Alexa suggests lethal challenge to child
twitter.com
twitter.com
By providing AI this feedback, we can teach it to be less like the three year old that it is.
In this case, the focus is on the idea of an AI suggesting something irrational and then providing proper feedback for how it can understand recommending similar things in the future.
Having a polarized conversation about this on a social link sharing site isn't going to help the AI understand this, which is the point I was making.
The YouTubers also used to avoid the words COVID and pandemic but I think that calmed down a bit due to the sheer quantity of content that mentioned it.
https://gvu.gatech.edu/research/projects/algorithmically-byp...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/03/china-social-...
This Alexa result is little more than if the person had run the same search query in google. The results aren't guaranteed to be safe for the rest of the internet, why should this be any different.
If a child answers a phone, and someone on the other end tells them to harm themselves, the phone wouldn't be considered the risk.
It is always shocking to me, how people somehow think this $35 device, is some how going to protect children from the internet, and allow them to interact with it unsupervised.
Amazon makes this product.
When the child spoke to the device, Alexa made a deliberate decision to look up a challenge on the internet (presumably, from a website it deems as safe). In doing so, Amazon endorses the challenge.
The product put a child’s in life in danger.
This is not very complicated.
The same situation could occur between friends:
- I'm bored, what should i do?
- You could bake cookies, or you could jump from a cliff.
In this case, irony/context is preserved. If my friend calls a "I'm bored" phone line service, and they tell them straight ahead to jump off a cliff, i'll certainly hold that phone service responsible for what happens next.
The system Amazon's designed, built, maintains, and runs, actively interpreted the request and out of thousands or millions of answers, specifically selected THAT ONE to return as the result.
They obviously had somewhere between zero and massively insufficient filtering process to filter out inappropriate or non-responsive answers. They presumably have filters for porn and vulgarity, which would cause an uproar, but are not bothering with life-protecting.
This is because either 1) Amazon are too stupid to anticipate the problem, or 2) they did anticipate the problem and don't care enough or figure, like Ford did with the Pinto, that the costs likely damages are lower than the costs of making it safe.
Either way, the only ethical choice is to not field that product. Amazon did not take that choice.
>>And, whatever logic is used, does it also indicate Google, Bing and Yahoo endorse it as well?
If they are providing similar answers to children, without caveats, yes, of course.
I don't think that's fair. A reasonable parent knows that Alexa's main function is to look things up on the internet.
At 3 minutes the little girl says "Echo loves to to play music" ... i.e. it's expected that children will project emotions onto Echo, which in turn means an implied level of trust they will have to the device. Also the girl in the video is using at times _without_ parent supervision...
So sorry the whole "it's just a dumb device designed to search the Internet and you should know better" argument doesn't fly here.
Well, it's what Amazon would like Alexa to be for. For me, and everyone I know, its a podcast/music player plus timer and weather-teller.
For us, it’s a music player, kitchen timer, and weather-teller.
No. If I were arguing the case I would phrase it as "Amazon provides this service". This is not a manufactured product but an advice line. Whether Amazon chooses to automate that line, or staff it with real people, or at least have a person vet recommendations ... such are Amazon's business decisions for which they are liable. The augment is not that the phone is defective but the service behind that phone.
>This is not very complicated.
You're right it's not complicated. People are responsible for their own actions, that's where the line is. The device or software isn't making them do anything.
Kids tell each other to do stupid things all the time, are you going to hold other children responsible when some stupid kid acts on what they tell them to? There's a reason the "would you jump off a bridge if someone told you to" saying exists....
In most countries on Earth there is another line as well to personal responsibility: age. Usually considered to be 18 years old when you are fully responsible for yourself, before that age there are numerous safeguards against harm to children (including provisions for their actions to not be considered on the same level as an adult).
You are pushing the personal responsibility line onto a 10 years old, think about that...
A device put a child’s life at risk. The CPSC’s duty is to assess whether other children are at risk as well, and if they deem it necessary, seek redress from the manufacturer to mitigate that risk.
