>What do you do with it? Like what is a typical use case / interaction ? Do you ask it to put on a movie or tell you the time ?
Control the lights in the house, make sure the garage door and front door are closed and locked at night, adjust the temperature, play some music (specific band, song, or genre) on one of the TVs or on my computer, read me things like the weather, calendar entries, emails, ask it how long it'll take me to get to work right now, ask it about conversions or math-ey things I need done, have it make notes (specifically notes that can alert me when I get to work, or the next time i'm at a supermarket, etc...), set alarms, create calendar entries, send emails/instant messages (almost always short and sweet, but still useful). Have it lookup "knowledge graph" kinds of things like what time a store closes at, when does a music album go on sale, what kind of reviews did [movie] get, when does [movie] come out.
And that's just the stuff I've used it for in the last month or so.
On the phone, it can do even more:
Have it navigate me places, and ask it how long until the next turn while on a motorcycle (through a bluetooth setup in the helmet). It will alert me when I need to leave for work using my usual route, it can infer where I am going when i'm not navigating there, and can alert me about traffic incidents on the route, and suggest an alternate route (this one is fucking cool when it happens). It gives me severe weather alerts for my location, notifies me of things like price drops or new releases of things i'm interested in, and shows me almost an "rss feed" kind of thing for news articles that I'm probably interested in (this one is hit or miss, but i'd say every time I look at least one of them is something I wanted to know about). Just today it gave me a notification that I told it to remember. What I said was "remind me to call my doctor tomorrow afternoon", and about an hour ago it put a notification on my phone saying "call my doctor" with a "call" button on it. When clicking the call button, it started dialing my doctor's office. That's what I want from an AI, and it's working great so far.
>I totally disagree people wanted all their personal information fed to private corporations in the "cloud" BTW. Completely disagree. It's Orwellian.
Well that's a strawman... It's like saying that "people wouldn't want to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars to get some wood and cement" when talking about buying a house.
People aren't dumb, they know these devices aren't magic. They know that if you ask what the weather is, obviously the device needs to know your location. If you ask it to play some music you like, it obviously needs to know your preferences. If you ask it how long it'll take to drive to work, it needs to know where you work. In most cases people don't want to spend hours on hours setting up every little setting to tell the system all this information, they just want it to work, so it just works. It infers information, it remembers preferences, it figures out connections that you didn't even know where there. And in return you get a wonderful device that can help you in your life. If you don't want that, it's fine. You can not use it, you can have google delete all information associated with you, and you can disable all tracking and gathering.
But let's not pretend that people don't want the outcome that handing over information can provide. They want the AI, and in order to do that, the AI needs to know them. These devices are being sold as being able to learn about you the fastest, and use it the most, it's not like they are being shady here.
In my experience lot of aging population feels that it's desirable to have such devices, that these could give them assistance to memorize tasks or do them automatically (e.g. closing garage door). There is many positives if it's implemented with ethical considerations.
> People aren't dumb, they know these devices aren't magic.
Yes they know that they aren't magic but for the most part they don't know how they work - so it's essentially black boxes with deceiving trade-offs, also almost no one reads TOS.
I haven't really noticed any one demographic using it more than others, most people tend to "get it" pretty quickly. Unless you are perfect, most of us need somewhere to jot down notes, or reminders to do things. Hell, there are times where my wife and I will be laying in bed and she will ask "did i forget to close the garage door?", and I can just ask the echo to close the garage door and lock the front door just to make sure.
>it's essentially black boxes with deceiving trade-offs, also almost no one reads TOS.
See, people keep telling me that they are "deceiving", but I just fail to see how. Nobody is saying that these work without your personal information. Nobody is saying that they aren't using your history to "teach" the service. Nobody is hiding the fact that they learn your preferences over time to get better. Why do you think they are deceiving?
To me it's quite the opposite (as this article shows). People are asking for more learning, more automation, more "AI", and the companies are putting out headlines like "Our AI can learn about you and your wants and needs FASTER than our competitors can!"
