A quixotic legal dream: All consumer data-surveillance must take the form of an opt-in monthly payment plan, which either side can cancel.
So the TV gets advertised as "$$$, but basically $$ if you sign up to be surveilled and get a $/month check back." If the company sets $/month too low--or is too creepy about what they collect--people just won't opt-in.
But what happens if they promise big pay-backs but routinely cancel from their side? That's a problem, but at least it's a kind the market [0] can handle when it comes to reputation and bad reviews.
[0] "Markets are good, use them." -- "OK, fine, you must price this on a market." -- "NOT LIKE THAT!"
> In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
There's a risk here that we will talk-past one another while using different meanings of the same words, so let me offer a scenario:
AcmeTV has an isolated component which taps microphone input, records to a 5-second ring buffer, and on "Wakey-Wakey" triggers an alert flag. Assume it works perfectly accurately.
Would you accuse AcmeTV of "recording or collecting ambient conversations" on the basis of that component constantly reading microphone data?
Personally I wouldn't, because it's not the same kind of "recording" we consumers are concerned about.
Human wake word recognition isn't infallible, either. How often in your life did you respond because you thought somebody called your name and it wasn't actually the case?
I wrote that in to deter kinda-bad-faith responses, where someone tries to play at being an evil-genie, inserting unreasonable flaws into the gaps, like: "But what if it triggered all the time? On purpose!?"
The point is that ethical implementations do exist, and them working does not rely on anything close to perfection--so nitpicking that word isn't helpful.
Later, AcmeTV has a 1MB lookup table of wake words that can be updated OTA. Whenever a wake word is detected, it triggers an alert flag with the device id, word id, and timestamp, and then broadcasts it out as high-frequency sound through the speakers.
Nearby, another AcmeTV or business partner device picks up the sound and sends it to AcmeHQ.
The former device "never transmits your viewing behavior to Acme".
The latter device "never records your viewing behavior".
I endorse the cynicism, but I feel that's moving the goalposts a tad, from "good is impossible" to "good is improbable".
Or, in a heavily-paraphrased nutshell:
Politician: "Watch-words are ALWAYS evil-mode. They have to be lying."
Terr: "No. Here's a watch-word which would be good-mode."
Politician: "Well, it'll still *become* evil-mode, eventually."
Plus, if you keep expanding the scope for definitions of objectionable behavior like "recording", you'll quickly reach a point where it would basically apply to any SoC made in the last decade attached to a microphone/speaker. Thus watering down labels to the point of meaninglessness.
Which actually makes it easier for a future EvilTVCorp to get away with recording your conversations 24/7 in MP3 files sent to their server if cynical consumers assume every TV records you anyway, so what's the difference?
I know this is off topic, but I feel compelled to point this out — the transition away from fossil fuels is happening extremely fast, in punctuated bursts, in broad daylight, and you still get comments like this. And meanwhile, many putatively smart people are really worried about an imminent robot apocalypse.
If I had the money to do it, I would be willing to make a large wager that neither gas-powered lawnmowers, nor lawns, nor robots capable of autonomously stealing power from your neighbor, will be common in 2035.
I said "fuel", not "batteries", so why are you giving a complaint that seems aimed at people who downplay next-ten-years electrification?
If you didn't misread my comment, then explain which "non-hydrocarbon fuel" you believe could become common in cars (and lawnmowers) within just ten years. (Hell, let's make that easier, just "non-petrochemical.")
Plus soon we'll be paying based on secret parasocial influencing agendas.
It's now possible to put a complex spin/bias on whatever the system shows (or whatever it chooses to bury) in a really easy and scalable way.
Ex: Dairy Association pays, and suddenly results about bones are just a bit more likely to show something about the importance of calcium that many people get from milk. Fraternal Order of Police gets involved, and now "shot by police" everywhere gradually morphs into "was in an officer-involved shooting".
... And of course "Google making it harder to see URLs" becomes "Google taking bold steps against evil scrapers."
> mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics
I see this comparison a lot, and I think it's a trap, because it invites us to confuse scaling duplicates with scaling design changes.
Duplicative mass-production was always core to software from the moment it first became "soft". A factory churning out 10,000 copies of the same book maps to 10,000 downloads of a single software release. The paper and bindings of the book may be below hand-crafted standards, but the words are largely unaffected.
In contrast, LLM-coding is the design and prototyping stage. So if we want to learn from textiles/electronics, we shouldn't be thinking of acres of looms, but instead about fashion-design, custom tailoring, determining patterns for clothes, designing new appliances, choosing circuit layouts, etc.
I think that's just because every analogy gives an entire "second front" of ideas for a hostile recipient to find a "flaw", when they ignore the intended boundary between the stuff that does/doesn't matter to the analogy.
Ex:
Explainer: "Getting a spleen means cutting open the patient and taking it out. It's just like how I'm going to unzip this section of the patient-shaped doll, and remove this little purple bean. In both cases a hole is necessary in a similar location."
Hostile listener: "Nonsense! I can just buy beans at the store! So just buy a spleen! No hole!"
So the TV gets advertised as "$$$, but basically $$ if you sign up to be surveilled and get a $/month check back." If the company sets $/month too low--or is too creepy about what they collect--people just won't opt-in.
But what happens if they promise big pay-backs but routinely cancel from their side? That's a problem, but at least it's a kind the market [0] can handle when it comes to reputation and bad reviews.
[0] "Markets are good, use them." -- "OK, fine, you must price this on a market." -- "NOT LIKE THAT!"
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