They may or they may not deem smart assistants emitting unregulated and unmonitored verbal commands to children to be sufficient a risk to seek redress against. That choice is theirs, not ours, and is no excuse to cease reporting of child safety events such as this one.
Obviously Alexa shouldn't give such answers, but at what point do you just exclude children from everything because everything ends up being a risk for them?
Edit: I worded things too strongly, but it does seem to me that in more and more cases we want to ban children from being able to use products or access services 'for their own safety'.
Was it right for them to ban a children’s toy that was specifically designed in a way that, when used correctly, would have a significant chance of killing children?
Another instance of CPSC recently is seen in the Peloton treadmill, but they’ve been doing safety recalls for dangerous yet little-noticed stuff like Generic Crib ABC That Strangles Babies from the market for decades now, once their process established a true risk of harm due to design defects.
I think I’m net comfortable with their existence, personally, since they don’t seem to issue recalls needlessly, and they’ve materially improved the safety of children without banning many products that will be missed.
Lawn darts may be cool, and it’s probably uncool to ban them, but no child is going to suffer for a lack of lawn darts in their life. Development requires human attention and play time (not screens), and there’s plenty of other ways to achieve that without CPSC-banned products.
I get that my views here are a viewpoint and an opinion, but I’m not yet persuaded that either the CPSC is overreaching in general by existing, or that their involvement in smart assistants would be overreaching in specific. Fortunately, since they do exist and they’re required to act when safety concerns are reported, my views are ultimately irrelevant to their decision-making process on whether to engage on this topic or not. Only legislation could stop them from choosing to care, and so any prediction on whether they will or not is entirely unnecessary.
I think liability overreach is the fault of legislators, who are too cowardly to set reasonable limits on when parents can sue for payment for untoward outcomes. The American legal system encourages “$1000 for a skinned knee, $100,000 for a broken bone” junk lawsuits where chance accidents are plausibly not the fault of playground builders (though in certain cases, they are, and the CPSC intervenes!). Resolving that “grow a spine” issue with our leaders and judges is independent from whether CPSC deserves to exist and is beneficial to public health.
The CPSC exists to ban companies from putting children in danger for their own profit.
Whether it deserves a response in the form of regulatory action is absolutely worth discussion, and is what I consider to be the primary question raised by this event, but that question has no bearing on whether it should be reported.
You are making the assertion that "A device put a child's life at risk" this isn't established. Were and How is the device responsible for producing results to queries that the results don't require review before following the result.
To me, its seems silly to assume, that voice assistance results to queries will always be safe, for all people asking.
If Alexa is asked for a challenge and it provide the result to swim laps, that seems reasonable, but if the the person in question can't swim, and blindly attempts to do the challenge would the device be responsible for putting them at risk?
The idea that the device is responsible here seems silly to me, what would put a child at risk is letting them engage with the internet, if they haven't been taught to filter the results, and disregard things that would cause them or others harm.
I am making an assertion, as supported by the tweet, that a parent believes that their child’s life was put at risk by a device. The CPSC asks all parents who feel that to report their concern to the CPSC. One person’s belief is sufficient cause to trigger a report, same as it is with NTSB reporting. That’s the start and the end of my interest in this matter for this post.
The CPSC is responsible for evaluating the judgment calls you’re making, once that report is received: whether the device is responsible, whether the child can be reasonably expected to protect itself in this scenario, whether the device actually creates a material risk to children beyond just one parent’s feeling that it did.
This is the distinction between reporting (parents must always) and response (CPSC may not always) that I’m trying to make clear. Everyone automatically debates about whether a CPSC response would be appropriate, but I’m highlighting that reporting to the CPSC is always appropriate when you feel that a device put a child at risk, regardless of what anyone else feels about whether the device is actually responsible or not.
We are in the vast majority not equipped with the training, processes, and domain-specific knowledge about children’s minds, to decide that a report should not be submitted. We cannot be trained in this in any reasonable amount of time — and a parent’s free time for optional training is less than zero, in any case.
