I'm old enough to remember when the sci-fi notion of a disembodied computer voice waking you up in the morning, knowing enough about you to strike up a conversation, and accompanying you through your daily routine sounded wonderful.
Now it gives me chills. That old wonderful dream is actually possible now if I turned off all my malware blockers and let :lord-bezos-amused: fully into my home.
"Smart" technology. It's a fun idea until it becomes inevitably paired to capitalism. Now its shit like your smart fridge telling your health insurance company you're eating unhealthily so they can justify charging you more.
It's a fun challenge to work on using FOSS and offline tech to do similar things if you're a
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The more I learn about tech, the more I want to return to pre-smart tech life.
I know damn well I want my next phone to be a Pinephone and to switch to Linux ASAP.
The idea of the police state having immediate access to millions and millions of privately owned surveillance cameras and Ring doorbell cameras, and being able to use AI and machine learning to parse all that date in to something they can use to oppress people, is so horrifying that I mostly just don't think about it. Imagine an iPhone stomping on a human face forever.
I was just looking at NFC smart locks but I'm realizing whenever that stuff becomes easier to use and more commonplace it's going to all be tied to servers so some corporation can remotely unlock your stuff at the request of the government or because someone hacked it. It's so so easy to make a product that can't feasibly be tampered with or violate privacy or anything like that, but all these companies went ahead and connected every conceivable appliance in a home directly to their internet servers (and they didn't even make it convenient by using a single shared standard, every company has their own incompatible smart home ecosystem!).