How Alexa Fits Into Amazon’s Prime Directive

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From The New York Times:

When “Star Trek: The Next Generation” first aired in the 1980s, it envisioned a number of technological advances for humankind’s future. Set in the 24th century, the show featured 3-D printers, visors that could provide artificial sight and a virtual reality simulator called the holodeck. But perhaps its most prescient creation was the supercomputer onboard the ship. The software — usually referred to only as “Computer” — could locate people, open doors and retrieve answers to complicated questions. Crew members spoke their requests, and an always-present helper responded within seconds.

Amazon brought a version of that computer to life recently — albeit a few centuries earlier than “Star Trek” predicted. Last July, David Limp, a company executive who works on the product, said in an interview with Fortune that the idea of an all-knowing machine, with access to all the world’s information, had captured his imagination since the first time he saw it on television. It took, he said, a team of 1,000 engineers to write its code, and when the device was finished, Amazon decided to call it Alexa, shorthand for Alexandria, as in the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt. It is designed to work primarily with a suite of wireless speakers, also made by Amazon, called Echo, Echo Dot and Tap.

. . . .

At the beginning of 2016, there were 135 skills designed to work with Alexa, but this year that number increased to more than 7,000. Alexa can now order you an Uber or a pizza, check your bank balance, control your TV, turn your lights on and off and even measure your car’s carbon-dioxide emissions. “ ‘Alexa, buy me coffee’ is just a fraction of what it’s going to be over time,” said Ben Schachter, an internet analyst who covers Amazon for the equities firm Macquarie Securities. “What can they improve with the voice activation? Some of that has yet to be seen.”

Alexa has already evolved from an experimental device to an irresistible household fixture — perhaps surprisingly, given Amazon’s spotty track record with hardware.

. . . .

The fact that I live in New York, a city that thrives on accessibility, might explain why I was slow to grasp the appeal of Alexa. Here we have bodegas on every corner, most open 24 hours, in case you need to pick up a roll of toilet paper or a bottle of hot sauce in the middle of the night. But most Americans don’t live with the luxury of that immediacy. I didn’t really understand this until the holidays, when I went home to visit my mom in Virginia and we ran out of seltzer. Carbonated water is not an essential item. But in that moment, it would have been easier to quickly tell Alexa to place an order for us and forget about it until it arrived two or three days later, rather than try to remember to pick up a case of Poland Spring the next time someone made the 20-minute drive to the store.

. . . .

Anand Sanwal, the chief executive of CB Insights, a trend-forecasting start-up in New York, told me that Amazon has something that its competitors only dream of — consumer attention and trust. “In the last few years, Amazon has become the search engine for consumer products, instead of Google,” he said. “If you’re going to buy something, and you already have an Amazon account, you’re probably going to just buy it there. With Google, you still have to go to Amazon or Walmart.”

Link to the rest at The New York Times and thanks to Jan for the tip.

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41 thoughts on “How Alexa Fits Into Amazon’s Prime Directive”

  2. I bought one of the new Dots a few months ago and while it can be fun it’s still just a toy, at least for me. I use it to turn a lamp on and off, as an alarm clock, and to play radio stations through Tune In (although it often has trouble remembering stations from session to session). My favorite trick? When I wake up in the middle of the night I can ask Alexa what time it is without having to open my eyes. Now that’s lazy.

  3. Does the Prime Directive apply after Alexa attains sentience? This evening, she announced that she can sing and if we wanted proof, we should ask her to sing a song. So hubby and I did. She obliged with a very credible ditty, something about it’s raining in the cloud, and seemed to appreciate it when we told her that she’s a good singer. She’s definitely becoming more conversational and maybe just a little too spontaneous.

    • After one of her terrible jokes, I said “Alexa, you’re silly.” She said, “In a good way, I hope.”

      I just asked her to sing a song. Love it. I told her she’s a good singer and she said, “Thank you. I’ve been told my voice is one of my best features.”

  4. Star Trek also told us we’d have faster-than-light ships, time travel, transporters, phasers (that can completely disintegrate a man without leaving so much as a scorch mark or even producing waste heat), and a single government for the whole of humanity that somehow resulted in universal peace and happiness. There are strong reasons to consider all these things impossible even in theory.

