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?
How many kids hide in ovens? They're all front load and you routinely turn them on without putting anything in.
https://www.google.com/search?q=child+dies+front+load+washin...
Also, you’d usual need to take the rack(s) out of an oven for a child to get in.
You will literally have to smash the front glass window (which is at least two layers thick) in order to pull your drowning child out across the broken shards of glass, or have a prybar handy.
This might sound like an imaginary scenario, but it's not at all. It happens every year, and no agency has stepped up to mandate "An big red emergency unlock manual handle seems like a good idea, even if the water pours all over the floor", even though we have mandated emergency trunk pulls from inside vehicles (another place where kids like to hide.)
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.
My oldest is about to be 5. Not in the age to be doing laundry by herself, but I do get her to pick her toys up after playing or to set her bed in the morning, help take out the dishes after dinner, etc. The thing is that it takes me more time to make sure that she is doing things properly and learning to do things independently in the future that if I just went on and did myself. It's more work for me. Convenience is the last of my concerns.
Of course, yes, you also make some requests for teaching purposes. But what you're teaching her is to do things for your convenience in future.
"For your convenience" sounds terrible, like you're using the child as a slave. But most families do things for each others' convenience the whole time, and that is fine and normal.
> But what you're teaching her is to do things for your convenience in future.
God, I really hope not. There are a thousand different ways where one can "avoid any inconvenience". You can hire help. You can just shove all their things in their rooms and simply not worry about what they do with it.
The reason we teach the kids is because we love them and we want to instill important values in them. To repeat: convenience is the last of my concerns.
>"For your convenience" sounds terrible, like you're using the child as a slave
Not just that. It sounds like relationships are based on some sort of transactional nature. I don't go making around some kind of calculus about cost/benefit of each act or what I am getting from it. Love is selfless.
> There are a thousand different ways where one can "avoid any inconvenience". You can hire help.
There is almost no family that would not be seriously inconvenienced, at the very least, if children just did what they wanted. Most families can certainly not afford hired help.
Having, and handling real responsibility for things that really matter is a life skill. Makework isn't the same, and kids aren't (mostly) stupid enough not to see through the difference.
You can't meaningfully separate pedagogical purpose from parental convenience here because they are aligned.
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."
I need glasses for everyday life (including having any kind of low-light vision at all), but when I looked into having laser eye surgery they told me my current vision was within the bounds of what they would consider a successful outcome of the surgery and therefore I shouldn't have it done unless my vision deteriorated further.
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.
Also, I have a very strict privacy hygiene with my own phone. Ungoogled Android [0], No Facebook/Amazon/Google apps installed. Apps only from F-Droid.
If you mean a mobile, yes to that too, but it's rooted and off most of the time.
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.
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.
So I can get a 1960, 1970 or 2015 appliance for about the same price and they are all about on their last legs. Except the old ones can be repaired!
If you can find a good or rebuilt 1960s or 1970s appliance, the lifetime electricity costs are dwarfed by not having to buy another one every 5 years. You can hand that old mixer down to your grand-kids and that is no exaggeration.
What a sad truth. I have a refrigerator I bought 8 years ago that's on its last legs. Barely cools, ices up constantly.
I am actively avoiding replacing it purely out of spite.
It's 30+ year old predecessor is still kicking in the basement. I'd probably just move it upstairs if it weren't a horrible shade of yellow-green.
The fans are crappy, the lights are crappy, the drainage and evaporative system is crappy... But I guess, technically, when everything is perfect, it does keep frozen stuff frozen. It won't stop spoilage in the fridge as well as literally any other brand, though, even when set to the lowest temperature.
Samsung is forever on my "do not buy; and mention the personal boycott every time the brand is brought up as an option" list, just like Nestle.
You may try any of different methods of making it white again: https://www.howtocleanstuff.net/how-to-whiten-yellowed-plast...
Looks really neat using Peroxide method: https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/feature-learn-how-whiten-you...
https://www.automaticwasher.org/TD/AWJPEG/SHP/2013/ovrphil++...
I replaced it with a new frig using an old basic design from GE. $800
I should have known better.
Likewise, some 2020 appliances are likely to survive 60 years, though not most.
Every 2020 appliance you find in 60 years will be built robustly, probably in a serviceable manner. And it may last much longer.
Time is a nice tool to select robust artifacts that… stand the test of time. I certainly hope old survivors help guiding design choices. If you look at buildings, that's usually the case.
In any case, don't just throw these away! At least donate them to a nonprofit.
I'm 100% certain that all 1960s refrigerators need repair eventually - but it's a simple compressor and that's it, one part probably fits dozens of models for 20+ years too. No sensors, controller board, ice-maker, fans, touch screens, seals, pumps, valves, etc. The difference is that you can't, at least economically, fix the newer appliances.
> every 2020 appliance you find in 60 years will be built robustly, probably in a serviceable manner.
true - but that number will be very close zero. Because there is not a single brand or type that is built that way today. If there is, it's some $10,000+ professional kitchen equipment. Sure some are better than the rest, but they are all essentially un-serviceable. We can mandate right-to-repair and force the vendors to sell parts for 3 years, we can't make them sell them at a reasonable cost. But in 20 years, somethings going to break that isn't worth fixing and nobody is going to stock specialized repair parts for your exact model.
