Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> We know how dangerous it is to let bad actors run amok with AI and our data – if you need a refresher, recall the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what does the Cambridge Analytica scandal have to do with AI?

> Rohit Prasad, the scientist in charge of Alexa‘s development, recently gave MIT Technology Review’s Karen Hao one of the most terrifying interviews in modern journalism

Is the hyperbole really necessary?

> Rohit Prasad, Alexa’s head scientist, has now revealed further details about where Alexa is headed next. The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant to move from passive to proactive interactions.

So Alexa will make suggestions or remind you that you need to order toilet paper. Much like Google's Android greets me with the time it would take me to get to work every morning without any prompt.

Its really sad that the state of tech reporting is full of this hyperbole and fear mongering. You can have a real discussion about the dangerous of technology and erosion of privacy, but this isn't it.

>Maybe I'm missing something, but what does the Cambridge Analytica scandal have to do with AI?

I also missed all the bad things that happened because of Cambridge Analytica. Even if we take their extremely dubious claims about their effectiveness at face value them running amok resulted in politicians being better able to target ads. That's not exactly the stuff of nightmares.

I work in digital for the Democratic Party. You are correct. If you look at my comment history you’ll see me affirming this.

Well, it sort of is my nightmare. I disagree with hyperbole in general, but politicians being able to easily manipulate truth across vast swathes of society is my idea of a nightmare (a pretty scary one at that).

Did you watch the Channel 4 report[0]? The CEO of CA clandestinely advertised far more than just ads for the reporter posing as a potential client. They are in the business of winning elections, through whatever means necessary. He openly talked about things like targeting and entrapping political opponents with blackmail via "honeypots". His deputies made some really interesting statements during that report as well. I highly recommend watching the report, it's a fascinating watch.

Based on what he was caught saying on camera, in addition to his deputies, and the reporting around their political campaigns in Africa using propaganda that claimed AIDS would come back if so-and-so were elected, it's not a stretch to imagine those people doing everything the can, legally and illegally, to sway an election.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbeOCKZFfQ

But this has always happened in politics. CA just optimized it

-people always travelled, automobile just optimized it -people always produced goods, factories just optimized it -people always used weapons, nuclear energy just optimized them

... never underestimate the impact of “just optimizing” something

That footage certainly doesn't make them look good, but the real question is how much of that is sales-pitch, marketing bs, and how much of it is really effective. Every data upstart in the world has the best data, can target audiences with precision, get your brand unprecedented engagement, and use their magical ML algorithms to do magical things - according to their marketing and sales teams. Blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile if you could peek into the actual data engineering, their data is a giant mess, totally stale, and barely better than useless (which to be fair, is all it takes to make money in the data space right now). But it terms of actual influence... well... always be skeptical.

> The real question is how much of that is sales-pitch, marketing bs, and how much of it is really effective.

Sure, they may not be able to deliver super effective results today, few startups in their early days do.

What they’ve identified, though, is that there is a vast market of incredible wealth willing to pay for services like this. CA may have shut down, but Nix turned around and founded another company that does the exact same thing[0].

Keep in mind that these guys also have access to incredible investment money, they don’t have to go out and raise seed rounds, series rounds, etc. These companies are being built in secret, and it’s incredibly short-sighted to write them off for their capabilities today, because if they succeed tomorrow, we’re in really big trouble.

0: https://www.newsweek.com/what-emerdata-scl-group-executives-...

See also "The Great Hack" (2019) via Netflix.

plus CA was an aggregate human misbehavior, people pressing "give away my friends data" en masse. It was millions of people being careless with each others data.

I am a professional FB advertiser and I would be shocked if the CA data was valuable in any way. Big lists of poorly targeted and categorized users are going to lose 99/100 against FB lookalike audiences.

> I would be shocked if the CA data was valuable in any way.

Indeed. There are plenty of companies that would pay a LOT of money to use that data in any meaningful way. It doesn't happen, but people will convince themselves it's important data, enabling a host of dying properties to fool a handful of market actors into getting a profitable exit. The amount of user data leveraged from most acquisitions is basically 0, excepting a few mailings. Conversely, consumer reach (active users) matters a great deal.

> So Alexa will make suggestions or remind you that you need to order toilet paper.

Using a microphone, even with an offline ML model, to do things like play music at the right times and (almost certainly) show you ads or ask if you want to buy Amazon product is pretty off-putting. Google Maps and Siri Suggestions uses your phone's behavioral data and location history to figure out when you usually leave for work, but if you said "i need to get to work an hour earlier tomorrow" to someone, it would be weird if your phone or Alexa instantly said "do you want me to remind you to leave earlier?" I don't think it's as off-putting as the article makes it out to be, but it's still pretty creepy; we're almost certainly going to have boomer facebook groups boycotting Alexa for "always listening".

So you think only boomers will find this sort of thing off putting or creepy?

No but they'd be the only people in a Facebook group complaining about it

This boomer doesn't do Facebook (or WhatsApp, or Instagram for that matter).

Then again I'm not likely to by a "smart"-speaker anytime soon.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN? You've been doing it a lot, and we've already had to warn you a lot. I just posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21502690, but there were several cases before that and plenty of other guidelines violations that I only just saw.

Yeah, my experience seems to indicate boomers have no concept of digital privacy and it's largely only the younger and more technically literate that care.

It might be hard to boycott AI assistants just like it's hard to boycott facebook. If assistant is powerful enough, people would be willing to onboard.

Please don't post generational flamebait to HN. It starts generational flamewars on HN. Those are seriously lame and boring.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, I was being more descriptive about which generation wouldn't look deep into what the technology does and would instead jump to conclusions, ie "amazon knows everything you're saying", but I still realize that wasn't appropriate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com