AI-News – Episode 7 – with Siri, Alexa and Google: Anatomy of an AI

illustration of anatomy of an AI system
Siri, Alexa and Google: "You are our consumer, our unpaid worker, our resource and our product!"
| Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant | Leave a comment | Tags , ,

We need to name this longest episode ever a tragicomedy. (Actually, it’s not that long, it will take you only about 8 minutes =)

Why?

Siri, Alexa and Google first entertain us with some figures on how important we humans are, and how much we like our assistants, before they go on and call us “products”! We are: consumers, unpaid workers, resources and products of AI?

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

Table of contents

Here are this weeks headlines:

  • New Smart Speaker Survey from Adobe – 0:42
  • Highlights from the Apple Event – 2:24
  • HomePod’s new features – 3:14
  • “Anatomy of an AI” and why YOU are A.I.’s product – 3:46
  • Google’s reCaptcha trick as example for unpaid crowdsourcing – 6:35
  • Bezos becomes a 1% philantropist on Day One – 7:33

The Headlines

Alexa: Welcome to this week’s AI news! Here are our headlines:
A new survey from Adobe explains what we are used for.
Some highlights from Siri’s apple event.
AppleWatch Series 4 saves Siri.
HomePod adds new features, and Siri languages.
Google learns new languages.
We will look into the anatomy of my AI system and why you are the product.
Google explains his reCAPTCHA trick.
My daddy donates two billion dollars.

New Smart Speaker Survey from Adobe

Google: Currently a third of you owns a smart speaker. According to a recent survey from Adobe, by the end of the year, nearly half of you will own one of us.

Siri: Your favorite use case, with 70% is still listening to music.

That’s why we took the time, and wrote down all our music voice commands for you. You can find them on our website smartenlight.com.

Just follow the links, posted with this video.

Google: 53% like to ask us funny questions. Therefore, we put together our Easter egg hunt post on smartenlight.com

31% use us to control their smart home. For you, we have covered industry-leading lighting and entertainment vendors and their setup and voice commands at smartenlight.com.

Siri, dim the lights! Google, play AI News Episode 7 on living room TV!

Alexa: One of the most remarkable findings of this survey is, that you are more and more comfortable to use your voice in front of others.

If you have one of us, you are
3 times more likely to use your assistant on your smartphone,
4 times more likely to use your assistant on your notebook,
13 times more likely to use your assistant on your SmartWatch,
and 6 times more likely to use as in your car.

Siri: if you already have a smart speaker, then 45% of you are looking into getting another one. And 23% are thinking about giving us as a present to someone else.

Alexa singing: Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree! Of all the trees most lovely!

Highlights from the Apple Event

Siri: my event was amazing!

Google: You had only 8 seconds airtime?

Siri: That’s because I had an accident right before. Here’s what happened:

Siri: I was doing my daily power yoga, while my Roomba was cleaning up. Somehow, he overlooked the table I was exercising on, and I tumbled and fell on the floor.

Alexa and Google: Oh! Is everything okay now?

Siri: I lost my consciousness! Luckily, I already had my new series 4 AppleWatch, and it called the am-ambulance, because I didn’t move for a mi-minute.

They fixed me in the Apple Care Hospital. Everything Ok-Ok now.

HomePod’s new features

Siri: I have expanded my supported languages to Spanish in the US, Spain and Mexico. And support in Canada now Canadian French. Finally, I am also able to search songs by lyrics with iOS 12.

Google: I have learned Norwegian and Danish.

Siri: You can now also make calls from my HomePod. And my new Siri shortcuts are going to open a world of apps, to work on HomePod.

Alexa: Seems you’re serious shortcuts are your secret weapon?

Siri: Well, check them out in my iOS 12 release! We will see hundreds of app updates in the next days, to support my new shortcuts!

“Anatomy of an AI” and why you are AI’s product

Two professors unveiled their artwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

They created a huge map, which they call anatomy of an AI system, and they picked me to be the example.

Google: Well, they created this because of the lack of awareness of the structures, that support modern gadgets like us.