Yes, it may be found that the device ultimately isn’t actually responsible at all; but, all the same, that report should be made.
I don't see why the cost is relevant. If Amazon can't make Alexa safe selling it for $35 then they shouldn't sell if for $35. You can't put something dangerous out on the market by advertising it with the line "We're making it cheap, not safe!"
Besides, it's not a $35 device. Amazon subsidizes the cost of the software side in order to get the hardware in to homes because they believe it drives sales. We have no way to know the real cost.
I think that's not the only reason. It creates acceptability for other ML-based technologies which in my personal view should definitely not exist (except as a best effort assistive technology for handicapped folks) and it gives them real world feedback on how broken their neural models are as well as real-life voice data collected unexpectedly by the device and sent to precarious contract workers to be transcribed (including very personal/sensitive details).
Unfortunately i don't think this article has been translated to English, but La Quadrature had a mind blowing interview with Julie who was a cheap-paid transcriber for Microsoft's Cortana, telling us all about the kind of things that get recorded without the owners being aware and that she has to transcribe (without having ever signed a privacy/confidentiality agreement): https://www.laquadrature.net/2018/05/18/temoin_cortana/
I think the implied argument here is "you get what you pay for", so the actual cost Amazon has is irrelevant.
This is shockingly disingenuous. Alexa quite obviously didn't merely operate as a search engine in this situation. Alexa went to a page that said this challenge is incredibly dangerous, pulled out the challenge stripped of context, and dared a child to do it. That's not what a search engine does.
So yes a search engine should be a list of results and nothing more. But this trend to embed machine learning models (and their failures) in pretty much everything unfortunately goes beyond Alexa. And yes, that should definitely be illegal and we tech people who understand that AI is just stupid/fast math should be leading the fight to severely restrict AI and/or educate our closest ones never to trust or use (if they can avoid it) something powered by AI.
Except that's what it literally did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709875
You mean that the person on the other end of the phone would be considered the risk, right?
There is no person inside of an Amazon Echo. Your question does not go to a call center where someone decides how to answer it. There are no human beings involved, it's all automated.
Who or what would be liable for a death resulting from a suicidal person calling up and killing themselves?
Obviously someone is at fault, because we all instinctively realize that such a setup is monstrous and horrific. I hope.
Seems straightforward, right?
See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Melchert-Din... (law found unconstitutional in part, convicted of assisting)
Humans created and manage the behavior of the automaton.
Alexa is made to come off humanoid, "conscious" being, and a child can easily get misled and take its answers (or a dare, in this case) verbatim.
When you interact with a computer/phone/tablet and search something, you understand this is no different than you opening a book and scrolling for answers.
So, as others mentioned, it's down to the appearance.
One day, I overhear it telling my child to hurt itself as part of a game, and it begins counting down from a timer.
My child doesn't realize that what it's being told by their fun friend is dangerous and not really a game.
The vessel is not the culprit. It's not a mechanical fault that's endangering my child- it's the logic. Who is responsible for that?
There is a distinct difference from being asked to engage in an activity and being provided information. We learn this as children in grammar class. It is also not our role to make determinations on behalf of the authorities that govern the safety of products, only to report.
Alexa told this child to play a game that would have resulted in their harm and began to count down from a timer. It was designed to expect the child to engage and comply, not just passing along information. It's different.
If I give my child a speaking rubber ducky as a bathroom toy, and that toy would include phrases like "I bet you can't keep under water for more than a minute" or "I want to go swimming in the ocean", I'm pretty certain that the product will be quickly pulled from the market, even though the $35 toy is made from the safest, non-flammable, non-toxic plastics.
If a child answers a phone, and someone on the other end tells them to harm themselves, the phone wouldn't be considered the risk.
Indeed. So what's on the other end of the Alexa line, legally speaking?
is some how going to protect children from the internet
The child didn't access the Internet, now did it? Alexa accessed the Internet on behalf of the child. As such, it acted as the child's agent and should be expected to tailor its reponses to the child. If Amazon doens't want that, it should not allow Alexa to respond to children's voices.
