Goodbye privacy, hello Alexa: Amazon Echo, the home robot who hears it all
I am dreading the first time I visit someone with one of these. I wonder how they will respond to my request to turn it off? offense? understanding? pity and ridicule?<p>Amazon and Google have both figured out that the current commodity of value isn&#x27;t oil, and isn&#x27;t energy in general, it is information. The people with more information have an advantage over the people with less information. That advantage can be tactical, commercial, or personal. So collecting information while being helpful gives you a much better asset than simply being helpful does.<p>We&#x27;ve read stories of cops misusing information databases to check up on their ex-spouses or future dates, Google SREs reading people&#x27;s mail, and NSA analysts passing around &quot;juicy&quot; intercepts with prurient but no security value. We&#x27;ve got people on the other side of these piles of information and those people are fallible, and susceptible to bribes, and generally susceptible to poor judgement.<p>What is worse, is that the &quot;service&quot; that something like Alexa offers is pretty credibly offered in a modest cluster of modern machines with GPUs. I would expect that a 32 node Jetson cluster could provide reliable general speech recognition and execution. But the illusion is that you need a &quot;big cloud&quot; of machines to do this. You don&#x27;t.<p>So I&#x27;m all in favor of these interesting technologies helping folks out, but I really wish we would step past &#x27;cloud&#x27; and into a &#x27;house cluster&#x27; which, like your furnace or HVAC system, does the work locally and protects your privacy. It is a company I have seriously considered starting twice now. Even in the US people can get multi-megabit connectivity to the Internet from their home, there is no reason any more why you shouldn&#x27;t be able to access your pictures, your media, your email, and communities by talking to your server in your house. The challenge is turning it into an appliance. That is doable I believe.