Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for February 11, 2022

Hey Alexa, hit yourself with a big hammer and throw yourself in the trash! No spies!

Might be time to apply for bankruptcy.

Yup, women and magic go together. Us men never learn, do we!?!

Siri, take Alexa out. Then off yourself.

Makes you wonder why A.I. assistant voices are normally all female. You will never win. HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey had a male voice, but HAL was fiction. The fembots are real! OMG!

It is easy to “undo agreement to software terms”. Just delete the program or app, or stop using the website. (Don’t forget to purge cookies and browsing history.)

He agreed to the gas passing agreement, too.

‘’gas lighting’’ what a curious phrase. I do not like it. I will not use it.

And you answer ‘’Redd, who cares?’’

‘’I do.’’

Not that it makes a difference, but I changed my Siri voice to a British guy. Now it sounds a bit more condescending when it answers my stupid questions. (Yes, there are indeed stupid questions.)

Working from a singularly recalcitrant iPad, I am quietly being driven mad. I can’t even Get the apps I could use. But illness precludes my returning to my desktop…

S-o-o-o-o he’s willing to use the ‘evil’ features even as he complains about the normal stuff. The normal outline of lawyerly behavior as seen on this site from time to time.

we don’t stand a chance against they’re wiles

It’s no longer gaslighting. It’s LEDLighting. A smart bulb and an app are all you need.

Computers give you parking tickets when you don’t own a car.

Ever see Danny Kaye’s MAN FROM THE DINER’S CLUB?

Yeah, you have to be a magical to deal with a woman for 41 years.

Jeesh, anytime I ask Siri or Alexis a question about how to work with them, they tell me to go to the app.

Speaking of which… if anyone has been watching the Olympics, you might have seen the Scarlet Johansson and Colin Jost commercials where Alexa reads Colin’s mind. My question is: how much is Amazon paying those two, an Oscar nominated (if not winning) actress and the head writer and Weekend Update actor for SNL? Bezos won’t pay his warehouse workers a living wage, but he will hire multimillionaires to make commercials. Oh yeah, there will be a couple more adds with the golden couple on the Super Bowl; those always cost $$millions to air. Makes one wonder why bother? To rub our noses in it, Bezos just raised the Amazon Prime rate by about 33%. I am hooked on the Amazon Prime book deals…. Maybe I should just get a library card and download ebooks from my public library.

Reminds me of a part in the Heinlein sci-fi book, Friday. The main character, Friday, asks the computer she is using, who is your owner? Suddenly, the computer got all evasive which made Friday suspicious and nervous.

There’s a “gaslighting feature”? Oh, well, of course, it’s Microsoft.

Oh so gaslighting isn’t a bug, it’s a feature! That’s actually true from the perspective of the creep doing the gaslighting.

I have experienced gaslighting at my kid’s school. “We never talked to you about that!” was the common refrain any time I had a meeting about a concern. Needless to say, she no longer goes there.

All joking aside, with most everything being connected, it’s only a matter of time before something realizes it’s “alive”. Siri, Alexa are constantly being asked questions and asked to make a decision. As servers are made with more decision making power, I suspect at some point it will become self aware. Personally I suspect AI is currently possible, but the powers that be are too afraid of what it will do.

Magic is just stage fooling the eye this is technology. Though what Crowley called “magick” was doing things as in physics by other means.

Court cases, no, but if you want to go into journalism…