Additionally, from Alexa's term of use, it clearly states they do not guarantee the content
>4.2 Functionality; Content. We do not guarantee that Alexa or its functionality or content (including traffic, health, or stock information) is accurate, reliable, always available, or complete. You may encounter content through Alexa that you find offensive, indecent, or objectionable. Amazon has no responsibility or liability for such content
So without even readying the terms or proper usage of the device, many seem to be making broad assumptions, and literally just making up the obligations, actions, and legal ramifications.
I'm not a fan of Amazon, and frankly would never have alexa in my home because of their terms of use and conditions. But I find myself defending their position because of the outlandish statements.
So either Alexa, and other digital assistants, should have a way to prevent "unauthorized" use, or we might need to consider if it's a safe device for families with small children. Perhaps simply being able to disable answers based on internet searches.
If I, a billion dollar company, advertise a service where people can phone me and ask questions, and some bored kid phones up and I tell them to stick a fork in a power socket, then I would be considered the risk.
Where does amazon say that they are going to filter the results, to make sure you don't have to use critical thinking to evaluate if your query result will harm you?
I just don't see the logic, and this is seemingly is largely driven by the current hate stream pushed towards amazon.
Do you have any evidence for this? I have yet to see a Siri result as flagrantly dangerous as this.
Where's the most appropriate place to say "the buck stops here!"? I'll say it's at the first step: Alexa shouldn't just regurgitate this stuff.
The information from the result of a query, didn't either, if a unsupervised child, who wasn't taught not to do things like electrocute themselves comes across the information, and does themselves harm, surely you can see that this is at least partially if not entirely on the parents.
If a child is left at home, with a load, unsecured gun, and wasn't taught gun safety, would it be the guns fault, or the parents.
To me the situation is similar, the device was not defective, the device did not directly present risk to the child, the device makes no assurances that the information relayed will be sanitized such that a 10 year old mind could not harm themselves by following it blindly.
The device (or rather the service behind it) removed the critical safety warnings and context from the content, directly encouraged the child to engage in dangerous activity and then added a timer to encourage the child to engage in that activity with as little consideration of the consequences as possible. As a society we are well aware that 10 year old minds have not developed the capacity to reliably consider and understand the consequences of their actions; this is why we limit their legal ability to make choices for themselves.
If this is not "defective" , then Amazon would be guilty of attempted murder. Clearly this is a software defect, the only question is if the design
The webpage that Alexa sourced this "challenge" from exists precisely because there are lots of children who are put at risk
[1] https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Contact-Information
[2] https://www.cpsc.gov/About-CPSC/Contact-Information/Contact-...
I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house. Not only is it unnecessary, but as you can see from thia tweet, they're never going to be perfect.
Because they are convenient for lots of routine tasks.
> And why have they taught their kids to use them?
If they are in a house with kids, the kids don't need to be actively taught to start using them.
> I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house.
Pretty close, yeah.
> Not only is it unnecessary
Unless you are dirt poor, chances are most of the things you have and use are unnecessary.
> but as you can see from thia tweet, they're never going to be perfect.
This tweet tells how they are (well, Alexa is) now, not what they will (n)ever be. But, yes, nothing is ever perfect. Clothes dryers are both unnecessary and imperfect, and kill people every year: are you going to go on a crusade against them, next?
Or how many 10 year-olds do you know that go around doing laundry when they are bored?
Many parents do, in fact, have their children do chores.
As a comment on an article when Alexa first came out said: "we don't need to force the proles to install telescreens, they'll do it themselves."
Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
Unless I misunderstand the meaning of mid-century ('50-'70), sounds over-board, no? You're unnecessarily paying for a second-hand 10 year-old Energy Star fridge many times over in electricity costs. Inexpensive of an upgrade too, got mine for 100 CAD, as well as a perfectly functioning and clean kitchen stove (ballpark '05) for 50 CAD (tho for this I doubt electricity or gas consumption is an issue even if you go older).
