The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Tech has answers, but not the right ones
I was working from home the other day and decided to stand up from the computer, stretch and speak out loud — other than hissing at the squirrel on the bird feeder. So I asked Alexa for a joke. She paused the soft jazz music she was playing and said, “What did the ear hear? (Slight pause.) Only the nose knows.”
I flared my nostrils, walked away and then doubled back. “Alexa, tell me an adult joke.” “Sorry, I don’t know any jokes about an adult person.”
“Alexa, tell me a Polish joke,” I said, since I’m part Polish and curious if my electronic friend is into ethnic humor.
“I can’t find the answer to that question,” she said, clearly ducking the question.
Alexa, as you may know, is the female voice and entryway to the Echo internet-connected speaker device from amazon.com. You can set an alarm, buy something you crave (as one young child did the other day without mom’s knowledge, and it was all over TV) or play music. You can play tunes from your own connected library or play the free version of Pandora music service, which has occasional, loud commercials. One ad starts with a doorbell ringing, so I keep getting up during the day to answer the door. And no one’s there, but one time I found something I ordered from Amazon, so I’ve got that going for me.
With the Echo, you can get the weather or ask for a “flash” news briefing — which is delivered by a robotic female voice and then a slightly less-robotic real person from NPR for a few minutes.
The technology involved is mind-blowing, or it was a few years ago. But as a gadget tester and writer, I have tried and adopted more than a few of the latest technologies and it’s pretty clear that there are great tech toys and tools in the 20-teens — with serious dangers, too, for our society and the world.
It’s also clear that human life is getting pretty weird. Like “Star Trek” sci-fi weird. (“One hundred quatloos on the newcomers.”)
Robots are taking our jobs. We have artificial intelligence such as Alexa (you can also set the “wake word” to “Amazon” or “Echo,” especially if you’re Billy Joel and your kid is named Alexa). Alexa and Google Home are making our kids think their wants are simply a voice command away, as if we didn’t have enough entitled youth already.
We speak and write messages back and forth via flat communicators (cellphones), which also serve to set a course for us to our next location. I liked tiny flip phones but they went the way of pagers, VCRs, Blu-ray discs, land lines, phone books, fax machines and keys you insert into a car ignition (shudder). Some of you still use those things, true, but I’ve moved on because I’m too lazy to walk up to my TV to put in a DVD, I couldn’t take the constant sales and political calls on the home phone and I don’t like to fumble for car or house keys (the car senses the key fob in your pocket and unlocks the door as you grab the door handle; at home an electronic deadbolt lock opens the door via numerical keypad).
Like many of you, I wear a “fitness” wristband that lets me see how few steps I’ve taken on a winter’s day after eating too much calzone or pierogi, and how many times I woke up during the night to ponder the tense movie I streamed on Am-
FROM PAGE 1 azon the other night (most recently “Room”).
We can binge-watch a vast array of adult-themed TV shows produced not only by the old networks or cable channels but by Netflix and other streaming services. Despite my years as a TV critic, I enjoy few of the more-heralded ones these days. But I have seen all five episodes of darkly humored “Wrecked” from TBS (it’s “Lost” with a few quirky laughs).
When we downsized out of a house, I traded my 200 channels for a small set of broadcast and cable TV offerings, plus high-speed internet and streaming.
I spend a minute each day staring at the greens in my AeroGarden hydroponic grower, which allows us to have basil, mint, cilantro, lettuce and even the occasional cherry tomato during the winter.
Non-Texas folks like me want to avoid gasoline and take the next step in car tech, a battery-operated car with lane assist and collision avoidance functions. But I want to know if the asphalt cowboys who weave all over the highway at 85 mph will be using the automatic driving feature; I doubt it. We wouldn’t want to impinge on their freedom to terrorize slower drivers.
Broadband internet and micro-computing are at the heart of the changes — in the background for Echo, the streamed movies and the “connected” light bulbs and water-leak sensor that work with your smart-home hub.
But the internet has nearly killed earnest print media (news flash for you, kids: old “mainstream” media was NOT the problem) and the digital age has failed to deliver on some grand promises. Like a well-informed populace (think fake news), security (identity theft), better democracy (hacked political files and a public more concerned with Facebook memes than truth and ethics).
Disruption is good, we’re told. And social media crowdsourcing? Nice idea. But trolls ruin the comments section of websites as well as Twitter feeds. Anonymity on the web breeds drunk talk, scams, phishing, homegrown terrorists and cruelty as much as it fosters creativity and freedom.
Russia is spying through our own computers, and we won’t even begin to examine the president-elect — the man who led the false “birthing” claims against the outgoing president. Folks voted to disrupt the Bush-Clinton royalty line because Wall Street and technology stole their livings and liberals stole their bathrooms (but not their guns!).
OK, I take back the “Star Trek”-weird reference. “Star Trek” was optimistic about tech and human achievement. In that fictional world, we might have leadership we trusted, effective legislators, maybe even electronic trigger locks to render guns useless to all but the owner. (“Set phasers to stun,” said Capt. Kirk.) We’d improve the internet to combat terrorists and bullies. And if you asked “Computer” (same as Alexa) to debunk a social media lie about a Washington pizza place or a president’s birthplace, you’d get the blunt truth instead of a puzzled dodge and an offer to buy a premium subscription to a music service.
New gadgets have been rolling out at the Consumer Electronics Show the past few days, new time-savers employing “artificial intelligence” and virtual reality. And department stores are going out of business, the Twitter feed says, as we opt for the ease of home shopping instead of mall visits.
We’re losing the face time we need with other folks, if you’ll pardon the expression. It may not be the Echo that’s the problem but the internet’s echo chambers, where haters and “truthers” find likeminded dolts.
Americans, like Europeans, fear a scary world of enemies reaching into their communities. And many chuck their peaceful religious and cultural traditions in favor of gadgets, video games and fantasy football binges.
But I’m an optimistic sort, so I have hope that we’re in a transition period to a more peaceful future where automatic weapons are silent and people spend more time staring into their home gardens.
Yeah, right. I ask Alexa for another joke.
“What do you use to make a cat’s fur look pretty?” she says in her robot/FM voice. “A catacomb.”
May the next generation be smart enough to get the joke.