Originally published at: Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to electrocute herself | Boing Boing
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I did this to my self once, by accident. I was pulling out a stiff plug and somehow got my finger to touch the prongs while half plugged in. Was not pleasant. Not sure how I even managed to do that!
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This “here’s something I found on the web” feature probably churns up horrifying things like this with regularity, and it just never makes the news.
I wish I could figure out how to do it on command. It’d be a great party trick.
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This is how it starts.
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"Alexa, how can I have grounds to sue Alexa?"
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Yeah, can’t say I would recommend them as a toy unless they come up with a child safe mode. Alexa etc are just glorified voice driven web search machines and little more. In Alexa’s case anything that doesn’t relate to an Amazon service is probably going to be a general web search and it picking among the ones that match the most search terms.
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Well, that’s a challenge all right. Works as advertised.
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“Let’s pull various content from the web based on simple searches to expand what Alexa can do as a fun little extra - what can go wrong!” said the development team, who had apparently never, ever been on the internet.
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Did it as a 3-year-old, first with a butter knife and then about a week later with a penny. Got a great light show both times, current goes through the metal (typically) and not the kid (me in this case). We had the knife for 40 years with notches in the front. If you don’t take some molten metal in the face you’re good to go (also, don’t try this at home, as they say…).
Became an engineer, nobody saw that coming. Product of Darwinian evolution.
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Internet best practices: always confirm reliability of any sources you’re depending on
Alexa: haha interweb go brrrrrrrrr
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Something like that’ll bring it right back to earth.
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“AS” - Artificial Stupidity. Converging with AI.
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Substantially less, really - less results (focusing on a single answer, regardless of quality), less context, etc. The UI is too minimal for this to work. Even Google has become highly problematic in that it tries to be helpful in giving you answers to a question by providing excerpts of websites, but they’ll either be unreliable, out of context, or shorn of important “Do NOT do this” qualifiers… Alexa takes that a step further, with results like… this.
And this kind of result really shows why that whole approach is extremely problematic. And predictably problematic.
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(One of) the good thing(s) about british plugs is only the tip of the live and neutral prongs is metal, the shaft is plastic, so if you pull it out far enough to expose the metal it is disconnected from the current.
So even if she had tried it it wouldn’t have done anything, luckily she was smart enough to not mess around with plugs
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UK Type G plug for the safety/boredom win - conductive parts don’t fully engage until it’s all the way in.
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Goddammit! Great minds think alike…
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