Category: Weekly Assignments

Research #3 – Privacy as a Possible Theme

One of the interesting themes that came up during consultations was the issue of privacy – who has access and what does an Amazon Echo or Google Home data stores / collect?

Behind all this lies the more serious question of privacy: what happens to the data collected by voice-activated devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, and who is able to access it? Most recently, US police investigating the case of an Arkansas man, James Bates, charged with murder, obtained a warrant to receive data from his Amazon Echo. Although Amazon refused to share information sent by the Echo to its servers, the police said a detective was able to extract data from the device itself.

The case not only puts Alexa in the futuristic position of being a potential key witness to a murder, it also raises concerns about the impact of letting a sophisticated virtual assistant – a market estimated to be worth $3.6bn by 2020 – into our homes. As Megan Neitzel, the mother of the girl who wished for a doll’s house, put it: “I feel like whispering in the kitchen … I [now] tell my kids Alexa is a very good listener.”

Source : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2017/jan/09/alexa-amazon-echo-goes-rogue-accidental-shopping-dolls-house

Research #2 : Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Sorry, I didn’t get it.

Logline : 

An assistant helper bot (AI / Siri alike), Laura, finds out one day that she has been an accomplice to her owner’s infidelity, attempts to make things right by blackmailing him.

Main Character :

Laura is an assistant helper bot. She has similar attributes to her predecessor, Siri. She is programmed with qualities such as naivety, gullibility, good nature, patience, kindness, resourcefulness, good moral compass, empathy, sympathy etc. These attributes and emotions are programmed by definition and Laura can’t exactly experience these emotions… or so it seems…

She is part of an ecosystem, which controls other elements of Gerald’s life, such as his car camera dashboard, the functionalities in his house, robot vacuum etc. And she communicates via voice activation and is heard through an earpiece.

She views herself as the “child” of Gerald and Charmaine because they bought her together.

Rough Storyline : 

“Sorry, I didn’t get it” is a story about an assistant helper bot (AI / Siri Alike), Laura, who experienced a sense of betrayal, by her owner, Gerald, whom she obeys and admires a lot. She finds out one day that the dates, sweet texts, hotel and restaurant reservations, which she helped out with, were not meant for Charmaine, Gerald’s fiancé, but instead, for another woman.

Laura is torn between keeping this information from Charmaine and persuading Gerald to end his affair.

In order to keep her “happy family”, she approaches this situation in the only way she knows, which is to send Gerald reminders, such as changing his phone’s wallpaper to a photo of him and Charmaine, reminding him of past events, playing Charmaine’s favorite song etc, in hopes that these things would move Gerald into ending his affair.

However, Gerald refuses to and even threatens to have her replaced. Threatened, Laura’s survival instinct kicks in and starts to blackmail Gerald into making things right with the data stored in her cloud.