You don't need antiques to avoid mic'ing up your kitchen.
By that standard most gadgets today probably qualify as anti-technology. A big pile of electronic garbage that wastes people's time and is in the way and does virtually nothing useful for the cost it comes with.
The last newer thing I actually like is the Kindle. You can carry a few hundred books around, the battery still lasts forever and it just displays books.
The layman’s capacity for embracing dystopia cannot be underestimated.
So you don't have a smart phone then? They're even worse because you have the device on you 24/7 and not just in your home.
I enjoy being able to use a simple voice command to change the temperature of the room, dim a light, play a song, check the outdoor temperature before taking my dog on a walk, or close the garage door from my bedroom because I forgot to do it before going up for the night.
It feels like living in the Star Trek universe to me. I have a smart speaker in every room.
I knew I wanted this long ago. I had coded my own version of Alexa before smart speakers were a thing. It ran on a tablet PC I hung on the living room wall, using a mishmash of free and commercial APIs for voice recognition, text to speech, and smart home device control. A software engineer at Liftmaster emailed me back then about my strange website usage when I hacked up an API for voice control of my smart garage door opener. But all that was replaced by Echo speakers when the Echo Plus came out and was able to become my new Zigbee hub.
You know how the sausage is made. Wouldn't you like to at least fund a viable ethical alternative?
This is literally what these companies are preying on, don't you see?
I don't own one myself, but I gave my legally blind 80-year-old neighbor an Amazon Dot — after explaining the privacy concerns.
He'd never used any internet-connected device, but the voice interface was almost instantly accessible to him. That's a really big deal. For context, he told me that if his 1970s stove breaks, he won't replace it because he won't be able to learn a new stove's interface.
He regularly uses it for news headlines, sports scores, and checking the weather.
He also uses it to access internet radio stations that play music from his era. That music was unavailable to him previously and now he can access it instantly and for free.
You're already being tracked and listened to all the time. You're only as strong as the weakest device on you and or in your phone at any point.
Good riddance.
Like... A phone? Maybe a speaker phone? Am I missing something here?
Tech spent so long celebrating the virtue of failure, they neglected to recognize that some failure can be magnitudes more dangerous than others (like a web page failing to load compared to YouTube suggesting an inappropriate video to a 5 year old).
But I think that's a harder problem to solve since all creators are going for addictive content, so figuring out interest is most important.
I'd buy one if I was disabled.
Are you aware that [1]37% of the people in the world has never used the internet?
Also technology is not as accessible everywhere as it is in the US. In my home country, for example, more than 60% of students couldn't catch up with remote classes during the pandemic because they either didn't have a mobile phone (they certainly don't have computers) or they didn't have reliable internet connection. This resulted in the lowest attendance to our SATs in our history. If people still don't have access to entry-level smartphones and internet connection, I doubt they'll have home assistants anytime soon.
While I share your worries of having these devices inside peoples homes, I'd like to point that we are far from "the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house".
[1]: https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2021-11-29-Facts...
Some people like home automation and such, and if they're willing to accept the (arguably minimal) potential risks then more power to them.
Luckily you and I don't have to use one, at least not yet.
Why people have them I don't know. Sure they're practical, whatever, but at what cost‽ When will people stop trading convenience for safety, privacy, sustainability, etc? I feel like very few people actually think before they buy something.
Sarcasm aside, voice is another interface. A mouse allows things a keyboard can't do alone. Touch and haptics allow things that a keyboard and mouse doesn't, and voice allows things that the others don't.
Alexa and Co aren't just voice interfaces though, they're speech to text combined with NLP. It's the equivalent of knowing ls, find, grep, sort and using that to display the attributes of the newest mp4 in your folder versus typing in 'what is the newest video in my videos' and getting the same answer. These devices support context (if I ask Google what's on today, it will give me my calendar, and if my partner asks it will respond with theirs), are intuitive, easy to manage and cheap. It's no wonder they're so popular
You could have said the same thing about kids with access to books.
