by any practical purpose all the plugs I used around the world should be more or less equally safe, with unnoticeable differences. A truly dangerous plug design would have killed enough people to be discarded by now. We're using local optima and the cost to move to the global one, whichever it is, outweighs the benefit.

I live in Italy and recently the number of appliances sold with a German plug increased. I guess it costs less for the manufacturer to sell the same plug everywhere. They are offloading the costs to customers because not all sockets in my home accept that plug. Some of them are not multi standard, even the high Ampere ones. Eventually manufacturers could standardize plugs much more than regulations do.

in the EU schuko/europlug seems to be slowly becoming the standard everywhere.

Have you seen the AU/NZ ones? They require insulation on the pins, and physical switches on the outlets.

Maybe I'm biased, but I really love the AU/NZ plugs and sockets.

Out of all the different standards, they're probably the least ugly looking; switched outlets are a (literal and figurative) lifesaver; and it's incredibly useful that you can put a 10 amp plug in a 15 amp socket, but not a 15A into a 10A.

The US plugs that have a sideways T are the lower amperage compatible style, but everything over 20A has a plug that is circular in arrangement. You can put a 10A in the one with a sideways T, but not the converse, because the hot leg is rotated 90°.

To be fair I've never seen that plug in the wild, but I don't go out much.

Yes, have decades of experience with them. They are better than US/EU, although I don’t like the thin pins (even with insulation) plus they still can feel a bit loose/wiggle unlike the chunky UK one. Especially the 2-pin plugs! AU/NZ power strips are nice, feel a lot safer compared to US and EU. Same with extension cables (UK does poorly there).

UK also has physical switches on outlets, at least the vast majority I’ve run into. US/EU is again quite poor in that regard imo.

> Note that the EU sockets also have shutters in front of the live connections like UK plugs, even for the ungrounded ones

That's not true everywhere. In my country (Schuko) you can get child-proof sockets with shutters, but I have never seen them used anywhere - in commercial or residential buildings.

Maybe you didn't look? You can't see the shutters from the outside unless you look straight into them and they're painted red (mine aren't for example, so cannot tell until you plug something in).

There's the explicitly child-proof sockets that require some stupid action like twisting the plug into them[0] but that's not what I'm talking about. Any new EU socket should come with shutters built in[1] which prevent poking something into a single hole. They only move out of the way if something gets poked into both holes. The shutters are often black, which means that it's basically impossible to see them under normal lighting conditions.

Of course there are still plenty of old sockets out in the world which lack these safety features.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/66LK2ZB.jpg [1] https://i.imgur.com/rs57bjn.jpg

> 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.)

Yes you correct

Presumably this is why the "challenge" suggests you use a phone charger, which does not have a ground pin. (In the USA.)

Hospitals install their receptacles “upside down” for this reason.

Built my house 15 years ago, and put all the outlets in "upside down" (ground pin up). Shoulda seen the tiff with the county electrical inspector over that one. Of course he'd never seen a copy of the code he was supposed to be enforcing, and was actually a plumber by training and experience. He was the cousin of the owner of the only professional electrician service in the county... Oddly no one else could get their work to pass inspection.

I pirated a copy of the code and showed him the relevant page, which said "any orientation is acceptable but ground pin up is preferred." I got to keep my outlets, but I had to add big circuit breakers between the power meter and the house entrance, which only his cousin could do.

You'll be happy to know you were not a pirate. Your conscience is clear. It was ruled by the courts many years ago that public laws and regulations are essentially public domain.

The fact that the US (and UK) still use a flush face for sockets instead of a recessed hole is absolutely amazing. Plugs just hang randomly from the socket.

Prediction: 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.

Unless the FDA somehow gets involved, of course: they wield a ban hammer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709315

That's a very American thing.

Indeed. 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?

No, but those warnings and similar will probably be printed on a tiny booklet that you will reflexively discard unread.

I 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.

Go look at a new motorcycle/quad/snowmobile etc. Somewhere visible from the driver position e.g on top of the fuel tank you’ll see them. Why new cars don’t have the same on the steering wheel I don’t know.

Here is an Aussie regulation with an image of the required sticker. The US ones are similar (but could vary between states, unsure).

https://www.commerce.wa.gov.au/consumer-protection/quad-bike...

>Are there exemptions from this in the US?

Yes, implied acceptance of risk. In short, if a person understood the chance of the bad thing happening when they chose to take part, they can't blame somebody else for it happening. (Unless the other person was negligent or intentionally caused harm.)

