Last week, reports of Amazon’s virtual artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Alexa bursting into unprovoked, creepy hysterics went viral all across the Internet. Many users were so unnerved that they turned their devices off. Amazon quickly went into damage control, issuing a statement explaining the reason for Alexa’s quirky sense of humor: “In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh,'” the company said.
Once again, Americans have demonstrated a perverse sense of selective outrage.
The real reason people should be disturbed is not the creepy laughter or even the ubiquity of AI personal assistants. In fact, at this point, everyone is so aware of privatized surveillance being wielded by the major tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, even that isn't very surprising.
As outrageous as it is that the Internet gatekeepers have willingly accepted the government's outsourced Orwellian policies, it still may not be as concerning as a new report coming out that the Pentagon will be housing classified data on secret Amazon cloud servers. This is eerily similar to my report last week that Google would be assisting the Defense Department in using its artificial intelligence technology to improve the Pentagon's drone strikes.
So this is two reports in as many weeks that Silicon Valley is accelerating its synergistic relationship with the military-industrial complex.
That's way creepier to me than a laughing algorithm.