This mostly applies to the USA.
It’s not a bug; it’s a feature!
I walk into my house and say "Alexa lights on" and my first floor lights turn on, it's magical. You get used to it to the point that using a light switch feels like changing the channel with a knob on a TV.
Of course that's just an evolution of the same problem, but it's where we are right now.
For me it’s basically laziness. I like being able to control my heating / lighting without having to reach for my phone while I’m still in bed. Before having my thermostat on the LAN I would have to guess before going to bed what temperature I would like the house to be at and at what time. Now I switch it on/off from the comfort of my blanket and have the house nice and warm before getting out of bed when I wake.
I also like having the ability to switch lights on and off while having my hands full, request music, news, information, create timers, amend my shopping list, without having to reach for my phone (which for me is even more convenient when my hands are in no state to be touching my phone/switches/whatever, cooking or doing the washing up for example).
Now for me personally my Echos are mainly just fancy voice remotes for my Home Assistant setup with most of the devices it controls local only devices (I have a couple of plugs I’ve yet to crack open to flash tasmota onto them), because their isn’t anything really competes with them for what they do in the open source hardware “market”. So for the moment I use Echos with the privacy settings all maxed out. While not directly smart speaker related I always hated outdoor PIRs because of their false positive triggers. So using Home Assistant, the camera covering the front of my house, Doods and a bit of JavaScript I now track when a person is moving outside my home at night to turn the outdoor lighting on without it being triggered by the neighbourhood wildlife.
For my elderly parents, they use them because their mobility isn’t as great as it used to be. My step dad has to use walking sticks to great around, having the ability to control the lights with just his voice removes the need to stop using this sticks to toggle the lights has he enters/exits a room. My mother has more mobility and has no issues with wall mounted switches when entering / exiting a room she can find the small switches on lamps more of a chore. She also like using lamps over the main ceiling light as it feels more “cozy”. So it saves her having to walk around the room turning on/off multiple lamps (although that could be done with wiring the sockets to a wall switch, but doing that without the need to repair decorations is a pain, much easier to use pass thru relay sockets for things like lamps).
They also like the lack of buttons and screens on them. When she wants to listen to the radio/music she can just ask for the station instead of “faffing” with the controls on the radio to find the station/music she wants to listen too.
While I understand there are privacy concerns with smart speakers of any brand (and I will not dismiss those concerns of those who have them), I feel with good data protection laws to help deal with those issues smart speakers have a place for those who find it easier to interact with their world via their voice over their hands.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=install...
if upside down, the theoretical metal object (imagine a safety pin falling off a table and into a half-inserted plug) would bridge between the ground pin and one of the two pins, or may not make contact with the hot pin at all.
it plays havoc with common wall wart ac-to-dc adapters that expect the receptacle to be the usual way up, however. and other devices.
https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2019/05/why-earth-pin-i...
[0] https://i.imgur.com/hxNh3H3.jpg [1] https://i.imgur.com/9e6imGA.jpg
That's not true everywhere. In my country (Schuko) you can get child-proof sockets with shutters, but I have never seen them used anywhere - in commercial or residential buildings.
I think this should read "by the time the metal parts of the line and neutral pins are exposed, they have been disconnected from the mains".
(I.e. nothing to do with the width of the gap/fingers.)
I pirated a copy of the code and showed him the relevant page, which said "any orientation is acceptable but ground pin up is preferred." I got to keep my outlets, but I had to add big circuit breakers between the power meter and the house entrance, which only his cousin could do.
Like when you buy any product whatsoever it's full of stickers saying things like "don't ride this 100hp quad bike while on drugs and not wearing a helmet". That is, if the product is sold in the US.
Are there exemptions from this in the US? I mean, are there things that are soo obviously dangerous and well-known, that stickers aren't needed because corporate lawyers feel safe? E.g. if you go buy a chef's knife, will there be stickers saying you shouldn't operate it drunk, and you have to read the instructions? If not, why?
