Alexa is watching you

I recently had a conversation with someone who had the nerve to claim that I was a luddite because I did not jump on the latest in gadgetry.  While it is true that I am judicious in adopting new gizmos, I am anything but a luddite.  The term luddite comes from one Ned Ludd, who supposedly broke into a stocking weavers shop and destroyed his equipment in protest of workers losing their jobs to the new technology.  Like most people, I am not opposed to new technology, I just pick and choose which new technology I wish to adopt.  Also, I am a slow adopter, waiting to see what falls out from other users first.  "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread"

According to Pem Schaeffer in his article at the American Thinker today, that is exactly what I should be doing.  Pem asks the question: Alexa, what are you doing in my room? He then proceeds to answer that question, and what Alexa is doing is not necessarily benign. My friend was raving at what all Alexa could do, when fundamentally all Alexa is doing is a bunch of simple calculations at very high speed, not actually "thinking" as we understand the word "to think."

A.I. has not broken through the mysteries of innate human intelligence. Instead, techniques have evolved for applying massive computational power to simulate various human capabilities. Prominent examples include interactive systems in the newest automobiles. They recognize voice input, speak back in response, and perform various tasks at our behest. All use inexpensive digital hardware running highly evolved computer programs. The irony is that while their performance seems dazzling, they are in fact doing what they do through an extremely fast series of the simplest acts.

If my friend wishes to be dazzled by this display of simulated human intelligence, that is fine, but I remain unimpressed. I would as soon turn on my own coffee in the morning, and switch on and off my own lights, thank you. However, the really scary part is not the ability to turn the lights on and off, it is that Alexa is connected to the internet, and therefore you are inviting the world to see what is in your house, what you are doing, and as they say, case the joint.  Do you really want to give some criminal access to your home in order to case it and decide if there is anything worth stealing?

Echo, where Alexa lives, while complex in one sense, is remarkably simple at the human interface level. It has speakers for talking to you (with Dolby performance, no less), a microphone for listening to you (with similar high-performance specs), and a wireless interface to the internet via your home network. Newer versions include a video camera to watch you even in the dimmest of ambients. All versions are noticeably absent display screens and other interactive devices like a touch panel, keyboard, or mouse.

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So far, so good. The immense power of Echo and Alexa lies not in voice recognition and voice synthesis capabilities, but in the connection to the internet. Voice recognition simply digitizes inputs to the microphone and analyzes them for language content. Voice synthesis is the reverse of this process – creating spoken words from series of ones and zeros.

The magic of digital technology is that it reduces everything to elementary operations, executed by incredibly fast, inexpensive, and nearly error-proof electronic building blocks suggestive of basic LEGO pieces. That the A.I. technology is primitive is not as relevant as the very fact that humans are investing billions in it...but for what purpose?

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The main point here is that simple as the Echo device may seem, once you connect it via the internet to the GDI, it is accessible to any other processing element of that global structure. Anyone who listens to and speaks to Alexa opens himself up to monitoring by and voice prompting from a vast universe of digital resources operated by unknowable entities in unknowable locations. And without realizing it, he willingly provides input to "big data" archives. This is what "the cloud" means. Instead of being connected to your neighbor's laptop, or Amazon's server bank in Timbuktu, you're interacting with a vast, unstructured, indeterminate array of digital resources in the ether.

One thing to note is that the internet stores everything forever. We warn teenagers today that if they don't want nude pictures of themselves turning up years later in some porn site, don't allow nude pictures of yourselves to be taken. But there are far more nefarious creatures out there than a mad boy friend. Peoples private data has been stolen from a number of companies and institutions you thought were protecting that data. Ever hear of names like Target, Yahoo! and Equifax? Interestingly, the way to find out if your data was released in the Equifax fiasco is to input your private data over the internet. Have these people no self awareness?

Please go read the whole article. If you have children and grandchildren, be especially careful, and choose your technological wonders with extreme caution. You never know who is watching you and why.