<
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-companies-advocates-cult-1234954528/>
"I was watching a video of a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show
for the Rabbit R1, an AI gadget that promises to act as a sort of personal
assistant, when a feeling of doom took hold of me.
It wasn’t just that Rabbit’s CEO Jesse Lyu radiates the energy of a
Kirkland-brand Steve Jobs. And it wasn’t even Lyu’s awkward demonstration of
how the Rabbit’s camera can recognize a photo of Rick Astley and Rickroll the
owner — even though that segment was so cringe it caused me chest pains.
No, the real foreboding came during a segment when Lyu breathlessly explained
how the Rabbit could order pizza for you, telling it “the most-ordered option
is fine,” leaving his choice of dinner up to the Pizza Hut website. After that,
he proceeded to have the Rabbit plan an entire trip to London for him. The
device very clearly just pulled a bunch of sights to see from some top-10 list
on the internet, one that was very likely AI-generated itself.
Most of the Rabbit’s capabilities were well in line with existing
voice-activated products, like Amazon Alexa. Its claim to being something
special is its ability to create a “digital twin” of the user, which can
directly utilize all of your apps so that you, the person, don’t have to. It
can even use Midjourney to generate AI images for you, removing yet another
level of human involvement and driving us all deeper into the uncanny valley.
We know very little about how the Rabbit will actually interact with all of
these apps, or how secure your data will be, but the first 10,000 preorder
units sold out at CES the instant they were announced. It was the most
talked-about product at the show, and I heard whispers about it wherever I
went. Among the early adopter set, people couldn’t wait for the chance to hand
over more of their agency to a glorified chatbot. This is where the feeling of
doom started building in my gut."
Via
Garbage Day: When nothing is important everything is
https://www.garbageday.email/p/nothing-important-everything
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