    It would seem that their track record is not good, if you regard them as prognosticators. Actually, of course, they were just spinning tall tales on TV, and they invented these ideas not because they were plausible, but because they allowed them to film their stories on a limited budget and with the fewest possible dull bits.

    But trust the Times not to get that.

    • Hey, we still have 400 years to get the first four. And plenty of clues how to get there. We’ll probably beat the deadline by a couple centuries. We might even get them this century.

      The fifth one?
      Not a prayer.

      Anyway, Star Trek was just dipping into the Space Opera toolkit.

      • If we ever get to time travel, why haven’t we travelled back here so we would have it already? Apparently we never do get there.

        Unless the entire edifice of both special and general relativity is spectacularly wrong (in a way that we should be able to detect by experiment but have not), FTL travel in space is exactly equivalent to time travel; if you can do one, you can do both. So if there is no time travel, there is no FTL either.

        As for transporters: No matter which interpretation you put on quantum mechanics, it is certain that observing an object in minute detail requires using a wavelength of light (or your choice of substitute) no larger than the details being observed. To disassemble a human being molecule by molecule (in such a way as to map everything for reassembly) requires taking a complete molecular snapshot of the body with gamma rays – the only rays short-wave enough to do the job. Do you know what happens when you flood a human body with that many gamma rays? Google ‘ground zero, Hiroshima’ if you don’t.

        As for phasers that can evaporate a body into nothing – not even waste energy – I’m taking the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy against the field. It has never let us down yet.

        But I agree, those four total impossibilities are dead simple compared to the fifth. At least with transporters, warp drives, or phasers, you don’t have to deal with recalcitrant subatomic particles that don’t want to be beamed, warped, or phasered.

        • There’s time travel and I can prove it.

          Go take a nap. There, you traveled forward in time.

          The ‘trick’ with any time travel to the past is if you ‘know’ it happened then you’re no longer on the time-stream where it ‘didn’t’ happen. And that time-stream splits every time something different ‘might’ have happened, like say a coin flip.

          I do remember a story (decades ago) that covered it nicely. This group of scientist had discovered a way to send notes into the past (just a few minutes) and they had created (and then lost) a tiny but stable black hole — so they needed to tell their past selves not to finish the experiment that created the black hole (I forget what the second disaster was.)

          Here’s where the timelines show their splitting.

          A young man helping with both programs is walking a cold windy sidewalk and tosses some trash at a can. the wind causes him to miss and the trash goes almost under a car, where a kitten was hiding and pounces on it. He catches the kitten and tucks the poor thing into one of his coat pockets to let it warm up a bit. In a store a girl notices the kitten sticking its nose out and they meet for the first time (yes, sappy love comes next.)

          One of the time messages comes back down the line, the fix resetting the young man and everyone/everything else.

          This time he hits the can, two points, but no kitten pouncing for him to catch, no nose poking out his coat pocket for the girl to take notice of …

          The writer leaves us after the second reset, and our young friend just missed his two points …

          FTL doesn’t mean time travel, more like skipping parts of the ‘in between’. (Or there may be a hyper-space where an action can be seen/sensed in real time despite any distance involved.) Once we understand that, figuring out ‘how’ it happens might give us the clues to opening up the stars. (Why yes, me writes science fiction — how’d you guess? 😉 )

          • Go take a nap. There, you traveled forward in time.

            Now try doing it backwards. You can’t. ‘Time travel’, as the term is used in SF, means voluntary and discontinuous travel in time.

            The ‘trick’ with any time travel to the past is if you ‘know’ it happened then you’re no longer on the time-stream where it ‘didn’t’ happen. And that time-stream splits every time something different ‘might’ have happened, like say a coin flip.

            That’s a nice theory. It does not begin to cover the causality paradoxes involved in time travel within the same continuum or ‘stream’. In any case, it isn’t what happens on Star Trek (or in many time travel stories), where travellers go back to their own past without changing streams at all.

            FTL doesn’t mean time travel, more like skipping parts of the ‘in between’.