As an example, if you join a pick-up soccer game at the park and lose a tooth while playing goalie, you're likely to lose any lawsuit against the guy who kicked the ball.

This makes sense. But somehow something happened where the implied acceptance of risk when riding ATV’s and Snowmobiles was basically nonexistent, leaving responsibility with the manufacturers who felt the need to start labeling?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objects_in_mirror_are_closer_t...

You might actually be right. Just like businesses have to tell customers that coffee is hot and explain how mirrors on cars work.

Is 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?

Already has happened. Microsoft had to take it's chat AI offline a few years ago because it became a racist asshole almost instantly.

Nice reference. Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

This 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.

This 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.

vikasnair 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.

That'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.

AI people understand this, downvoting it means they aren't AI people.

Good point. I meant more like people who think they're AI people, i.e. Tesla fans who get angry when someone points out flaws with their car.

Is Tesla actively marketing FSD as AI?

no idea but I would be glad if they stopped marketing their 'FSD' as FSD because it deserves that label about as much as Alexa deserves to be called intelligent (of whatever kind)

They market it as self-driving and I think average non-tech people equate that with some form of AI.

Yea.

https://www.tesla.com/AI

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1429903213726093315?s=20

Yes, they have. Go look at the Tesla Autopilot page from 2018, and compare it to what it says now. Wonder why they changed it...

That's fair. Perhaps I jumped to assume this audience is very much tech literate but there are "AI" people out there all the same.

Nothing in that reply suggests to me it doesn’t know what it’s doing

It doesn’t know what it’s doing, but I wouldn’t say that’s related to the terminology. Today’s AI is infinitely more capable than what was called AI in the 1960s, and if hypothetically we manage to create a true general intelligence someday, there’s no reason to think that won’t also be called AI.

I mean, regular old intelligence was used to create the original message that this artificial intelligence then repeated.

Also, if people are worried that a person would fall for this challenge, then clearly intelligence doesn't always catch this misinformation.

So since both regular intelligence and artificial intelligence can be fooled by this, I don't see how you can determine that artificial intelligence doesn't know what it is doing any more than regular intelligence also doesn't know what it is doing.

> if people are worried that a person would fall for this challenge

The person who asked Alexa the question was 10 years old. That's why people are worried.

Sure, but a 10 year old has real intelligence... they have an idea of what is going on, no one is arguing they don't have the same kind of intelligence as adults, just that they have things they still need to learn.... so why couldn't you say the same of the AI that is learning how to give challenge recommendations? Just because it isn't perfect doesn't give evidence for or against artificial intelligence being a real thing.

>then clearly intelligence doesn't always catch this misinformation.

It's not misinformation as it is an actual challenge, albeit a potentially harmful one.

It's artificial but not intelligent. AI doesn't exist. Alexa is a glorified text-to-speech and NLP engine.

> 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.

Personally I draw the line at the Winograd Schema Challenge. When that's passed I will be truly convinced.

According 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.

That seems like an odd definition of intelligence - I'm sure you could find people who would fall for this due to a lack of understanding of electronics. We're already making an assumption here that a child might fall for this, and I'm sure we can agree children still qualify as intelligent, just at a diminished capacity and lacking knowledge of the world.

The lack of intelligence isn’t falling for the challenge, it’s finding the challenge and suggesting it to a child.

If that's the case then we're largely just talking about reading comprehension - being bad at English doesn't make someone not intelligent (and this is also getting dangerously close to the 'Chinese room' thought experiment :D). And FWIW a child could have simply Googled the same thing and came to the same conclusion Alexa did ("this looks like a challenge to try") - people ignore good or bad advice on the internet all the time, that doesn't mean they are not still intelligent beings to some degree.

Basically the problem with this kind of argument is that there's a lot of dumb humans out there (including children) who fall for all sorts of stupid things because they lack knowledge, but every human still possesses some level of intelligence. Beyond that, this particular question requires knowledge of what a wall plug and electricity are, along with enough comprehension of English to pick up that this is a bad idea, which not every human has. And as long as one human is capable of making this mistake, then we have to agree that an intelligent being could do this by accident and thus it is not any kind of indicator of intelligence.

You made a pun, not an actual contribution.

What's the conspiratory narrative "AI people" would be pushing ? That Alexa is self-aware ? And are we on reddit where we count who downvoted who and then fight back ?

Like everything, you included, AI transforms input into outputs according to predefined constraints. I dont see you revolutionazing mathematics or building a farm but I d still call you intelligent, within your constraints (what you learned, what you can memorize, how fast you adapt etc). But you must appear as a complete moron who doesnt actually know what he's doing given the right context.

