An example might be something like Google Glass and how augmented reality is being considered as a product offering. All of the scenarios are along the lines of "And you will be able to spot your Uber from a distance whilst getting discreet notifications from your contacts" which are inherently all connected services, offering data enrichment to third parties with a side effect of some convenience to you.
Compared to an augmented reality story that if it were fully autonomous and independent would require an abundance of sensors and near real-time processing such that it could do things like edge highlight for the sight impaired, colour correction for those impairments, or as enhancements of human capabilities like being able to see in parts of the spectrum not visible to the human eye.
The obsession with connected and data is leading to the Futurama episode where they connect to the internet and fight through adverts and it is firmly dystopian, whereas autonomy could lead us towards Geordi La Forge's visor.
And I'm already thinking how in the UK the Hive API went down a few weeks ago and resulted in no-one being able to adjust their thermostat.
In Minnesota red light cameras and such automated ticketing systems were determined to be illegal (for the state):
https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/16/1688.asp
The result? Minnesota isn't experiencing some sort of Mad Max like traffic apocalypses, things seem pretty normal and I don't know of any dramatic disparity between places that use such cameras and those who do not. Meanwhile corruption and other issues cloud the traffic camera world... it's a product that arguably encourages / benefits bad actors, and possibly nobody else despite what we might otherwise think it does.
Sometimes despite what we might want, we just don't need smart stuff and using it just allows for bad actors and little else. There's lots of talk about home smart speakers but then on HN we see all sorts of discussions of people who bought them and admit, they really don't get a great deal of utility from them... so perhaps we've just paid for a product that actually provides google or amazon more utility than we ever get...
As Frank Herbert said:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
In Dune the result was that mankind eventually did away with "thinking machines" as it was clear the risk was greater than the reward.
>The result? Minnesota isn't experiencing some sort of Mad Max like traffic apocalypses, things seem pretty normal and I don't know of any dramatic disparity between places that use such cameras and those who do not. Meanwhile corruption and other issues cloud the traffic camera world... it's a product that arguably encourages / benefits bad actors, and possibly nobody else despite what we might otherwise think it does.
There are so many areas of law and law enforcement that are like this. Turns out if you just let people do whatever most people will do what society considers reasonable because at scale what people do determines what society considers reasonable.
This is part of the core argument for libertarianism - and has been my experience in life. Generally every time I head someone should "there ought to be a law against that" there probably shouldn't be one without considerable thought on the matter.
The camera flashed for both of their cars. Nice way to get punished for helping.
Also, who is getting the value. With many public-private "partnerships" like this, it doesn't seem like the general public is getting value out of it; rather, it's the parties involved in making the business deal. The government can be wined-and-dined with sales pitches, and then pat themselves on the back for "making the public safer". The companies get a lucrative deal from the government.
Smart things, like these cameras, gives the companies that operate them a blackbox to work with that impacts the public but is not accessible to the public. So now, a company that has a vested interest in themselves, has the government go-ahead to cast a net to make money from the public. What a great deal, right?
Even if companies and government promise they won't do anything malicious or unjust, how can we actually trust their word when the ability for a company to skew things in their favor is such a low barrier?
If I ask a valet, "You won't joyride my car?", and they say, "No", how much of a guarantee is it that they won't joyride? Maybe they don't do anything obvious that would throw off a red flag, like significantly deplete the fuel or run up the odometer, but they decide to redline the car to hear it VROOM or drag race it in a short stretch of a street. These little 'nothings' add up over time, or at least give the incentives to get bigger and bolder over time if nobody notices.
Who is to say a company with smart things, like these cameras, wouldn't decrease the capture time by a few milliseconds on their highest revenue intersection, or release an "erroneous update" that lowers the red light capture tolerances?
It's better to be less trusting of these "smart" business dealings than to openly invite the possibility for abuse right through the door.
With the right-to-repair, your interests are definitely not aligned - each time you repair an iPhone, that's money you give to someone else that you're not giving to Apple. It's good to be aware of these situations - you'll never avoid all of them - but at least you can predict in which ways companies might try to screw you over and decide if you're okay with that.
The only reliable promise is someone else's self-interest.
With an iPhone I may find myself aligned on 5 points, and not aligned on 4, so perhaps I buy as being the least worst available. The iPhone, or other brand, with all 9 things I care about may never have been sold, even though technically and commercially feasible.
In the case of phones, no maker seems to care a jot about right to repair any more. So it's not deciding I'm OK being screwed over that way, but a choice of screwed that way or no phone.
However, there's a problem with free services. Internet was largely free in the past and now it's still largely free - but now users are the product themselves. Interests are no longer aligned.
As far as I can figure, it started with "smart bomb" in the early 70s. A term which at this point is so normalized we might not think twice about it, but which I suspect of being propaganda. Here is a 1972 NYTs article suggesting that the term is Pentagon propaganda: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/26/archives/smart-bombs-and-...
> "To one who has bombed and been bombed, recent Pentagon propaganda about our new “smart” bombs is dumb and repetitious (not to say, indecent)."
Of course politicians will be interested in some "smart" solution, because it implies the current way is "dumb", and nobody wants to be "dumb". "Smart" =/= "Better". In various ways, proposed "smart" solutions are actually worse or have new consequences, making them not so smart of decisions in the first place.
This kind of stuff is a new lure companies use to fish for money.
An alternative model like this, at small scale, is a low-risk way to enrich the competitive landscape for places to live.