That’s kinda my point, though. You have the Google Assistant app for a legitimate reason, and its need to use your microphone is also equally legitimate…the problem comes in when Google says that they don’t monitor what you’re saying, or worse, they say they can’t because your phone processes it all locally. They have this giant loophole that they take advantage of here, in that while they do not keep track of what you say themselves, they embed a third party service that does. While not particularly surprising given it’s Google, that’s shady as fuck and they shouldn’t be able to say they don’t monitor just because they let their little bro Alphonso do it on their behalf and they magically get off on a technicality.

Is that to say that it’s no longer valid? Or just that it’s old news? The list of apps associated with the software is still pretty extensive; Google Assistant even showed up.

It’s not even the people; it’s their actions. If we could figure out how to regulate its use so its profit-generation capacity doesn’t build on itself exponentially at the expense of the fair treatment of others and instead actively proliferate the models that help people, I’m all for it, for the record.

That is entirely true and one of my favorite things about it. I just wish there was a way to nurture more of that and less of the, “Hi, I’m Alvin and my job is to make your Fortune-500 company even more profitable…the key is to pay people less!” type of AI.

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But the people with the money for the hardware are the ones training it to put more money in their pockets. That’s mostly what it’s being trained to do: make rich people richer.

Tennessee: a state in the USA.

That totally sucks, I’m sorry. I will freely admit to being annoyed when I try to click a top link on Google and being black-holed. Still worth it to not deal with the ads.

For some completely unrelated reason, I suddenly have this song stuck in my head…

https://www.tiktok.com/@originalsinfluencer/video/7443873893430971678

Making a career change from an industry with several active unions (all of which continue to be proven as vital, even after over 100 years), into the tech industry in the mid-2010s, where there was no union and you’d hear horror stories (especially from the video game industry), I can’t help but feel like this was inevitable and I’ve been excited to watch it happen for almost 10 years. I hope it continues.