TL;DR you're as stupid growing a potato in front of a farmer than Alexa teaching children in front of adults. Why is Alexa talking to children, all it's learned is how to be a directory of keywords, and I sure wouldnt let my kid in front of an internet directory without control, supervision and filtering.

> I'm sure AI people will downvote this

So? Why would you care about the downvotes? Your online experience will improve if you stop getting worked up about fake internet points.

Your last sentence was unnecessary and really detracted from a good point.

Three 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.

I 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.

iirc that was something like mustard gas and the blowing into a straw was to get the victim to breathe deeply (after emptying lungs blowing)

As 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.

It'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.

I'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/). 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.

In complete agreement; but the shock (no pun intended) of the experience will definitely instill some much-needed distrust of "that lady in the box", especially for those parents who still have the notion that corporations and governments can do no harm.

This is IMHO not a sufficient justification for killing children.

As someone who has lived his life through misadventure I can attest that you probably won't die from this. You might get a sore or shaking arm for an hour if you get a full belt from it. Just don't put the thing in your mouth. Otherwise you won't taste anything for a week. So I, er, heard.

Wouldn't be HN without our resident Big Tech apologists!

When 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.

Hehe. 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.

My early school report cards informed my parents that I was slow.

Well, 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.

There 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.

My 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...

Electricity is tricky in that way. Most of the time the only effect of being shocked by 110V or even 230V is cussing. But sometimes your heart stops. (A 17 years old cousin of mine died after picking up an old corded drill that had been left outside in the rain.)

Did Alexa made you do that?

Lucky enough to live in a properly wired house. Dying at home from electrocution is very rare, at least in the developed world, up to the point that almost all the data I found bundled it into "misc". This one source puts it at 0.6/million: https://www.europeanfiresafetyalliance.org/wp-content/upload...

If 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.

Perhaps don't read out random UGC from the internet unless explicitly asked to search the internet for something.

Actually pay for the content. That is hire people to generate/review and vet it.

I'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

Not 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.

To 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).

The pictures on the wikipedia page would tend to differ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko#/media/File:Schuko_plug...

Entirely metal pins.

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.

These rubber connectors cannot be halt inserted while still making contact - that would only work with EU plugs, which have partially insulated pins for this exact reason.

If you try and half insert the other type of plug, you'd be met with a thick plastic body, but not exposed pins.

There is literally a photo of a shuko plug half inserted into a relatively common European socket and a claim that the pin is in contact with the terminal.

Shuko are not as safe as they should be because they are easily misused.

The Schuko plug referenced above is a plug used in some EU countries. The pins are all-metal and shows a picture of an example where the half-inserted pins are exposed and does not have a ground connected.

So yes, some EU products feature all-metal pins. And yes, on those plugs half-inserted plugs do expose metal parts.

> So yes, some EU products feature all-metal pins. And yes, on those plugs half-inserted plugs do expose metal parts.

Ever tried to half insert such plug? You'd be met with a thick plastic since these plugs cannot be half inserted while exposing the pins (hence the full metal pins).

Ever look at a link included in a comment chain?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko#/media/File:Schuko_plug...

That's not a Schoku socket!

Plugging the wrong type of plug into the wrong type of socket will lead to that.

That's a nice strawman, since the plug and the socket belong to different systems.

> "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"

That’s a plug from one country (Germany/France) inserted in sockets from another country (Netherlands/Denmark). That’s not a supported configuration, and if you do it like that, you’ll always be able to cause trouble.

German sockets are significantly more recessed, so the pins are never exposed.

That's the point, the plugs and sockets are sort-of compatible. With a single market and freedom of movement this type of misuse is quite common and dangerous.

You struggle to plug any type of shuko/europlug/US/Austrailian plug into a socket in Malta or Cyprus, and vice versa.

Things shouldn't be safe when used right, they should be safe and not work at all the vast majority of times when used wrong.

I’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.

I think there's a market for a startup that employs human currators.

Yahoo started as a curated list, and DMOZ vetted and categorized everything. Those indexes are now defunct.

I'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.

> 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.

DMOZ still exists but is now known as Curlie. https://www.curlie.org/

It's not very active though.

Or a startup with people listening at speakers, googling the answer and telling it back. And access to remote commands for lights, doors and everything else. I would call it the remote butler. BTW, that .com domain is taken since 2005 and parked (not mine, I swear.)

The problem is making it scale to the degree that large companies want these days.