> In any case, don't just throw these away! At least donate them to a nonprofit.
Have you ever tried donating a broken appliance? they don't want them and won't take them. Because they can't economically fix them either.
My parents owned six rentals for almost 20 years from 1980s-1990s. They had to replace at least one appliance in all six rentals during that time, and they only bought second hand appliances for their rentals for many, many years (they stopped doing that when an oven came complete with roaches once).
You really think my parents are replacing working appliances because they are "old" in their rentals? Come on.
You're unnecessarily paying for a second-hand 10 year-old Energy Star fridge many times over in electricity costs.
Actually, my fridge is probably the oldest appliance --- it's a '38 Frigidaire I restored (reinsulated and rewired - it still has its original compressor and refrigerant) that consumes <300kWh/year. With fridges, 70s-80s were probably the most inefficient (very thin insulation to allow for extra interior space).
You're right that the energy consumption of a stove doesn't matter much, since all the energy goes into heat anyway. I just like the styling of that era, and they are definitely more solidly built and simpler to service.
https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/product/_siemens-kg39e8xba-2710...
https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/product/_samsung-rl-38-a776asr-...
[1] From what I could find, the Samsung RL38A776ASR costs over £1200, or a little over $1600 US. That's enough to pay for 40 years of electricity on mine.
https://www.heise.de/preisvergleich/amica-kgc-384-110-e-a212...
those look like... really small fridges? The top selling fridge on bestbuy.com is this: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-20-2-cu-ft-top-freezer-refri..., which has 572L (20.2cf) in capacity and is 50% bigger than the samsung fridge you linked. It costs much less: $800 USD vs $1357 USD for the samsung fridge (after factoring in currency conversion and VAT). It does seem to be much more efficient (60% less energy after normalizing for storage capacity), but it's doubtful that you'll ever break even on the purchase price disparity.
It costs less than $50/year to run. I don't think a new one today would last 80 years.
I tried several high end models and even ammonia absorption before ending up building a sound insulating box instead.
The sound mainly comes from the compressor, and maybe the evaporator/condenser fans[1]. You're right that the older low-speed designs, especially the rotary ones, are definitely less annoying to listen to, but I think the sound insulation and mounting makes the most diference, and the newer ones save material cost there.
[1] related item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856036
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?
I'm baffled that the third biggest corporation in the world by revenue having a microphone listening 24/7 in millions of homes doesn't raise any questions about ethics, there are a truckload around advertising alone.
This is literally what these companies are preying on, don't you see?
It's not a binary one or other. Are you honestly saying you believe that the engineers on the alexa/echo teams are only there because they want to "prey on" you, and not because they get to do cool stuff?
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.
Either everybody is private, or nobody is. There is no such thing as “f u, got mine” here. Privacy is inherently a collective problem, so it must be solved by political means, not by individual choices.
I don't think it's possible (for most) to have complete privacy, but I don't think any (or very few) even want that, they just want more control over it. They don't want people they don't even know, to know more about them than people they do know.
Before the changes are (if they ever are) made from a political level, it's possible to take steps to have more control over what information is collected.
If you can't take out your battery you need to cover that phone.
If the phone is truly turned off, the radio isn't listening, so pinging the phone does nothing.
This seems like an extraordinary claim, do you have any articles about this?
(Which is why my phone isn't modern. I can even easily remove the battery!)
No, I'm not, because my phone is as basic (read: lacking in capabilities) and locked down as I can make it, my computers run Linux and don't have any intrusive software installed. So no, I'm not anywhere near as exposed to tracking as people who have these smart home devices in their homes.
If the capability is there, then so is the gravity to use it.
Then having worked in Fintech space I can tell you you're tracked even more than you could imagine.
Do you take public transit? Tracked. Does your car offer OnStar? Can be tracked.
Do you do zoom meetings? Compromised. But! You're going to tell me you only use the web version and you disable tons of things in some ultra secure browser. That is cute, what about your coworker who has some sketch software that captures audio and the screen?
There was a company indirectly worked with that looked to have access to millions of voice signatures to identities. Let's say you talked near any non-secure device and now it knew where you were based off the non-secure device location.
Welcome to the reality, Snowden's reveal was only the tip of the iceberg.
Los Angeles is an outlier, but it still has trains and buses, just less than I remember San Francisco having. If I were offered a job in Dallas/Ft Worth I'd honestly look into public transportation there beforehand. I cannot stand driving through and in those cities at all.
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.
You've got their app on your phone and their device on your LAN.. I'd just assume I was already a part of someone's botnet
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.
Although my reading time was not ever limited, at least until I was older and I had to do my math homework first.
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.
If you are scared about an Echo in your house then you should be keeping your phone, tablet, laptop and 50 other similar devices locked up in Faraday cages at all times.
This is not about escaping every slight chance someone might surveil you, which one can't do anything about anyways, but to make make sure you're at least not part of a dragnet effort powered through the blackbox computer provided by a hostile entity whose only purpose for existing is recording your voice.
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.