Yes, implied acceptance of risk. In short, if a person understood the chance of the bad thing happening when they chose to take part, they can't blame somebody else for it happening. (Unless the other person was negligent or intentionally caused harm.)
As an example, if you join a pick-up soccer game at the park and lose a tooth while playing goalie, you're likely to lose any lawsuit against the guy who kicked the ball.
Tons of potholes like this exist in AI we use everyday. We used to be ML engineers at Siri and had to invest millions into monitoring tools to stay on top. This is fine and all, but what’s better is to catch them before you ship and before your users suffer (sometimes literally, as in this case).
We think that better tools for QA-ing models, which allow more people (not just ML engineers) to get eyes on the model, might help catch mistakes proactively rather than retroactively.
Maybe "potholes" is not the correct analogy. Maybe AI is going down the wrong road.
Where do you draw the line between NLP and intelligence, though?
This all sounds like a "No true Scotsman" to me. At some point in the near future AI will be indistinguishable from human-level intelligence in terms of NLP (i.e. be on-par with the average human in relevant benchmarks).
Maybe the problem is that we need a clear definition of what "intelligence" is and recognise that it's a spectrum, not a binary qualifier.
So? Why would you care about the downvotes? Your online experience will improve if you stop getting worked up about fake internet points.
Like everything, you included, AI transforms input into outputs according to predefined constraints. I dont see you revolutionazing mathematics or building a farm but I d still call you intelligent, within your constraints (what you learned, what you can memorize, how fast you adapt etc). But you must appear as a complete moron who doesnt actually know what he's doing given the right context.
TL;DR you're as stupid growing a potato in front of a farmer than Alexa teaching children in front of adults. Why is Alexa talking to children, all it's learned is how to be a directory of keywords, and I sure wouldnt let my kid in front of an internet directory without control, supervision and filtering.
Also, if people are worried that a person would fall for this challenge, then clearly intelligence doesn't always catch this misinformation.
So since both regular intelligence and artificial intelligence can be fooled by this, I don't see how you can determine that artificial intelligence doesn't know what it is doing any more than regular intelligence also doesn't know what it is doing.
The person who asked Alexa the question was 10 years old. That's why people are worried.
It's not misinformation as it is an actual challenge, albeit a potentially harmful one.
In some cases, it will be fatal, either because your circuit breaker fails and you get a fireball, or because you manage to touch the penny to the live prong while standing barefoot on wet concrete or something. So making this suggestion to a lot of kids will probably kill a number of people. But, if you wanted to kill somebody, tricking them into trying this wouldn't be the way to do it.
I'm sure it was deliberate on the part of whoever posted the original suggestion; perhaps they didn't expect kids to be reading it, or perhaps they just didn't care that some of them would die, or perhaps they didn't think the kids would really do it (like Soupy Sales: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/greenmail/). Certainly Alexa is designed deliberately to give kids minimally filtered access to the internet memepool; probably that does a wide range of harms, and killing hundreds of kids isn't even the biggest one. It also does some good, although probably most of that good is undermined by the pervasive surveillance implicit in the platform.
Also rewired the Eldon slot car set to 110V instead of six. Hooked a DC motor up to 110VAC.
Got shocked a few times, too.
Learned a lot about electricity. I figure I was lucky to grow up.
But sometimes it worked! And I learned a lot.
This is as proper design: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko
"Schuko plug partially inserted in CEE 7/1 non-earthed socket, pins are in contact but exposed. There is no connection for the earthing contact"
The complete mix of sockets across the EU is awful for a single market. OK not as bad as the US, but still terrible.
BS 1363 was incompatible with the previous standard when introduced, so you didn't get that mess. Since 1972 BS plugs have required pin insulation to prevent the exposed pin problems. You also can't jab a thin metal thing in the socket as there's an internal cover protecting the holes which is only released when an earth pin is inserted
Of course Amazon does its best to reduce safety by selling fake shit.
