From The Milken Institute Review, December 9:
Do What I Say, Not…
Some recent New York Times articles reminded me of a decades-old exchange with one of my graduate school professors. The Times stories explained that while Americans had been telling pollsters that they were deeply concerned about inflation, they were continuing to buy branded products that had increased in price even faster than the overall cost of living. And despite expensive gasoline and rising hotel rates, they were also traveling much more. Why this gap between talk and action?
Stimmung versus HaltungBack to my own 1970s episode. My dissertation advisor, Leonard Krieger, was not only one of the leading American intellectual historians of the time — protégé of a protégé of some of the greatest 19th-century German scholars — but also a veteran of World War II military intelligence. I asked him about German civilian morale during the last years of the war, whether the populace had lost faith in the regime. He said that he and his colleagues distinguished between the public’s mood, or stimmung, and its behavior under duress, or haltung. (The English word “bearing” comes closest to the latter.) The public grumbled but persevered.Only later did I learn that the Allies had appropriated this analysis from none other than Hitler’s premier theorist of mass manipulation, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. This distinction became especially salient as the tide turned against the Reich after D-Day. German efforts to prop up domestic morale may even have worked at the expense of combat capacity. In his book, The Shock of the Old, The British historian of military technology David Edgerton, observes that the increasingly scarce metals, fuel and skilled labor that Hitler expended on so-called wonder weapons — in particular, the V-1 cruise missile and the V-2 ballistic missile that may have impressed the Nazi faithful but failed to break British morale as they were expected to — would have been far better used in defending the Third Reich with more fighter aircraft. (According to Edgerton, the V-2 budget could have produced 24,000 aircraft.)
How we spend our money is not the only realm of behavior with a stimmung-haltung gap. Consider privacy. Americans across the political spectrum are suspicious of the security of their personal data on social media sites — especially Facebook, which is distrusted by over 70 percent of Americans. Yet about the same proportion of Americans have Facebook accounts, and one statistical source projects the numbers will in fact rise to over 75 percent by 2027.
Still more surprising: the popularity of Alexa, Amazon’s voice recognition software now found not only on Amazon devices like Echo smart speakers but in a multitude of machines ranging from microwaves to SUVs. Indeed, the number of devices connected to Alexa has increased from 200 million to 300 million in only a few years. Corporate and government clients are generally confident that Amazon protects their data in the cloud. This should not necessarily reassure users of Alexa, though.
In principle, Alexa does not begin recording user speech until it hears a so-called wake word. But it can wake up mistakenly a dozen times a day by mis-hearing a word. Yet such widely acknowledged privacy concerns have not materially affected adoption of Alexa-enabled devices or similar products running the Google and Apple voice-driven digital assistants.
In its defense, Amazon does offer some strong privacy options, but how many people wade through the choices? Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot, which makes the popular Roomba self-propelled vacuum, raises additional issues since some models upload home layouts learned while vacuuming to the cloud. But in any event, concerns about Amazon as the privacy octopus with ever more tentacles have been overstated. (Jeff Bezos isn’t inclined to lose money on anything for very long, and according to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon’s devices unit, including Echo, is losing $5 billion a year.)....
....MUCH MORE
You knew Roomba is mapping your house for Amazon, right?
....Take, for example, Roomba, the adorable robotic vacuum cleaner. Since 2015, the high-end models have created maps of its users’ homes, to more efficiently navigate through them while cleaning. But as Reuters and Gizmodo reported recently, Roomba’s manufacturer, iRobot, may plan to share those maps of the layouts of people’s private homes with its commercial partners....July 2018
No, Wait: THIS Is the Amazon everyone should have feared (AMZN)
From Bloomberg, July 30:
Did Bezos Just Tease Amazon Plan for Alexa-on-Wheels Home Robot?
From FT Alphaville:
Cybersecurity dispatches: Managing the IoT poltergeist threat
Imagine the scene in the not too distant future.But do you know why your Roomba is singing Daisy?
An Uber self-driving electric car has just dropped you home. Your front door has recognised your face, and your fingerprint has authenticated that it’s definitely you. You get into your house, not a key in sight, kick off your shoes, and happily discover that the 3D printing feature in your fridge has already printed the food you plan to consume for dinner. All the appliances you need are on. And everything you don’t need is off, nice and efficiently saving power.
You decide to treat yourself to a quick 30-minute Netflix holographic update, only to get a nudge from your wearable tech that you’ve still got a 10 minute exercise deficit to meet your daily exercise quota. It’s a problem because you happen to have signed up to the extreme health management option which shuts down ApplePay access — without which Netflix won’t work — if you fail to meet your objectives. You quickly get busy on your smart-grid connected treadmill (which conveniently sells off the energy produced by your system back into the grid).
When all of a sudden… your utility door flings open and your iRobot Roomba begins singing Daisy, Daisy....MORE
It's an homage to the first singing computer:
From Switched, November 2009:
...Rejoice! World Learns Why HAL Sang 'Daisy'From a purely selfish point of view, at least we got a few dozen posts out of the madness. One more:
