It would be one thing if the Alexa was free... but they actually charge for the thing, and they don't even develop their own apps/skills, that's on the community.
One of the big plot holes of the Star Trek universe is that money and bartering would ever go away (they ended up back tracking in a major way on this) or that anything like the Federation would ever be as benevolent or magnanimous as it is portrayed.
That is, I don't think taking corporations or greed out of it will make the tech better. People are people, whether they report to the Minister of Stuff or the Chief Whatever Officer.
Like if the earth spent a while as a cyberpunk dystopia and had "ancestors" of Augments who had lesser issues but were used to give the elites a self-perpetuating edge writ large, disregarded space as having no profit, and refused to provide any welfare despite a pitance of their production being required to prevent horrific suffering could give justification for why the federation is so radical on certain issues and why Ferngari would consider Wall Street worthy of pilgrimage - awed that humans of all species once "bested" them. Granted that should probably be regarded with about as foreigners visiting sites of travesties to celebrate them.
On some level it was a joke shot through with distortions, deliberately inaccurate misinterpretations of history, and willful ignorance among the characters of the xenophobia’s capacity to forge bonds among the ingroup of humans volunteering to accept the burden of fighting outsiders as a gateway to other privileges.
This part is glossed over with the premise of starfleet academy, or the motivating factors that impel characters toward their rank and status. So, we start to see that star trek is something of a cartoon, with “post-scarcity economics” being a deus ex machina for unlimited resources, leading to unlimited technology, leading to unlimited resources, with only a vague line connecting warp drive to first contact with vulcans, which then grants all other technologies for free as originating from alien discoveries.
Anyway, I think we’re pretty close to the idea of robots doing a lot of tedious things for us, if we play our cards right, which means we start to see a lot of things essentially growing on trees. Automatic hamburger machines mean less people slaving away over a hot grill in a low paying fast food chain, which is great, but this premise of automation won’t really save us unless robots can solve the human condition end-to-end.
It means we need a place to stay, clothes to wear, food and water, and something to keep us stimulated and occupied in such a way that we don’t get lonely. All this so that we can go out and find things that keep life interesting, once all our basic needs are met by default. That doesn’t seem to be where all our great inventions are taking us though.
With a harsh light and a strong lens, a lot of consumer oriented inventions do nothing for anyone. Business still seems to aim at bankrupting customers and competitors alike in furtherance of bigger business. Taken to logical conclusions those coziest with successful businesses get taken care of, and it’s near total neglect everywhere else.
But that doesn’t exist in a vaccuum. Really all the most extraordinary inventions have been miitary concepts. Preparing for war makes peace. Maybe that’s the proper inspiration at work here...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp...
I think it's great to have future utopian stories to tell ourselves.
It's likely we'll end up somewhere in the middle but if we only listen to the bad stuff then that is all we can hope for because we can't imagaine any other state :)
Microsoft actually commissioned a bunch of authors to write some positive short stories about the future in hopes of getting people in a more positive mindset.
It's called Future Visions and you can grab it for free here: https://news.microsoft.com/futurevisions/
You take your fingers, and take your 100+ key keyboard, and you think about how reliable your structured articulation of codified text syntax can be, when storing files on a file system the UNIX way.
Take that same philosophy, and make that happen with spoken word, and a language that has ~65,000 words. Phrases over text files, spoken through the air, instead of written down, saved and interpretted.
If that were what these speaker/microphone combo systems were about, and they weren’t internet connected, and exclusively piping profitable surveillance data home to some corporate data center to mine for buying habits in aggregate, this would all be very different.
Anyway, the future is fucking stupid, and I hate it. I hope JavaScript bitcoin mining eventually sucks so much accidentally wasted computational energy into some quantum computer with an unterminated while loop, that it conjures a black hole and erases us all.
Just my two cents.
Why do you think everything is recorded and sent to a remote server?