Your giving up lot of personal information and potential freedom of choice to have "AI" (not sure that's the right word for it anyway), do a bunch of these tasks just for, what you perceive as convenience.
For example, having content fed to you is potentially unhealthy, "Google, read me today news", are you telling me you just want to be fed any kind of information based on some kind of "preferences"?
As you said it's a choice but don't pretend people totally know what's being done with the data.
I hope there is age limit restrictions placed on this kind of thing.
> Your giving up lot of personal information and potential freedom of choice to have "AI" (not sure that's the right word for it anyway), do a bunch of these tasks just for, what you perceive as convenience.
Come on now, you can't handwave away what to me are very real benefits as "perceived convenience", and just because it seems like a lot of personal information to you doesn't mean it is for me.
Yes, i'm letting them see a lot of personal information, but that's not a bad thing. I get tangible benefits from it (not just this "AI", but many many other services), and I'm actually asking for more. Right now it only learns my music preferences from when i play stuff with Google Music, i'd love to feed my soundcloud history into it to give me a more well-rounded set of preferences. I'd also like to feed my netflix watch history into it to let them give me better tv/movie recommendations. This isn't a "mistake" by me, this is a conscious decision I am making to improve my life by giving them more information, just like how it's not a "mistake" that someone pays money for a service they want/need (even if you personally don't want or need that service).
Also, i'm not so sure that "AI" is the right thing to call it either, but it's the term that was chosen, so it's what i'll call it. I read somewhere once that "AI" stops being "AI" when we understand it, and just starts being "programming" at that point, and it makes a lot of sense. As we get better at making programs that feel "natural", it's less "magical AI that can do anything" and more "well understood programming techniques".
>For example, having content fed to you is potentially unhealthy, "Google, read me today news", are you telling me you just want to be fed any kind of information based on some kind of "preferences"?
Come on now, are we going to have an actual discussion here or are you just going to build up strawmen to kick down? First off, it's not my only source of news. I'm not having them "feed" me anything. Second, it's more of reading headlines that i might be interested in. For example, this morning it showed me 5 headlines:
* A new XKCD comic is out
* "The Macbook pro 2016 October release date confirmed" from the University Herald
* A story from TechCrunch saying that the Boeing CEO says he's gonna beat SpaceX at something
* An article from PCWorld titled "Happy 25th once again to Linux"
* And (funnily enough) this story from TechCrunch titled "Not OK, Google"
I'm not being "brainwashed" here, i'm not letting google determine what i'm interested in, i'm not taking anything there blindly at face value, it's just a list of headlines that I can either click to view the article, or lookup at my own will (or in many cases lookup on HN or Reddit for some discussion about it). Every one of those i'm interested in in some fashion. I personally find it funny that you think it's unhealthy to have an "AI" "feed" you information, while most traditional news networks are much more of a "feed", but they don't tailor to any kind of personal preferences (what fox news decides to air, is what fox news watchers are going to watch). That to me is much more dangerous! At least in this case I can tell the system that I don't like this story (because it's blogspam, or it's incorrect, or it's just done in bad taste), and to not show me stories like this again.
>As you said it's a choice but don't pretend people totally know what's being done with the data.
No, and I don't pretend to know what is being done with the data, that's the point. I give them that data, and they do what they want with it, and in return I get all of the benefits I get. There's nothing stopping them from selling it, there's nothing stopping them from releasing it to the public, there's nothing stopping them from looking through it personally to find "bad" things. But I have "faith" (if you can call it that) that they won't. Because if they do, i'm done with them. And a lot more people would be as well.
>I hope there is age limit restrictions placed on this kind of thing.
There is, as with most things online it's "under 13 needs adult supervision". Funnily enough I've read that toddlers LOVE these things. It's much easier for a child to tell the TV to play Thomas the Tank Engine than it is for them to fumble around with a remote, or have access to a phone. It's actually becoming a really good way to let little kids be involved in computers and technology at a younger age, which I believe will be a major benefit in their lives (the jury is still out on that though).
I totally disagree people wanted all their personal information fed to private corporations in the "cloud" BTW. Completely disagree. It's Orwellian.