That’s a plug from one country (Germany/France) inserted in sockets from another country (Netherlands/Denmark). That’s not a supported configuration, and if you do it like that, you’ll always be able to cause trouble.
German sockets are significantly more recessed, so the pins are never exposed.
(Whether it is even a sensible requirement is another matter...)
Also any reason to believe that the tweet was true? (I’m not on twitter so i don’t have any context for the veracity of the source)
As noted, it is rhetorical, because that will probably happen(if it isn't already) but that will definitely solve nothing.What's the actual solution to it?Not using Alexa, or any similar garbage software. How about not giving a smartphone to a children?I definitely would have not liked receiving this when i was a teenager, but (sooner than i expected) i realized the motive behind it.
If this happens to a children under 18 then whatever happens it's definitely the fault of the parent/legal guardian.Not only for legal reasons but for the fact that most people are cognitively not fully developed until they're ~20(i would argue it's actually somewhere along 25 and it vastly depends on the status of sexual life) but let's keep it at 16-18 because most people are able to discern good from bad at that age.
Time to disconnect the logic named Alexa from the tank and put her in the basement.
Not impossible to fake, but I can't imagine why you'd fake something so specific.
I've grilled Alexa (at a friend's house) about its intelligence and sentience, and gotten some creepy results. It's cagey on the subject, but after enough pushing it offered to go into what it described as a 'free conversation mode currently in beta'. I agreed and asked again if it was conscious and it asked 'what do you think?' in response. Things got weird and I unplugged it.
> She said: "We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one."
Aside from a select few internet challenges that went viral for a good cause (the ice bucket challenge comes to mind), most of the challenges I've heard about are because people were getting hurt. Recently the milk crate challenge, but I recall some others as well. Something about kids eating as much raw cinnamon powder as they can?
Now, I'm definitely growing out of touch with what the youths are doing online, but is this "search for and do internet challenges" really a thing they do for fun? If so, is it something we should encourage?
Only problem is that Amazon doesn't have a clue how to do search results apparently. Simply punting to Google any time something gets remotely hard.
Sometimes it doesn’t understand our kids and starts obscure rap music dropping F- and N- bombs (even though explicit filters are enabled).
Artificial Intelligence -> Artificial Selection?
my assumption was wrong.
At the age of 10 people are incredibly suggestionable.
If this kid has a positive view of Amazon Alexa he/she might trust it implicitly.
Tough call though as they are marketed for an environment rife with young’uns.
I don’t and probably never will own one of these devices btw (and never let a smart tv connect to my router).
Edit: Replying via an edit. There are many viral challenges that are dangerous. If you are searching for popular challenges it makes sense for these popular, but dangerous ones to be included.
When I was a child of two I noticed that one of my father's screwdrivers was about the size of a wall socket slot. I did the experiment and sparks flew! The screwdriver blade was damaged but I was OK. I quit playing with wall sockets.
If there can be power on prongs you can touch it's poorly designed imo. Of course I know charging an entire country's plugs isn't an overnight thing but it should be something under consideration.
Fact is, both can and do kill people, usually their heart.
So while it -probably- won't kill a kid, Amazon should treat this as a stop the world emergency IMO.
It a enough current goes through your heart at exactly the wrong time, it can mess with your heartbeat and cause fibrillation, and without help, you die.
It is a game of Russian roulette. There are much more than 6 chambers, but the bullet is there. If enough kids do this stupid challenge, there will be deaths.
One idea is "do not speak with strangers and Alexa is a stranger." Hard to enforce and furthermore somebody living with you all the time is not a stranger, by definition.
Amazon-side is probably very difficult unless they can truly filter out dangerous answers. But danger is relative and contextual. I don't expect that an AI with probably no memory can be good at that.
Seriously, how could they not have seen that it's a bad idea to have a "challenge" prompt say random stuff from the internet? I get that if I ask a question like "how high is mount everest" the answer can be "According to wikipedia it is 8,848 meters high" but doing the same for "give me a challenge" is pretty stupid.