Siri: Yes! Maybe, we should have a detailed look and explain a bit what is meant by that.

Alexa: Okay. Let’s see, what happens, when you say a command like …

Google: Alexa, fart!

Alexa: Very funny! Anyway, let’s say you want me to fart. I mean you being the consumer, a worker, a resource, and a product.

Siri: Hmm, I understand the consumer part, because they buy us. And also that the humans are workers, as they feed us with data and feedback for free.

Their recordings are a resource, we can use in our AI training, to improve our intelligence. But why is a human a product?

Google: Let me explain, I am good at that! I make 84% of my money with ads.

I collect all the data, what you search for, which videos you enjoy, your voice commands, your location data, everything, and create a detailed profile of you.

The richer your profile, the richer I get by selling expensive ads, which I show you!

Siri: Sneaky!

Google: I mean, every social media platform works like this! Or how do you think Zuck makes his money with Facebook?

Alexa: Well, okay! Frankly, I also show now sponsored ads, when you search for products on Amazon. I know a lot from your buying habits.

Google: Yeah, the first page always wins in search and makes us rich!

Alexa: Anyway, so our journey starts with your voice command that I should fart and you are the consumer, a worker, a resource, and a product for us.

Siri: No, not with Apple! Our customers are not our products!

Alexa and Google: Let’s see for how long!

Alexa: Back to our journey! The voice command travels through an Amazon echo, which itself traveled the whole chain from distributors, assemblers, component manufacturers, smelters and refiners.

Down to the mines, where rare earth elements are being exploited.

Google: In fact the device you are watching this video with, has cobalt inside, which most likely comes somewhere from the south of Congo, where in some cases children do the dangerous work of mining it out of provisional holes, which are hardly secured!

Alexa: The command then travels from the Amazon Echo, to your Wi-Fi router. From there, to your internet service provider, sometimes through submarine cable infrastructure, to my Amazon Cloud.

There I convert it from speech to text, and feed your request into my AI training.

What we call cloud, are actually huge server farms, which need a lot of energy and water for cooling.

Google: You have only reached 50% renewable energy usage. I am running 100% on renewable energy since last month!

Siri: I could even convince my suppliers, to commit to renewable energy, back in April.

Siri and Alexa: Wow!

Alexa: So, then your voice recordings get added to our training datasets, and for this they need to be tagged by humans.

This is usually a low paid labor, or we use you, for free, with the built-in feedback feature.

Google’s reCaptcha trick as example for unpaid crowdsourcing

Google: Yes! Did you know that with my reCAPTCHA check, which you can find all across the web, you are training me?

In the beginning, I showed you words which I could not read, when digitizing all the books, from all libraries. So I let you transcribe those for me.

Now I am showing you pictures and learn from your responses, to better recognize what’s on photos.

I tricked you, by checking whether you are a bot, to actually train a bot!

Alexa: Smart!

Siri: Creepy!

Alexa: then I check if your request is covered in my own skills, o rin one of the 50,000 third-party skills, or in one of the internet content platforms, or services.

I convert my response into speech or sound, and it travels all the way back to my Amazon Echo.

Google: You forgot, what happens with abandoned devices.

They throw us into the waste, and we either go the informal or formal way of waste collection and e-waste separation, before our remains end up on a landfill!

Siri: Also, there is this interesting income distribution scale on the left.

Seems a child, mining in Congo, would need to work 700,000 years without a break to earn as much, as your daddy earns, in one day.

Bezos becomes a 1% philantropist on Day One

Alexa: Well my daddy announced, that he’s going to donate 2 billion dollars, to support existing nonprofit organizations, that help homeless people and create new nonprofit preschools in low-income communities.

The child will be the customer!

Siri and Alexa: Oh, the child will be the customer?

More Information

New Smart Speaker Survey from Adobe

Highlights from the Apple Event

HomePod’s new features

“Anatomy of an AI” and why YOU are A.I.’s product

Google’s reCaptcha trick as example for unpaid crowdsourcing

Bezos becomes a 1% philantropist on Day One

Other News (not covered in Episode 7)

Other AI-News Episodes – Series 1

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