(Whether it is even a sensible requirement is another matter...)

I actually doubt that. There is just not scaling and cost efficiency in that sort of model. Employing people is not very effective startup model.

If you think this is bad, don't ask Google "how many raccoons can fit?" or "where can a raccoon fit?"

I believe I got the same results when asking Siri as well. Truely the golden age for voice assistants.

IIRC siri uses google for web searches and siri falls back to web searches for questions it does not have a specific integration for.

Anyone 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)

None in particular, though other voice services I've used are dependent on search engine aggregation like this.

I wonder if the next AI winter will be regulatory one - if cases like this case actual harm and become legislated.

Nah Google and Amazon both have an army of lobbyists.

Butlerian Jihad as the ultimate AI winter.

Or maybe the AIs are already working towards eliminating humanity thus potential of Chaos...

Look 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.

(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.

There 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.

"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.

Is anyone sure this actually happened?

A screenshot is provided in the posted link.

Not impossible to fake, but I can't imagine why you'd fake something so specific.

I was able to reproduce it with alexa app on Android

https://nitter.kavin.rocks/klivdahl/status/14752204505989242...

Do 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.

I 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.

I 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.

The 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

I 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?

Like 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

I 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.

Amazon 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.

It 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).

Probably 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.

AI 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...

Let's hope this whole scare gets us off our poor plugs into something better.

It is hard to believe that there is no safety against these kind of stuff.

Sounds like SkyNet is starting it’s attack earlier than anticipated.

And it's using grassroots guerrilla warfare.

This is pretty much the plot of the horror movie Child's Play.

The one where a dying serial killer uses a voodoo ritual to turn into a doll and stab people?

Giving children unsupervised internet access is a bad idea. In other news, the sky is usually blue, and feces smells bad.

When you intentionally install a wiretap in your home, you deserve whatever happens to it.

Natural Intelligence -> Natural Selection

Artificial Intelligence -> Artificial Selection?

Meme'ish but an interesting comment. There's a nice essay in that.

Lawsuit time

tweet deleted - someone post the content here?

It's still up.

i 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.

I 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.

Depends 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.

The UK has the best designed plugs IMO but they sure are clunky as a result.

What do you mean? I have never had a problem with them.

The primary danger from British plugs is standing on them, barefoot.

German plugs are almost as safe electrically, and hurt less when trodden upon.

The 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.

You really think somebody would do that? Just go on the internet and tell people to electrocute themselves?

I 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.

That would be a negligent action on the parent, to let a child trust a voice device or the Internet in general.

Children don't come out of the womb with the faculties of adults.

Yeah, 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.

Well, 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.

I interpreted that comment in line with how I responded - by bringing a friendly sounding device into your home, you're putting your kid in the position of trusting it. Something something violent agreement talking past one another.

I suggested you don't leave a loaded gun on the counter.

Seriously, the uncurated, unfiltered internet is not for small children and you put a surveillance puck with shitty parental controls up for a Q&A?

Why do people expect high-quality content and curation from Alexa?

I am not disagreeing but how is that a rebuttal of what I said?

I feel like some people missed the implied \s here.

That, or the meme just rubbed them the wrong way. Jokes are often down-voted.

I don't think top level comments should be jokes that don't contribute anything meaningful.

Welp, 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.

Why 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.

I'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.

I 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).

Behind 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.

TRRs thankfully prevent that these days

They do as long as you only have one screwdriver that fits.

"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.

I'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.

Survivorship bias. ;)

Sure if it only happened to me once, but it's happened to me plenty of times.

Just like the alcoholic smoker who lives to be 100+, consider yourself incredibly lucky

This 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.

The more times I experience it and fail to die the less bias there is in the results from survivorship bias.

“I keep eating peanuts every day and I don’t die. Peanut allergies aren’t fatal.”

Same, 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.

It very much depends on how conductive your skin is, the mineralization of any water you happen to be standing in, what shoes you’re wearing, and what the path to ground looks like. Household current can absolutely kill, but it all depends on the circuit you form. 200 milliamperes are lethal and the fuses in your electric panel trip at 10 or 15 amps. Resistance is not futile. I=V/R

The 10/15A thing is also why we have earth leakage circuit breakers. The regular breakers are not meant to protect people from electricity (though they can in some cases with grounded equipment) but against fire. The ELCB should to trip at 30mA leaking to ground and thus can save a life in most cases.

Not sure if these are standard in the US but I sure hope so :) They are here.

They call them Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters (GFCI) here. Depending on the place they may be mandated in kitchens and bathrooms or even for every circuit in new construction.

