Artificial intelligence

In terms of my particular work, there's nothing worse than those days when you're chained to the laptop all day long, as the minutes tick by and the deadline fast approaches. But there's nothing better than when you finally get to the last page, and you do your final spell check, and update your table of contents, and ship the thing off, knowing that it's as good as it can possibly be. Even when that happens at 10:10 on Sunday night, it's still a happy moment of euphoria that will carry you through to the next mad deadline crunch, which you can only hope will happen on a weekday.

*****

So that was Sunday; and now it's Monday, and I'm now the proud owner of this:

Yes, I'm listening to everything you say,
but you have nothing to hide, right? 

I had to replace my phone recently, and I got a Google Pixel 2. Unbeknownst to me at the time (any excuse to say or write "unbeknownst"), Verizon was offering a free Google Home Mini with any Pixel purchase, and it arrived in today's mail.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's a fun new thing in a pretty box! It was free! And we'll have so much fun talking to it and telling it to play music and look up random facts and tell us when the puck drops. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that it will become (if it isn't already) a surveillance device that will report on my every thought and conversation. I've read 1984, and this is how it starts.

I actually thought about just leaving it in the box. I could donate it somewhere, I thought; or we could just sell it on eBay. But curiosity got the better of me, so I opened it, just to see what it looked like when I plugged it in.

It's a very cute little device, and when you plug it in, four tiny lights flash the now-familiar Google colors (red, blue, yellow, green). It's cheerful and fun to look at; it's like Christmas in June. But after I set it up, I didn't know what to do with it. My son started testing it on state capitals, and then I threw it some multiplication questions. When I was 9 or 10, I dreamed of something very similar to this--a machine or a robot that knew everything and that could offer the sum total of human knowledge, just for the asking. State capitals, multiplication tables, and the weather, all in a a little round package.

*****
Last year, I had to write a white paper about data lakes. I don't know very much about databases, relational or non-relational, but that didn't stop me from writing all about them. One of the things that I learned while researching this topic is that when you build a data lake, you don't need a use case for the data you're collecting. You can just gather any and all data, throw it in your data lake, and then figure out later how to use it, and why. That's kind of terrifying, isn't it? With the right kind of data repository as the backend, your Google Home device, or your Alexa, or your Apple Home, could just collect data on every question you ask it, now and forever, store that data indefinitely, and then eventually figure out how to use it, presumably against you.

*****
I don't know very much about algorithms, but I do know that algorithms control how search results are compiled and returned. The day after I received the Google Home device was primary day in Maryland, and I wasn't sure where my polling place was (it changed recently), so  I asked Google, and it suggested that I should visit the Board of Elections, in Virginia. Based on the weather forecasts, it knows that I live in Maryland, so there was reassuring proof that it doesn't know everything. It does, however, know that the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup, because everyone in my house has asked it "Who won the Stanley Cup?" at least ten times.

*****
It's Friday now, day 5 of sharing my household with an AI-enabled speaker that actually speaks. I like asking it to tell me jokes; and of course, the daily reminder that "the Stanley Cup was won by the Washington Capitals" (passive voice; another algorithm quirk, I'm sure) will never get old. But I'm keeping it at an arm's length for now. As helpful as it might be to get a quick Spanish-to-English translation (or the reverse) or to get the weather forecast without looking for my phone, I'm still not convinced that it's not spying on us and reporting my every idea to our Google overlords. By the time I finally unplug it, it might be too late.