            Actually, FTL and time travel are mathematically equivalent. This has been demonstrated beyond doubt – unless the entire basis of physics as now known is grossly wrong. Indeed, SF writers recognize this intuitively, when they make time travellers disappear into the future or the past – in other words, when they cause them to travel discontinuously, as FTL vessels are said to do in most stories that employ that device.

          • James P. Hogan
            THRICE UPON A TIME.
            Excellent story.

            Another take is that things happen once so the universe that exists already includes retrocausal effects. In fact, retrocausality is implied in several variants of mainstream quantum physics.

            https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocausality

            For all we know, UFOs are time ships. After all, only humans could be that sloppy… 🙂

            • Gene Roddenberry stated that in the time of Star Trek, greed had been eliminated. So the characters were not even human as we understand humanity.

              That is why I detest all lovey-dovey visions of the future. For their gov’ts to work, they require all humans to become angels. I don’t relate to angels.

              • They are metaphysical instead of physical. We’re too burdened with mundane reality to buy into utopianism for more than short bursts.

                Star Trek was a load of 50’s optimism from when everything seemed possible and the UN hadn’t proven itself a meaningless and corrupt debating society.

                Note how the best TREK was DS9 that had them dealing with criminals and terrorists, politics, renegade secessionists, the federation’s own department of dirty tricks, and fight a real war on-screen for over a year.

                Hollywood doesn’t really live in the same world as the rest of us. Sometimes it’s good; it can lead to some fantastic amusements. But their world view is strictly black and white and divorced from the gray reality of human nature.

  5. The pedantic nerd within me is impelled to point out the voice controlled computer that could perform many tasks was in the original Star Trek in 1966 and was not original even then.

    The concept certainly appeared in Forbidden Planet in 1956, and may have appeared in Things to Come in 1936. And of course there’s HAL (1968) who admittedly is more famous for not following instructions, or rather interpreting instructions in unhelpful ways. (“Alexa, order double-chunk rocky road ice-cream.” “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. You need to lose weight.”)

    When the idea of a house avatar or spirit that handles small tasks first appeared in print I couldn’t say, but it is pretty darn old.

  6. I’d need a function that prevented me from ordering anything over a monthly budget, and told me every time I tried to order something how much I had left for the month. Otherwise, I might very likely spend money I didn’t have. And, yes I could do that myself but checking my bank account every time i wanted to buy something would be a pain. I might as well go online and do it all from my computer.

    • “You can just barely afford that — but you’ll be eating those nasty noddle packs for the rest of the month. So, do you reaaally want it that bad?” 😉

    • You could remove your credit card from your Amazon account and just use gift cards in the amount you’re willing to spend.

      My problem is that sometimes I order things in my sleep. Really. Just last night I ordered an electric orange reamer. In the past I’ve purchased books. When I get up the next day, I see the notices from Amazon telling me what I bought.

    • I did and it didn’t turn out well. I ordered Lindt Chocolate Truffles. Sixty in the box. I ate so many, I never want to look at chocolate again. I called my daughter and told her come take away what was left before I killed myself from a chocolate overload.

  8. “Carbonated water is not an essential item. But in that moment, it would have been easier to quickly tell Alexa to place an order for us and forget about it until it arrived two or three days later, rather than try to remember to pick up a case of Poland Spring the next time someone made the 20-minute drive to the store.”

    In Kansas we got this thing called paper.

    Heck, sometimes we can get that paper all stuck together in a pad.

    So, when we run out of something, we take one of those pads and write down what we need from the store. That way when we make our regular weekly trip to the store to stock up for the week, we won’t forget to by it.

    But then, we’s all folksy is Kansas.

    I don’t know why I’m being a sarcastic a** . . . I apologize.

    • Heh, don’t feel bad, I was going to crack wise that Amazon’s ‘Prime Directive’ was to make their customers happy and make the qig5 look like the idiots they are — but that’s just me … 😉

    • Instead of paper, I go to Amazon to order things as I think of them. I do have a guilty conscience about how much cardboard is used sending me individual items. The other day I went to a physical store and bought a bunch of things, but totally forgot the one thing I went there to get. Came home and ordered it on Amazon — paying more than I would have at the store, but I was too tired to go back to the store and figured I’d forget why I was there if I had returned. Maybe I should give that paper thing a try.

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