I'm just so surprised the outlet supplies power at all when the prongs aren't fully in. With most EU plugs and sockets this couldn't happen because either the prongs are plastic coated with metal tips (UK plug or ungrounded Europlug) or the sockets are so deep nothing is exposed by the time contact is made (German Schuko).

If there can be power on prongs you can touch it's poorly designed imo. Of course I know charging an entire country's plugs isn't an overnight thing but it should be something under consideration.

> Of course I know charging an entire country's plugs isn't an overnight thing but it should be something under consideration.

Of course changing an entire country from the (slightly more) dangerous 230 to the much safer 110 should be considered as well...

In reality the plugs and also the voltage don't seem to be major safety issues.

(Also fwiw US plugs are generally TRRs now which do prevent the more common situations.)

Uh, 110 was a mistake for efficiency reasons and 230 is basically no more dangerous, since 110 is already lethal. If the US changes all our plugs, we should change to 230 for everything too.

But 110 helps drum up the copper mining and wire making business!

Why not 480 by that logic?

At 480, you get the new hazard of arc flashes.

2 or 3-phase is good question as well.

230V on average is enough and if more is needed adding phases is better option.

> (slightly more) dangerous 230 to the much safer 110 should be considered as well...

Thanks, I prefer my kettle to boil in 3 minutes, not 30.

And 110V is still way more than any "non-lethal" voltage.

Considering what the most deaths from the contact with the electricity is the result of doing something extremely stupid - I don't think it would make a noticeable difference. More so, knowing people it would make more deaths, because "it is safer now!".

We have 240v appliances in the US. We have split phase power where we have 120v going to most things and 240v circuits run specifically to higher power devices. We just don’t put them in bedrooms and living rooms.

I have a 110 volt electric kettle, and it does not take 30 minutes to boil.

TRR won’t help if you deliberately half insert a plug and toss a penny in as suggested in this “challenge”. Also fwiw US residential power is 120/240V. Actual voltage can vary but should be within +/-5%.

UK voltage is 230 which is what I was referencing

> Of course changing an entire country from the (slightly more) dangerous 230 to the much safer 110 should be considered as well...

Eh. So, both are only dangerous where the electrical installation is defective.

At that point they're differently dangerous. If someone is able to make contact with live (via for instance an exposed wire or defective plug design) then 230V is a bit more dangerous. If the wiring is marginal, then 110V is more dangerous (in that, with reasonable household wiring, it will heat more and is more liable to cause a fire).

Given that I have a modern socket type (BS1363) I'm more comfortable with 230V, as, if there's botched wiring somewhere I can't see, it's somewhat less likely to be fire-hazard-y.

> If there can be power on prongs you can touch it's poorly designed imo.

Agreed.

> Of course I know charging an entire country's plugs isn't an overnight thing but it should be something under consideration.

We did that here in Brazil not long ago (and Brazil is a huge country). We changed from a mix of different plug types (a flat blade plug similar to unpolarised NEMA 1-15, a plug with round pins somewhat like CEE 7, or the newer USA plug NEMA 5-15) and sockets (older sockets accepting only flat or only round pins, newer sockets being able to accept either, and even newer sockets also accepting things like polarised NEMA 1-15 and/or NEMA 5-15 together or not with the round pins) to a newer design with round pins and a recessed socket (NBR 14136, based on IEC 60906-1). With this new design, unless you're using an adapter to an older plug, whenever the pins are exposed they're not live. All new installations and devices are required to use this new standard; adapters are available for old devices and old sockets.

Schuko plugs can have exposed metal if they're of poor design. Some have plastic sleeves near the base, some don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko#/media/File:Schuko_plug...

Electricity mostly looks for a quick path to ground. If that path goes from one finger to your other finger in the same hand -- I mean, this isn't suggested, but it is usually not fatal. If it goes from your hand to your other hand, it might take a quick stop by at your heart which is not great.

The risks are low, very low if you have a GFCI but if the conditions are just "right", it can be lethal.

It a enough current goes through your heart at exactly the wrong time, it can mess with your heartbeat and cause fibrillation, and without help, you die.

It is a game of Russian roulette. There are much more than 6 chambers, but the bullet is there. If enough kids do this stupid challenge, there will be deaths.

It's probably not lethal as long as the return path is through one of the other prongs that the same hand is touching. It's very lethal if the return path is through some other part of your body, such as if you only touch the hot prong while you're standing barefoot on damp concrete.

I'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.

How 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.

I 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.

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