Every time Amazon announces a new kind of gadget, there’s an inevitable and often justified backlash of concern that it’s further eroding our privacy. Although the company has done lots of work to secure its devices and provide clear and strong protections, the backlash is unavoidable given the nature of the products.
Amazon’s ambient intelligence platform, it’s no longer a joke. The computer is both in the cloud and on the device, and the actual computing happens here, there, and everywhere — and as a consumer, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to locate. . .it’s a messy melange of inputs, outputs, machine learning, and hunches (literally, Amazon calls its technology for predicting your commands “hunches”). Limp says that as many as one out of four actions taken by Alexa devices today are proactive — they’re done by Alexa based on what it has learned about your desires instead of in response to a specific command.
Amazon’s race to create the disappearing computer
Ambient computing is here; now what?
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"For his last column in 2017, Walt Mossberg predicted that technology would fade into the background, and so-called “ambient computing” would become ubiquitous. Four years later, we are well on our way — but what exactly that term means for how computers will work and how we’ll live is still very much up in the air.
Many companies are working on some vision of ambient computing, but there’s nobody working harder to try to make the idea of ambient computing happen right now than Amazon’s head of hardware, Dave Limp.
How he’s building that future today is a case study in how Big Tech confounds our preconceived notions of how progress works. We expected AI to look like HAL 9000. Instead, it looks a lot more like a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.
At Amazon’s yearly lollapalooza of gadget announcements, the company typically announces literally dozens of new Alexa-connected devices. Releasing so many different devices at such a heady clip makes a certain kind of sense: if computers are meant to be all around us, Amazon needs to produce as many different kinds of computers as possible.
This year, among the flood, Limp presented three devices that are paradigmatic of his vision for what he calls “ambient intelligence.”
Subbing out the word “computer” for “intelligence” is a tell that he’s trying to change consumers’ thinking about how our digital lives will work in the future.
Today, however, these three devices are limited to pushing the boundaries of — and our comfort levels with — what we expect out of smart homes. Critically, all three take part in a new kind of computing platform that is unlike what we’re used to seeing from Big Tech. It’s diffuse, dispersed, and sometimes difficult to comprehend. . ."
READ MORE: https://www.theverge.com/22696187/amazon-alexa-ambient-disappearing-computer-limp-interview
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